Creating a better world requires teamwork, partnerships, and collaboration, as we need an entire army of companies to work together to build a better world within the next few decades. This means corporations must embrace the benefits of cooperating with one another.
— Simon Mainwaring
Through their own actions, customers can hold companies responsible to higher standards of social responsibility. Through collective action, they can leverage their dollars to combat the force of those investors who myopically pursue profits at the expense of the rest of society.
The private sector must play a role in ensuring the prosperity and health of the people who comprise its market. It is time for the private sector to become a proactive partner contributing to the efforts of governments and philanthropies.
Often motivated by a desire to maintain the existing status quo, sloth almost cost the U.S. its auto industry, as it refused for decades to build fuel-efficient cars to compete with Japanese, Korean and European imports.
A social contract is the way out of this dilemma for corporations that want to lead in the 21st century by showing consumers how seriously they take customer loyalty and goodwill.
In fact, I believe the first companies that make an effort to develop an authentic, transparent, and meaningful social contract with their fans and customers will turn out to be the ones that are the most successful in the future. While brands that refuse to make the effort will lose stature and customer loyalty.
Consumers now have a voice. And the fact that consumers can be creators, producers and distributors means they can push back against brands to punish them for their socially irresponsible behavior or reward them for their responsible behavior.
Move your personal investments and retirement funds to socially responsible investment (SRI) funds that support only those corporations that uphold higher standards of behavior. Returns on SRI funds are usually equal to, if not better than, many of the well-known traditional mutual funds.
More than ever before, consumers have the ability to unify their voices and coalesce their buying power to influence corporate behaviors.
If capitalism is to remain a healthy, vibrant economic system, corporations must participate in taking care of the society and the environment in which they live.
Gluttony might be innocuous were it not for the fact that gluttons tend to disregard whether their self-serving behaviors harm anyone else. We don't need to look far and wide to find examples of gluttonous behavior, as they are numerous throughout the history of capitalism.
Everyone living under the social contract we call democracy has a duty to act responsibly, to obey the laws, and to abandon certain types of self-interested behaviors that conflict with the general good.
Too many brands treat social media as a one way, broadcast channel, rather than a two-way dialogue through which emotional storytelling can be transferred.
Executives can no longer hide behind the corporate veil. They need to be accountable for what their companies do, because entities are responsible for socially irresponsible behavior.
The most impactful way consumers can assert their power is to become mindful shoppers, giving their dollars only to socially responsible companies. In today's world of social media and smart phones, this is easy to do.
We need to develop and disseminate an entirely new paradigm and practice of collaboration that supersedes the traditional silos that have divided governments, philanthropies and private enterprises for decades and replace it with networks of partnerships working together to create a globally prosperous society.
A world in which government is burdened by historic debt, philanthropy has limited resources, and the private sector is only interested in its own personal gain is simply unsustainable.
Greed has increasingly become a virtue among Wall Street bankers and corporate CEOs in the U.S. Nowhere else in the world do CEOs insist on receiving compensation as high compared to what their employees earn.
However, it was the great 18th century social philosophers John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who brought the concept of a social contract between citizens and governments sharply into political thinking, paving the way for popular democracy and constitutional republicanism.
And if you look at the reality in the United States, where you have more than 40 million people below the poverty line and 42 million on food stamps, and then you look at poverty around the world, clearly the way we're running the engine of capitalism is not serving us well.
There are many individuals, companies and even countries operating in what I call a 'me first' mentality, which is effectively a purely competitive approach to life, treating the planet as if it has infinite resources and pitting one country against another for supremacy.
