From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If you benchmark on everything, you simply become more similar to your competitors and move into a red ocean space which is highly, highly, brutally competitive. There's only room for one, maybe two at most, cost-cutting businesses.
Possibly the most important thing here is the existence of the first column, setting minimum standards for common equity — which is also known as core Tier 1 capital. Such standards did exist in the past, but they were set extremely low, at just 2%, and so were generally ignored.
Fundamental sense of well-being crucially depends on our having the ability to exert control over our environment and recognising that we do.
Because Peter Paul Rubens signed his name to his paintings (several of which were finished by his artisans), they commanded a higher price. Today, the famous contemporary glass artist, Dale Chihuly puts his name on every work of glass although he never makes any of it.
Markets are human artefacts; however we often treat them as natural phenomenon in the same way we might treat a language. Markets are emergent phenomenon too, but individual market-places have proprietors and groups of users and therefore markets are more amenable to change. When something isn't working, we can change the rules!
Concepts like democracy and human rights will always remain fairly abstract if you cannot feed your family. It is therefore important to ensure that job creation, and protecting livelihoods occurs early on in the process.
We have one planet, and we have to make it work for everyone, not just one group. The same is true of the global economy – which can only really work if it works for everyone.
This problem originated in the most sophisticated and advanced financial markets because those are the markets where leverage was the greatest and people took the most advantage of it.
We run the very real risk now, not of going back to the 1970s, but of going back to the 1930s or 40s with economic and financial collapse, massive pandemic, and real-world wars.
This is the equivalent of asking how close we came to falling through a big crack in the Earth when it didn't actually happen. However… going on eyewitness accounts from very informed and non-hysterical observers such as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and others, it looks like we were quite close. When people start talking seriously about some of the biggest banks in the world folding? …That says you're pretty close to a meltdown.
I once advised my daughter, as I handed her some money, to consult our family's wealth manager. But she corrected me, saying, 'Dad, it's not just about avoiding the negative; I want my investments to contribute positively.' That was an eye-opener for me. The rise of impact investing is undeniable.
Ultimately, we want to make it unnecessary to be a B Corp – we want it to be just the norm of how all businesses are run, but that means we have to change the rules of the game and the role of business in society.