Profitability with purpose is a hot mantra right now.
We hear of triple-bottom lines, social responsibility, and accountability that blends operational and financial performance with an equally invested commitment to improving lives and sparing the planet of further human damage.
Motives for this awakening fit into a range, from heartening to cynical.
- Sheer altruism that comes of emotionally, spiritually, and culturally evolved dynamic business leaders
- Recognition that talented young adults today are drawn to firms that balance purpose with profit
- Increasingly activist stakeholders and important investors demand it
It could be a combination of those influences that causes Harvard Business School professor Rebecca M. Henderson to write:
We are witnessing a big, transitional moment – akin to the transition from analog to digital, or the realization that globalization is a really big deal. Companies are beginning to realize that paying attention to the longer term, to the perceptions of their company, and to the social consequences of their products is good business.
Perhaps aligned with that first bullet point, Henderson notes that some of our powerful corporate leaders recognize that looking to the government to solve for big, chronic challenges may be a fool’s errand, spurring the likes of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and J.P. Morgan Chase to attack employee healthcare from a new, deeply resourced, data driven, and mission-focused point of access.
Henderson’s call for action is that more companies deepen and take more invested action on social impact commitments “to demonstrate that you can be a successful business not just in spite of but because of these commitments.”
Cradle to Cradle and University of Virginia visionary and architect William McDonough contemplates a consumer behavioral economy that soon enough will reward companies–manufacturers, service providers, capital sources–that commit to positive social impact. As consumers, he conjectures bluntly, we’ll reward the firms that stop killing their customers. That would seem to make sense.
“Doing well by doing good” is a key part of more and more corporate imperatives, as corporations take an ever more important role in our culture and society, and as the notion of who holds a stake–our stakeholders–gains definition, and matters more. A next generation of people, for instance. Their not having a voice, or capital, or a seat at the board of directors conference table no longer simply equates to their not having a stake, and not having compelling meaning in our decisions as corporate leaders.
These days, it seems, we’re either discovering those long-buried, long-obvious truths in how we do business and live in societies, or we’re denying their reality.
And, among housing’s profit-making organizations, one of the more compelling questions as regards social impact investment, is simply this: who counts?
Housing starts, permits, for-sale orders, deliveries, completions, and settlements count for an essential economic dimension in our lives, and builders, sellers, buyers, and renters in that data stream are the very pulse of the business sector that is housing.
Too, though, people whom the algorithms of qualification, classification, and approval do not capture in our buyer pool, our customer segmentation grid, our potential universe; they, too, can own, rent, and sew the seeds of great communities like anybody else.
Which begs the question for those who are leading housing’s leading companies, leading community developers, leading corporate citizens in the housing economy writ large.
Who counts?
Perhaps more specifically, who do we allow, in this day and age, to be counted out? And why? Do we imagine parts of the great ocean of need in housing that our businesses, our investments, our commitments, our accountability simply does not include?
That would be like saying a young child growing up in one of the new homes in the new communities you build doesn’t in some form or fashion belong in a seat at the table of your board of directors, advisors, key stakeholders.
There are challenges housing’s corporate leaders have staring them in their face that more concerted, more decisive, more committed, and, ultimately, more stratetically smart social impact investment of time, money and focus would begin to make progress on.
Here, in the spirit of greater awareness in our community to the opportunities, challenges, and risks of one of America’s housing pain points, is just one of those.
