I went to business school after my first career, 10 years as a radio journalist. Ten years of asking people up-close questions about what they were doing, why they cared, why anyone else should care. Ten years of being moved by their answers. The world is full of hard cases, but it has more, far more, people who are willing to step up and make a difference.
I went to business school because I had witnessed some exceptionally lacklustre management in my career with our beloved public broadcaster, and I was on a quest to learn how it could be done better.
But I wasn’t entirely comfortable going to study business. Too often in my news stories, business had been the nemesis. Business was often faceless, unreachable, formulaic, prone to anti-community responses and government pandering.
It was, after all, the 1990s. Businesses didn’t show up very often, if at all, in stories about social change. They lobbied for reduced red tape and increased incentives, and the good ones made some annual donations to charity. Other than that, they did their thing, fuelling the economy but doing little to engage in, speak out about or foment change in the issues that surround it. It was business as usual. Getting involved in anything beyond costs and revenues was simply not in their frame.
I went to business school because I wanted to study what makes people tick – and I figured an MBA was more practical than a degree in anthropology. To my surprise, the degree taught me more than I expected.
I came to respect the work of business – the ability to face risk, the entrepreneurial instinct, the innovation, the test of a good idea, the discipline and leadership inherent in keeping a group of people motivated towards a common goal. I saw the positive contributions of healthy business in a healthy community. And, I discovered the early roots of sustainable business.
Things have come so far since then. In my 1996 UBC MBA class, we had one conversation, for a mere few hours, about “business ethics.”
Fast-forward 15 years, and there are entire MBA programs devoted to sustainability. There are companies focused on pursuing social profit. There are “benefit corporations” required by law to create general benefit for society (a topic for a future column). And increasingly, across all sectors of business, and all generations of employees, there are people coming to work who are refusing to check their values at the door. Business is changing, fast.
The question is, is it fast enough? Are we at a point, now, where business can be counted to speak up where it matters, where self-interest may not lie, where self-interest might even have to take a back seat to long-term community well-being?
How far have we come?
B.C. businesses are helping lead change in alternative energy, green building, new technologies, and new, more community-oriented business models. There is so much to be proud of. But we have a fast-money decision being made in our backyards that will frame risks and opportunities for our children for generations to come.
Not only will the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion and the proposed Enbridge Gateway pipeline put at risk the health and beauty of the landscape our businesses operate in and depend on. In addition, the Gateway pipeline is part of an industrial expansion that, in the name of relatively short-term profit, will wreak further havoc on our over-stressed and warming climate system. We will all feel the effects of this decision.
Many B.C. companies have no direct role to play in the pipeline and don’t stand to make any direct profit. That’s no reason to stay silent. We use the terms “business community” all the time when talking about a collective voice related to government policy. But now is when community really counts.
My experience covering environmental issues showed me poor business decisions can cause huge, lasting damage. I’ve seen since how business is developing a much wider sense of responsibility, understanding its interdependent relationship with communities and the environment. The pipelines challenge us to stretch again, to think in a more long-term frame and in a potentially more activist role than business usually comfortably does. The world has many people willing to step up and make a difference. In discussions about the pipelines, B.C. businesses should speak up, show up and be counted.
