B-Corporation - Essential Organizational Innovation
February 7, 2009 at 08:12PM "B Corporations" is a business sustainability initiative to achieve the fundamental change in corporate rules and structure required for the private sector to make the powerful contribution to sustainability society requires. See http://www.bcorporation.net/about.
Their communication to the Obama transition team elucidates this focus, as follows (http://www.bcorporation.net/resources/bcorp/documents/Obama-Biden--TransitionTeam_Private-Sector-Social-Innovation-Briefing.pdf).
Systemic Problems
1) Non-profit Social Innovation and government intervention are necessary but insufficient to address society’s challenges. Private sector leadership is required to address our challenges with the speed and at the scale required.
2) Private sector Social Innovation requires investment capital to scale, but current corporate law and capital markets were not built to embrace sustainability. Corporate law requires short term shareholder value maximization at the expense of social and environmental interests. Furthermore, investors do not have the transparent and comparable measurement tools to assess the social and environmental impact of their investments.
Systemic Solutions
The role of government is not to pick winners and losers, but rather to create the public infrastructure which enables the private sector to support businesses creating both social and shareholder value. The current financial crisis also highlights the need for public policies to enable a market-based change in corporate transparency and accountability. The following proposals address systemic problems with systemic solutions and advance many elements of the Administration’s Social Innovation, Energy and Environment, and Economic Agenda simultaneously.
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