The Ethical Careers Guide by Allen Paul;

Author:Allen, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Internationalist
Published: 2016-12-25T00:00:00+00:00

‘To succeed, you have to believe in something with such a passion that it becomes a reality.’

Anita Roddick

7 Game changers

Some companies simply rip up the rulebooks. They succeed in bringing ethical values into an industry so emphatically – often in the face of adversity – that other businesses follow and copy them. This can change a whole industry, creating a bigger positive social and environmental impact than they could ever have imagined in their start-up days.

Even if these companies weren’t always the first to attempt this more purposeful approach in their sectors, they were the ones who succeeded at scale. They are the game changers. Let’s meet a few.

A hand up, not a hand out

How do you change a 300-year-old industry overnight? That’s what happened in 1991 when John Bird and Gordon Roddick launched The Big Issue.

Instead of creating just another publishing company, and printing just another magazine, they decided to use their business to transform people’s lives. By enabling homeless people to become magazine sellers, they gave them ‘a hand up, not a hand out’.

Today, over 2,000 people sell The Big Issue in the UK. It’s a business unlike any other, and has inspired the creation of over 120 ‘street papers’ in other countries – helping tens of thousands of people to move away from life on the streets.

bigissue.org.uk

The Big Issue may strictly count itself as a social enterprise – but there are many examples of purely for-profit businesses that have transformed industries through ethics. And The Big Issue’s Gordon Roddick was married to a woman who did just that.

Anita Roddick opened the first Body Shop in 1976. The human-rights activist and environmental campaigner wanted to create and sell ethically sourced beauty products that met her five core values:

•Against animal testing

•Support community trade

•Activate self-esteem

•Defend human rights

•Protect the planet

Anita started with a small shop in Brighton. Fast-forward three decades, and the Body Shop had almost 2,000 stores, and was serving over 77 million customers throughout the world. It was voted the second most trusted brand in the UK.

In 2006, the cosmetics giant L’Oréal bought the Body Shop for £652 million. For some, this was a disappointment, even a ‘sell-out’ – L’Oréal has been involved in animal testing and is part-owned by Nestlé, which has been heavily criticized over its corporate behaviour, especially over its marketing of babyfoods in the developing world. However, Anita argued that the Body Shop would be a ‘Trojan horse’ – sticking to its original values and influencing the way that L’Oréal does business across all its brands.

Whatever the controversy around the sale, no one can deny that The Body Shop put animal rights and environmental protection at the heart of the cosmetics world, and changed the industry forever.

Today, The Body Shop employs thousands of staff around the globe – and is still committed to Anita Roddick’s original five values.

thebodyshop.com

The story of smoothies giant Innocent Drinks has a similar conclusion. Today, Innocent is over 90-per-cent owned by The Coca-Cola Company, not too many people’s shining example of an ethical business.

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