Ideas
Net Positive

Corporate impact: Can ‘net positive’ be meaningful? ... The idea that a company can do more good than harm is gaining popularity, but work is needed before it can gain credence, argues Mallen Baker

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Corporate impact: Can ‘net positive’ be meaningful?

The idea that a company can do more good than harm is gaining popularity, but work is needed before it can gain credence, argues Mallen Baker

When I first got into corporate responsibility I was focused on the environmental impact of business – and it always seemed self-evident that however good a business became the simple act of doing business would always have some negative ecological effect. After all, just about everything creates emissions of some sort or another.

So the best we could hope for would be that companies would reduce the negatives to the absolute minimum, while aiming to maximise benefits to produce an “overall positive impact on society”.

That, in fact, is the phrase I used when framing my CSR definition back in 2004 when we were still trying to convince some people that it was about core business, not just about some community-focused philanthropy.

I admit, I saw that “overall positive impact” as a highly aspirational state – something that no company would explicitly commit itself to in a measurable way. Because, like “sustainability”, it would take a huge shift to achieve it.

Now, the idea is moving to the mainstream.

Companies such as Kingfisher, with its commitment to “net positive”, have begun to show that mainstream businesses can, with all seriousness and understanding of the scale of the challenge, commit themselves not only to do as little harm as possible, not only indeed to do no harm at all, but to leave the world better than they found it.

Such ideas have only made it into the mainstream when someone has codified what it means, of course. And now a coalition between Forum for the Future, WWF and the Climate Group have done just that. In their new report Net Positive: A New Way of Doing Business they have created the “12 principles” of net positive. I was keenly interested when I first saw what had been done – thinking that here might be a substantive work to really help companies come to grips with their overall approach to business. Sadly, it falls short of that outcome – not surprising given the challenging nature of the endeavour.

The right questions

But it asks some of the right questions.

Take the example of flying. If a bunch of holidaymakers fly to a sunny location for a holiday the negative impact comes in the form of greenhouse gas emissions. The positives may be positive economic impact on the livelihoods of those who provide services to holiday makers in that area – indeed maybe sufficient to create additional jobs that people need.

Not enough? OK – suppose then that Al Gore flies from the US to the UK, speaks to an audience of businesses and as a result three major sized businesses commit to making big changes in reducing their emissions far outstripping the contribution of the original flight. In principle, that’s easier because the impacts are far more comparable. The emissions from a single flight against the subsequent emissions reduction made by a company.

Of course, when the decision to do the speaking engagement is taken there is no guarantee that anyone will be inspired or that any change will result. In any case, the benefits can be much more intangible, and maybe more important, than that. In the case of world travel – travel broadens the mind. People understand each other better. They find education, enlightenment, wonderment, and plain and simple the joy in life when they travel. Businesses do better deals when they can be face to face.

The way a number of the companies try to achieve the goal is by influencing the sustainable behaviours of their customers. So if a company’s products can help its customers reduce their impacts by more than the company produces in terms of its own emissions, then that is demonstrably a net positive impact. It’s an obvious aim that any company committed to net positive should have. But it’s still tricky to measure since it’s impossible to know what the customer might have been doing if they had found an alternative to your great eco-product.

As long as two decades ago, some businesses would justify their bad impacts with the excuse “but it’s worth it because it creates jobs and economic growth”. And that was a “get out of jail free” card that just about any business in any industry could use.

If net positive is not to be simply an updating of that phenomenon, it needs robustness in establishing the valid trade-offs and the contexts within which they work. We are not there yet.

Mallen Baker is a contributing editor to Ethical Corporation and managing director of Daisy Wheel Interactive.