Rajesh Setty's excellent Life Beyond Code blog brought to my attention this new book from Tim Sanders entitled Saving the World at Work: What Companies and Individuals Can Do to Go Beyond Making a Profit to Making a Difference.
Sanders, a former Chief Software Officer at Yahoo argues that what he calls a 'Responsibility Revolution' is underway. Both consumers and employers have turned away from price consciousness to demand that companies make a difference to society through their products, manufacturing methods, environmental efforts and community outreach.
According to the author, casual consumers now represent the minority; mindful consumers have brought in a new value system, paying as much attention to a company's environmental and social policies as to its pricing structures. Companies that do not clean up their acts will be left in the dust, losing customers who want their money to go toward good causes and employees who place more importance on green factors and job satisfaction than pay scale.
Through success stories like Horst Rechelbacher, the brains behind the ecologically sound cosmetics company Aveda, and Lee Scott's greening of Wal-Mart in 2004, Sanders makes a compelling argument for the necessity for businesses to appeal to their customers' hearts as well as their wallets.
A customer review on Amazon's US website is worth reading in full. Here's a flavour:
"Sanders' use of the words "revolution" and "revolutionary" are not hyperbolic. He wants to help achieve what Clayton Christensen characterizes as "movements punctuated with disruptive innovations that either create new markets or reshape existing markets." These movements will change, radically, how companies do business.
"These disruptive movements occur in five phases and Sanders devotes a separate chapter to each: First, a major change of circumstances that dramatically impacts how we think about the business landscape, creating in Phase Two a new set of values prior to the arrival of the innovators in Phase Three; then, "as the new values reach a tipping point of mass popularity, the fourth, and most extreme, phase of a business revolution occurs: disruption.
"In Leading the Revolution, Gary Hamel describes it this way: "First, the revolutionaries will take your markets and your customers. Next they'll take your best employees. Finally, they'll take your assets. The barbarians are no longer banging on the gates, they are eating off your best china."
"During the final phase, what Sanders calls The New Order, companies develop proficiency in service to new markets, innovators become more sophisticated, and customers become more demanding. 'Eventually, surviving companies will satisfy the new market needs and the competition will then turn to who does it best.' The process of natural selection continues as new 'infectious revolutionaries' appear, disrupting the terms of engagement in what continues to be a Responsibility Revolution."
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