Creating Social Value

Reviews / Votes

Kiser and Leipziger with Shubert take us on a brief journey of corporate executive interviews, conducted by MBA students in The Babson Social Innovation Lab. Creating value is the responsibility of all business entities to its shareholders. This text acknowledges, without value creation as a fundamental outcome first and foremost, the 'social' aspect is left out to dry. Capitalist endeavors and self-interest have arguably been the most effective change driver or conversely prohibitor in our society. Coincidently, many of the social causes needing to be addressed today are by-products of such pursuits. This book suggests the creative retooling of tackling social causes. Methods for greater intrinsic value, affecting "bottom-line", gaining shareholder buy-in, and social impact being a result. In summary, the business exploration of profiting from social problem solving. The introduction lays out an idealistic description and framing of the elements for creating social value. The student, corporate leader, entrepreneur with a conscience will be moved by the definitions and manifests highlighting the crux of 'conscious capitalism'. Here we are introduced to newer words, terms and a jargon that has evolved from early workplace movements in philanthropy, corporate giving, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and now social value creation. The authors give a clear comparative chart of the differences between Traditional CSR and Social Innovation. Predicting the impending confusion by any that are familiar, yet not newly updated on business trends in this arena of capitalism for "doing good". Social innovation steers CSR back to the real business of business i.e. not volunteering your staff, but engaging in staff development, not spending on service providers, but gaining important partners. For the sustainability of social responsibility in business, it must achieve the status of a clearly objective system for strategic growth, with an assigned value. Sharing risk with strategically beneficial partners, opening new relevant markets, R&D, product refinement and delivering competitive advantages. The entrepreneurial mind or 'intra-preneur', in this text 'entrepreneur inside' is the leading character and skill-set for shining a creative lens on the problem. The entrepreneur, leader, social-practitioner, activist, or change maker innovates the basic corporate giving platform, to one that makes sense as an everyday function of growing the business. Transforming stakeholder concerns from a cost-center to a strategic mechanism for generating economic value is no easy task. There is a design, business model, and value proposition. The book showcases the executives responsible as sophisticated outliers and heroes, by virtue of depicting their corporate environments as landscapes filled with mines. Achieving change against-all-odds. The reliance on more art than science, could attribute to social value adoption barriers. Realizing alternatives' value, like social value, is difficult for a majority of corporate structures, because of their embedded dependency on linear thinking. I address this with what I term 'art-thinking' in business, an evolution of design-thinking process for corporations. For the discussion forum and department insight we are grateful. Being a guide for leaders and change makers is somewhat misleading, it is the story of. The text doesn't truly guide with any detail for the reader wanting to effect change. Case measurements or examples of metrics used are absent. Their importance in practice is implied throughout. For benefit corporate structures are mentioned, but their argument is not robust. B-Corp scores are illustrated for companies, without giving the reader easy reference to derive meaning of the numbers. Student questions are not purposefully digging deeper to uncover more insight, rather giving voice to reiterate what was already messaged. The interconnectivity of our economies and environmental issues make a strong case for the need to what this book calls, 'co-leading' or in layman's terms collaborate. Ford and Toyota, competitors collaborating on developing hybrid technology is given as an example. Understanding social problems takes vast exploration and witnessing from many perspectives. Defining what is a 'social' problem is imperative to whether companies or individuals are designing anything worthwhile, positively affecting quality of human life. To determine social value within the silo of a single business, culture of people, geographic region, or any other constraining viewpoint, is potentially missing the mark. Cross-sector functionality, the authors' reference to IBM's term 'sector-blur' in doing business, is a positive advancement in the innovation process with sticking power. The companies highlighted, BiddingForGood, Campbell Soup Company, Ford Motor Company, Greyston Bakery, IBM, Preserve, Roshan, School House, Target, UPS and Verizon all provide the reader slits into various models developed. Creating social value is solidified by this book as an early study in business. The challenges of creating objective measures for objective seeking investors glares as a major hurdle in the nuanced and often subjective pursuit of doing good. What is almost a law like takeaway from this read is, doing well is the precursor for doing good. To affect social change with substantial results, we must figure out how to make this a simultaneous pursuit in everyday business. MBA students, those aspiring to c-suite heights, entrepreneurs and even social-practice artists would benefit to examine the pages of this book, for its perspectives and questions it leads the reader to. Should corporations be in the pursuit of creating social value? The book aggregates these individual projects into an interesting topic. All good organizations and managers will seek to adopt or adapt best practices. This warrants the need to have a unified construct of Creating Social Value that transposes the waters and all sectors, much like the methodology Total Quality Management (TQM) entered the corporate play book. -- Neil Ramsay, Consultant, Creative Economics Kiser and Leipziger have assembled an impressive set of corporate leaders to share their accounts of how they have come to recognize and employ the connections between business value and social impact to positively differentiate their companies. The appearance of business students as interlocutors takes the story narratives in unexpected directions at times, which makes the book even more interesting to read and offers insight not only into the current generation of leaders but also into the next. This is a must-read for those who seek to deepen understanding about the potential of business to achieve social good. -- Katherine V. Smith, Executive Director, The Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship