“The social responsibility of 21st century business is to maximize profits while benefiting the world around you.” —Peter Ressler, CEO, author -Spiritual Capitalism

THE CHANGE IS IN THE AIR! Good Business is the biggest trend in 21st century business. Gone are the days of Darwinist capitalism. Welcome to the new marketplace of maximizing profits while building a better world. Socially conscious business? Morgan, Frick, Gould, and Vanderbilt would turn over in their graves. One hundred years ago, who would have thought it possible?

The father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, might be the least surprised. In his 1776 The Wealth of Nations,  Smith wrote that “self-interest” drives the markets and benefits society. It has in many ways – too many to count. Much of the modern world enjoys a substantially better quality of life than ordinary 18th century folk. Smith believed morality and self-interest were not mutually exclusive. Yet despite Smith’s values, economic self-interest has caused tremendous human suffering over the centuries from slavery to the current credit crisis. Exploitation, however, has never been the sole province of capitalism. In any human economic system where profit can be made, greed will rear its ugly head.

The movement of Good Business is growing in tandem with the overall movement for a better world. In case you haven’t noticed social activism is the wave of the present and the future—a refreshing change after years of blind indifference. Traditionalists, progressives, corporate officers, Wall Street wizards, technology innovators, moguls, entrepreneurs, mavericks of all kinds are part of the revolution taking place.

Good Business isn’t a really a new idea. The late Stanford University professor Willis Harman, economist Hazel Henderson, and many others wrote about conscious business over twenty years ago. Yet few were listening back then. They could hardly drown out the loud mantra, “greed is good.” Fortunately, greed is no longer sexy. It never was sexy for victims of the slave trade, shareholders of Enron, nor homeowners caught in the subprime snare. For victims of greed, it is always painful.

The good news is that even for those who formerly embraced it, greed has now become passé—primitive even. Good is back in style. Old “white shoe” firms like Goldman Sachs are jumping on board with hybrid cars, sustainable businesses, and common good initiatives. Traditionalists like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, comparable in wealth to John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie of “robber baron” infamy, are a major part of the transformation. Buffet, humble and brilliant, values integrity along side business acumen. Gates recently issued a battle cry to moguls like himself for a kinder gentler “creative” capitalism that benefits those at the bottom of the economic pyramid as well as those as the top.

Fifty years ago, management guru Peter Drucker spoke of a similar kind of capitalism where fair play ruled and all benefited. For some conventional economists like Milton Friedman, his ideas were idealistic, even worse, obsolete. Drucker is revealed again as a visionary. He embodied the “golden rule” in business. Fortunately, maverick thinkers like Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt, Buffet, Gates, and many more fantastically successful business innovators also think the same way. They are the vanguard of change that is occurring in the pursuit of profit. They are young, old, rich, hungry, conservative, progressive, women, men, American, British, European, Indian, and middle eastern. From the west to the east, students to moguls, everywhere and anywhere the change is palpable!

Yet we didn’t snap our fingers and move from 19th century ruthlessness to 21st century compassion. It has been a steady process of change over two centuries. Looking back, we see tremendous advances made in the world of profit. While America's richest man, Andrew Carnegie, used a private army to shoot and kill striking workers in 1892,  a century later the world’s richest businessman, Bill Gates, was named one the world’s “best” employers.

Sure there are holdouts. There remain those who think global warming is a farce, social activism a fad, and compassionate capitalism, an impossibility. For many, change is hard. They have been doing things one way for so long it is hard for them to adapt to something new. We can judge them harshly or we can encourage them by our own example to move forward. Eventually, they will jump on board or be left behind. Either way, the transformation of business is already underway.

For us at Good Business International, the vision of an extraordinary future is clear. The profit revolution is a new kind of revolution. Not bloody, angry or hostile, but an ever expanding evolution of social consciousness. Modern business is evolving from its self-serving past to a future that values self-interested profit along with inclusive world interest.

In the following pages we record and review the developments in the Good Business movement and its growing community. People all over the globe understand that if we are going to change our troubled world, we have to begin by taking action ourselves—one business at a time.

MONIKA MITCHELL RESSLER
Editor -Good Business International