Recertified. With Open Eyes

THREE YEARS AGO, we wrote about becoming a B Corp. At the time, the direction of travel seemed clear: Larry Fink was rewriting the rules. The Business Roundtable had pivoted. The reimagination of capitalism, apparently, was underway.

That was then.

At Davos earlier this month, Mark Carney reached for Václav Havel’s image of the greengrocer who places a “Workers of the world, unite!” sign in his shop window each morning. He doesn’t believe it. No one does. But he places it anyway, to signal compliance, to get along, because everyone else does. The system persists through participation in rituals people privately know to be false.

Carney was diagnosing the rules-based international order. But the image resonates closer to home, not least for any business that has pinned its colours to purpose.

Nick Asbury’s The Road to Hell makes a parallel case about corporate purpose. His reference point was marginally less high brow than a shift in global order but instead Hellmann’s repositioning of mayonnaise as a food-waste campaign. Hellmann’s enthusiasm for higher purpose peaked when they stopped advertising condiments and started campaigning to ‘make taste, not waste.’  The sign goes in the window. Or in this case, the mayo stays in the jar.

As Unilever investor Terry Smith put it “a company that feels it has to define the purpose of mayonnaise, he said, has clearly lost the plot”.

Asbury calls it climbing the ladder of abstraction, each rung taking a brand further from what it actually does. It’s a pitfall that sits alongside the comfortable fiction that doing well and doing good are always aligned. For many, this framing lets businesses signal virtue without confronting hard choices.

Tariq Fancy, BlackRock’s former CIO for Sustainable Investing, made a similar warning from inside the machine. His argument was not that responsibility is irrelevant, but that it’s too easily turned into a reassuring substitute for changing incentives: lots of measurement and rhetoric but far less willingness to address trade-offs.

Construction knows this dynamic intimately. We say we want to decarbonise, but most business models still depend on building more, not less. We talk about value, but its all too tempting to procure for lowest cost and pay for activity rather than outcomes. The gap between stated intentions and actual behaviour isn’t hypocrisy, exactly. It’s structural. The greengrocer isn’t lying. He’s surviving.

But the test of a principle is whether you hold it when it costs you. To us that has meant turning down work that conflicts with our core values, particularly when pipeline is short. It means aligning with those who share our values, not where power or convenience lies.

In 2021 we wrote and still maintain that we’re not social activists, nor do we expect to solve problems at a societal or even industry level. We didn’t claim B Corp made us good. Our view was and remains that B Corp is an outward signal of our inward commitment to consider all stakeholders and focus to deliver better outcomes.

The narrative of 2021 has, in some respects, frayed. Some of its loudest advocates have quietly retreated. ESG as a brand exercise has faced a correction and probably needed one. But the correction doesn’t invalidate the underlying question. It sharpens it. Strip away the performance and what’s left is simpler: are you examining the gap between what you say and what you do? And are you being honest about what you find?

That’s what recertification means to us.  Definitely no claims to have cracked systemic. Asbury’s own prescription is to underclaim and over-deliver. We’d settle for that.

The B Corp assessment provides a framework for honest self-scrutiny, external examination of practices we might otherwise take for granted. It forces the question of whether we’re doing what we said we’d do.

Three years on, we’ve recertified.

Havel’s greengrocer eventually stopped putting the sign up. That took courage. But there’s a version of courage in the opposite direction too, in continuing to put it up when you actually mean it, knowing full well that some people will assume you don’t.

Assessment to improve. Not mayonnaise for purpose