Written for University of Oregon's Master of Business Administration application.

photo credit: http://www2.lcb.uoregon.edu/App_themes/Content/Docs/mba/MBA-viewbook2010.pdf

Henry Ford once said: “For a long time people believed that the only purpose of industry was to make a profit. They are wrong. Its purpose is to serve the general welfare.” Many business leaders and economists disagree, arguing instead that industry best serves the general welfare by making a profit and not deliberately trying to effect larger social change. What is the proper role of business in society?

Fueled by cheap, non-renewable resources, industry in the United States has allowed profit alone to guide its course, without regard to the potential long-term, detrimental effects on the general population. Consequently, the United States consumes 25% of the world's resources while representing only 5% of the global population. Logically, the U.S. lifestyle standard is unsustainable. This should not imply that a high quality of life is unattainable; rather, in order to secure a high-value lifestyle for our future, while significantly reducing our resource consumption, businesses must educate consumers regarding the actual lifecycle and cost of material products. The hidden subsidies that make cheap products possible must be eliminated and the long-term well-being of the customer must become the central focus of any organization. 

In the past, political action served to manifest this shift.  However, driven by bureaucracy, the political system within the United States today is ineffective. Instead, business culture has filled this void and become the primary avenue to effect larger social change in the modern world. Just as the concept of “nation” superseded religion as the primary social governing body, business has now overthrown the “nation-state” as the true governing force. Whether we want to accept it or not is irrelevant: business' daily influence on society is unavoidably significant. In part, this is due to the constant, direct consumer access that modern technology facilitates. This power, and the resulting influence, requires responsible action. Considering the substantial impact of industry on both the environment and people alike, an integrated, whole systems approach to “business as usual,” which supports the health and well-being of both the environment and human inhabitants, must become the primary focus of executive leadership.

The concept of Natural Capitalism, as outlined by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins in their book, Natural Capitalism, seeks to infuse an ecological bottom-line into the existing capitalist business plan, wherein both manufacturing and resource efficiency are carefully managed within an ecologically sensitive framework. The authors assert Natural Capitalism’s inevitability within the marketplace: “it is both necessary and profitable, it will subsume traditional industrialism within a new economy and a new paradigm of production, just as industrialism previously subsumed agrarianism.” Leveraging the marketplace as a tool for protecting the environment has transformative potential. Additionally, the concept of Natural Capitalism defines the environment in terms the present marketplace understands, which increases the likelihood of assimilation into existing corporate culture.

Industry must adopt this ecological counterpart while concurrently placing direct focus on human health and well-being. After all, at the individual scale, industry exists solely to provide goods and services supporting human endeavor. Companies should seek to create working environments, transactional environments, and end-products that aim to improve the daily quality of life for both their employees and customers. This approach supports human-centric communities wherein companies become buoys rather than weights.