Small Business Column: Societal change

In this week’s Small Business column, Kehlan looks at how business is at the forefront of societal change and why social problems need to be at its core.

Ireland has a very long and very uninspiring history when it comes to politics and business. We are up to our eyes in inquiries and political scandals involving business people, whose relationships with our political representatives flies in the face of everything democracy should be about.

We seem to have gotten ourselves into a situation in which business and politics is seen as a toxic pot of shady deals and brown envelopes.

In recent years, businesses, in particular SMEs, have had to look at what that they stand for. What do you believe in? It is something that is being demanded more and more from employees and customers.

Pay your workers a liveable wage. Be concerned about their lives outside work. Do something for the community. Help others, change lives. For far too long we’ve seen business as capitalism with no heart.

However, business is becoming one of the main focal points for how we develop, and want to develop, as a society.

A young lady from Limerick, Emily Duffy, has created a social enterprise which allows sleeping bags to be donated to homeless people and shelters. For every one you buy, one gets donated. Then there’s the start-up founder in the US, who dropped his salary by 90% so that his employees could get a minimum wage of $70,000 (€63,000) per year.

Camara Education, here in Ireland, takes unused computers and cleans them up, wipes their hard drive and ships them to schools around the world. The minimum wage, poverty and a host of other social issues are now being tackled by businesses who have causes as part of their ethos.

Lynda Gratton, author of The Key: How Corporations Succeed by Solving the World’s Toughest Problems, said in an interview that “without the basic, yet widely ignored, concept of focusing on employees, community, and solving the global problems that challenge us all, companies not only can’t succeed, but they’re doomed to struggle in an environment that demands more”.

Business can change the world. It has the tools to bring even the worst of problems to the foreground and tackle it.