A few days back I was treated to lunch by my pal Mallika Basu which was a joyously painful affair at the brilliant Smoking Goat in Shoreditch where they use all sorts of chillies in all sorts of ways including in a strawberry salad – who would have thought? Amidst the coughing and the tears that ensued, she floored me with this question: why did I write my book on the failure of charity six years ago when its underlying message – that business, not the public or third sector, is the best vehicle to tackle inequality and save the planet – is only becoming relevant now?
Being told you were ahead of your time may sound flattering, but it is not a rewarding experience.
Indeed, the book’s argument is not just relevant now but is beginning to be proven to be the case. Another close friend Karan Bilimoria recently shared with me a lecture he gave at Oxford in which he spoke about how both as an independent member of the House of Lords and as President of the CBI, his entrepreneurial skills made the government eventually see sense on the business interruption loans scheme and then more recently getting businesses to quickly send their support to the people of Ukraine.
Reading Karan’s lecture made me realise there was a gap in my argument: it’s not business as such that needs to be the force for good, a phrase that is increasingly becoming part of our vocabulary, but the entrepreneurial mindset. Entrepreneurs often fail but they don’t give up – they lick their wounds and live to fight another day. So when they decide it is their duty to be agents for change, as we’re seeing more and more with the Steven Bartletts of the world, Ella’s Kitchen founder Paul Lindley creating a global competition to fund businesses that are formed to tackle the UN’s sustainable development goals and a new impact-driven model is devised whereby people identify a social or environmental problem and then create a commercial solution to it like Jenny Costa did with Rubies in the Rubble, we’re onto something.
Soon after I wrote the charity book, which was hated and tolerated in equal measure, I asked a literary agent whether I should do a follow up book charting the history of capitalism and seeing its next iteration to go from being the creator of our problems to being the solver of them. Her reply was: “Don’t predict it. Prove it.”
We’re currently at the “can you prove it?” stage in how we hold businesses to account, in particular on net zero progress and on improved gender representation across the board, though we’re less well advanced in challenging racial diversity.
Where the entrepreneurial mindset steps in is when a business founder hones their unrelenting zeal for more than making their own business work.
Despite a few shaky moments, Karan has remained chair of Cobra Beer for over 30 years and has seen his passion for business take him to circles where he has been able to use the belligerent nature that forms an essential part of the entrepreneur’s DNA into arenas like hounding government and shaking up education.
Entrepreneurs see the finishing line and not the barriers in the way. Now we need to get better at sticking it out – the average life expectancy of a founder as CEO of their business is just two and a half years – because only when we build at scale can we become effective changemakers. And only when we do that can we rely less on government and even less on charities.
Entrepreneurs will increasingly own that process.
That’s the prediction. Now we need to prove it.