The New Nature of Business

Chapter 6Building with Intent, and Leading by Example

Just like a tree can grow once its roots are firmly anchored, so business can start to thrive once it roots itself in nature. Indeed, once a company's fundaments are built on working with nature, and not against it, it can live up to its purpose (or redefine it), set targets and deliver against them, and even engage in broader societal leadership. In this chapter, we look at these elements. We name these practices the trunk and the crown of the new nature of business.

The Trunk: Build with Intent

Reflect on your corporate purpose, set goals that go beyond profits, and measure and disclose all your impacts and dependencies.

It is an overused adage that sums up well the current state of corporate management: “what gets measured, gets managed.” There is, however, a major issue with the business truism. For most of the industrial age, and up to the present day, we have mainly pursued and measured financial metrics in business. The centricity of revenue growth and financial profitability in assessing business performance is a logical consequence. But it is also a system that does a disservice to the other “capitals” that matter to our society: human, social, and natural capital. Today, they are simply absent from corporate accounting, and therefore from management, board, and investor analyses. It means that V. F. Ridgway's full insight (he came up with “what gets measured, gets managed”) is more poignant than ever: “What gets ...