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A week ago I attended the UK Social Enterprise of the Year award at the British Museum-?won by Belu Water, a Catalyst client. At the end of the prize-giving, I began to chat to my neighbour, whose name tag said he was from BSkyB (the UK arm of Murdoch controlled News Corporation). What were THEY doing here, at such a sacred gathering of all these earnest social enterprises and their acolytes? Having grown up in the USA I can get away with being rude in London, so I asked him. In a very matter-of-fact way he told me why the company thought this stuff was important. Sure, I thought, “just what I would expect a representative member of the CSR Department from the evil empire” to say”?. So then I asked, to confirm my smug conviction, what role he had in the organisation, certain he would utter some creative new title to describe a basic CSR role-?meaning he gave away a thin sliver of their profits to try to spruce up their image. Sheepishly he confessed, “Chief Executive”?-?I was dumbstruck.

Bear in mind this was not some incredibly splashy event. The audience did not consist of the glitterati, getting into champagne-drinking shape for Davos the following week. This was a simple evening to hear about 6 great social enterprises, give a prize to 1 of them and get home by 8:00pm. Moreover, I recalled that this had only just got the job recently when James Murdoch moved upward within the group (oh, by the way, his name is Jeremy Darroch). So what really was he doing here 4 weeks into his high-profile new job?

He tried to explain to me that he REALLY DID care about this sort of thing-?by now I was even starting to believe him! He told me the story of how 18 months ago “the light went on” for him, in this regard. To move towards the carbon-neutral standard announced by his group, he (in is capacity as CFO) decided the company, which used loads of taxis, would switch to Green Tomato Cars (GTC). GTC is an environmentally friendly private car hire service. In announcing this he sent an email out to staff and about 10% or 400+ people emailed him back (an unprecedented number, Jeremy informed me) nearly all of which praised the decision as exactly the sort of thing the group should do. BSkyB so overwhelmed GTC however, that they ran out of cars! BSkyB then helped the company to finance the expansion of it fleet. Since that point he claimed, he fully understood and appreciated the power of ethical purchasing and social business-?and he came to the award ceremony to learn more. “If we hope to retain the best staff, or just retain customers, this is the sort of thing we simply have to do”?. This point impressed me and suggested considerable future buying by companies of ethical products-?representing an important new source of growth for the sector. But I should hardly be surprised. Weren”t Goldman Sachs and other large investment banks among the first customers of Belu Water?

We tend to think of companies as entities in themselves; monolithic, unified in thought and action-?we then anthropomorphise them and give them labels which suit our prejudice; such as “evil”?. Companies, we seem to forget, are comprised of people and they operate, universally I expect, in a completely different way than perceived by the outsider. They are rarely so efficient and effective as they seem, as we insiders have long known. Staff nevertheless are marked by the association with the firm and its public brand and reputation. They must live with these associations and need to be able to explain to their kids at home, their friends at dinner parties or their mates “round the pub” who they work for and why. Most critically, they have to feel justified in themselves.

What must it be like to work for a company whose reputation falls into disrepute (Enron) or becomes badly tarnished (BP). How easy to justify oneself if you work for Google or, even better, Facebook (my kids would love that-?although they might wonder if that would give me access to their more personal messages!)

These psychological questions are not the point here, and not my field. This is a Social Business Blog, not Industrial Psychology Today. What is relevant is that observers have not incorporated, in my judgement, the potential growth in this market emanating from corporate purchasers, because they undervalue the influence individual highly-skilled staff members have on such companies. In an increasingly competitive labour market for such talent their influence will only grow. Jeremy Darroch and BSkyB are only one example-?I could list many more.

Rodney Schwartz

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