SALİM KADIBEŞEGİL

What have we learnt from COVID-19?

If the first lesson is that national borders are “meaningless” in the face of global issues, the second lesson we’ll learn – by experience – is (unfortunately) the “climate crisis.” Now, we see that injustice in income distribution and inequality is causing the huge gap between the rich and the poor. We’re going through a period where we’re paying the price of becoming a consumer society – regardless of the distinction between rich and poor. We’re going through a period where the rich can’t even enjoy their wealth.

So, is there a “remedy?” Is there a “solution?”

We may not be able to stop this bad course in its tracks, but maybe we can design a new model of social life based on the mistakes of the past.

People –indebted to the future – have shaped their lives in an endless clamp of consumption, an extension of the notion of “consume at all costs.” Alas, that life doesn’t belong to them! By the 2000s, international reports had already reflected that our ability to sustain life was under great threat due to our consumption frenzy, which undermined human rights and ecological balance, as well as which caused injustice in income distribution.

Capitalism is Getting a New Outfit!

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, where world leaders gather, loudly said that companies no longer can satisfy their own appetite for profit. “Post-capitalism” contains many a hollow concept whose instrumentality is questionable. Among them, “stakeholder capitalism” and “social capitalism” now dictate that it is important that we value stakeholders in the business world, not just shareholders.

The “raison d’être” on which managers of communication strategies in companies rely have begun to falter. Communication of raison d’être that prioritizes “stakeholder value” has begun to radically change communication in general too. That’s why we’ve begun to hear about concepts such as sustainability, social reporting, corporate citizenship, and activist CEOs.

At the end of this 130 years of (When petroleum acknowledged as an economic value in commerce) adventure, we’ve consumed the planet. More importantly, we’ve consumed “morality.” Debates on these new concepts include anything but “morality!”

Globalization has opened the door for us to discuss many issues related to sustaining life. It moreover has made us see that companies’ traditional produce/market/sell approach to business is “no longer sustainable.” On the one hand, the planet is losing all of its natural resources. In parallel, raw material sources cannot renew themselves. On the other hand, the rising “accountability” among social sensitivities pin down companies. These reflect on laws and regulations. Yet, with each passing day, companies are looking for a “way out” of the deadlock of traditional business models.

Social Reactions Turning into a “Brand”

Of course, social dynamics have a very important place in getting things to this point, since we can see in them what values people around the world are adopting. In particular, transforming social reactions into a “brand” has a large impact on companies, brands, and regulatory institutions. We refer to these as Protest Brands or Branding Protests. Such brands include the “yellow vests movement” (that occupied the streets in Paris for months), #metoo, #occupywallstreet, yellow umbrellas (Hong Kong), the “Sardinian movement” (that rose during Italy’s elections), and #duranadam (which became a brand during the Gezi protests, in Turkey, 2013). All of these are an indicator of “globalization of individuals” – another dimension of globalization. We therefore must first ask ourselves, “what’s happening?” and then “will they affect us?” It is rather clear to us that they will affect us too; thus, we’ve begun to find a way to answer: “what should we do?”

Benefit Corporations are Spreading Rapidly

Despite its rather old roots, “social entrepreneurship” entered our agenda as a business model that people throughout the globalized world accepted (in the 2000s). ASHOKA – a global voice of civil society – states that: “Like entrepreneurs who change the face of the business world, social entrepreneurs are the tools of social transformation. They aim to solve major social problems and eliminate them without expecting material benefit and profit in return. Just like commercial entrepreneurs, they create new opportunities by seeing what others can’t see. They also change systems and find new approaches to solve important problems in society.”

In parallel with these developments, another organization has entered our lives: Benefit Corporations (B+). They are rapidly growing in number. There are more than 3,500 B Corps in 70 countries. Legal Studio defines this model as follows:

“B Corps are profit-oriented, non-tax-exempt trading companies that mostly operate like a classic company. But unlike a classic company, their goals are to maximize profit as well as to serve a social good. In other words, B Corps are trading companies with two main goals: To make a profit and to pursue a social purpose. B Corps melt profit- and non-profit legal entities in the same pot and work to positively impact the environment and the community, albeit at the expense of sacrificing profit.

Classic trading company executives may experience problems when they follow a management style that deviates from the goal of maximizing shareholders’ profits. B Corp executives, on the other hand, do not take personal responsibility when they demonstrate management that focuses on employees, society, and the environment.”

Take Danone, for example. Danone has set itself the target of becoming a B+ by 2025. They’ve accelerated their change and transformation efforts to complete the certification processes.

When we step into the world of social entrepreneurs and benefit corporations, we encounter the concept of “ethical and fair trade.” This concept has generated more than $6 trillion in business volume in 2020 alone – therefore, we need to mix the dough. Journalist Dr. Şeref Oğuz says that “Fair trade is related to ethical trade. Ethical trade defines everything in producing of something, be it paying taxes, not employing illegal workers, not polluting the environment, not cheating your partner, not fobbing your client off, and not bribing.” We can infer that companies that create meaningful and social benefits look at social entrepreneurs from out of the corner of their eye. The winds of change in values are first blowing there. Moreover, we observe that there are also radical changes in companies’ management habits:

• NGO representatives enter boards of directors of companies.
• Metrics of managers’ performance assessments shift from financial to social, environmental and employee happiness.
• Yes, you’ve achieved your sales targets, but what’s the cost of your carbon/water/plastic footprint? Official documents question this.
• Are your colleagues happy?
• What is your social and environmental impact performance like?
• How are your suppliers? How are the living standards of their employees? Can you measure their environmental performance ?

We need to follow the developments of Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose to see what’s happening around there.

These examples come from within!

We now can hear the footsteps of our need for a new societal structure and a social contract that would serve as that basis for it. I foresee that we’ll all probably meet around the “Wikipedia” model in the long run. Wiki business models – supported by the Wiki source utilization philosophy – are essentially a blended version of today’s successful cooperatives, with innovation and technology.

Wikipedia is a structuring model that we can look to as a role model for many different areas. Can everyone gather around an “idea” to contribute to the solution of global issues? Can we accumulate intellectual out of this? Can everybody – beyond those who enrich this idea – adopt that idea and create other ideas from it to serve the same purpose?

Robert Redford (a film director/actor and environmental activist) comes to mind. In the early 1960s, he dreamt of Sundance and in the 1970s, he transformed it into the center of independent cinema. To do that, he built a mini-town in the middle of nowhere and turned it into the Sundance Institute, based on a complete wiki-business model. There are dozens of examples just like it. The system – where everything except money is a “priority” – features a business model focused on generating “added value.” Everyone in the system – especially writers, directors, actors, and producers, who all focus on the social problems of the world – contributes to this system; the fruit of their efforts benefits all of humanity. That’s why I’m writing these in this article. Just like what Jeff Skoll (the founder of e-Bay, entrepreneur) tries to do with his eponymous foundation. Lord John Bird [also] did this with Big Issue, a program he had developed for the homeless.

The Newman’s Own brand – founded by filmmaker Paul Newman in the early 1980s – is just one of many successful examples reflected to this day. Newman’s Own begun to grow with salad dressing and then included other organic products within range. What makes it peculiar is that it donates all its profits to other social enterprises. The fact that it has donated over $500 million to date shows us how healthy their system is.

Another example is the micro-credit system successfully managed by Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammed Yunus.

On the Çeşme peninsula where I live (Izmir, Turkey), there are many such successful examples (e.g. The village of Bademler (which has had its own theatre since the 1930s) and the Development Cooperative. The village people live up to their traditions to which they owe their cultural wealth (thanks to the theater, toy museum, library, and other social and cultural activities). They’ve also achieved success in sustainable harvest of local products.. Immediately ahead, the Gödence Cooperative is another success story in its own right when it comes to rural development; as is the Tire Milk Cooperative.

Finally, the “economics of derivation” understanding (developed by “good4trust” https://good4trust.org/ and led by ASHOKA award-winning social entrepreneur Dr. Uygar Özesmi) is a perfect example of a Wikipedia society.

What do we have to do?

A “different” model has ruled Bhutan (a tiny kingdom in Asia) since the 1970s. They implement “happiness index” criteria (an indicator of public well-being not monetary gains.) In other words, we can move life to another format, of course.

• Bold moves are needed for a new world and a new life design.
• We have to put aside our old-fashioned way of thinking.
• We must overcome the rhetoric of our carbon and plastic footprint.
• New global organizations are inevitable. Instead of today’s expired organizations (such as the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank), we need brand new institutions that will create movement on a global scale so that we can deal with the climate crisis and global warming.
• We should be able to think that stocks have no meaning – that they are instruments that [can] darken our future.
• We have to be able to get the stock markets – which are the board game of a handful of speculators – out of our lives.
• We must not let companies grow.
• We should be able to move towards the global single currency.
• We must exclude immoral science.
• We should be able to turn into societies where even sculptors can be tax champions.
• We should be able to make justice the backbone of social life.
• We have to do business that will trigger local production in agriculture. We must preserve our thousands of years-worth of knowledge about nature and agriculture and pass it on to the next generation. We must prevent starvation locally.

In short, must think about becoming a WIKIPEDIA society!