What Good Is A Company?

What if you could say that your company is directly responsible for 0.8% of total GDP in a country, and that 100,000 downstream jobs depend on you?

The idea that business and philanthropy are playing on opposing teams becomes more dated by the day.  The Connoisseur-It-All has always felt that businesses shouldn't be so shy about pointing out the good they do in the world, but the problem could simply be that they don't always have the data.

The company I cited above is Unilever, and the country is South Africa.  The Economist this week talks about Unilever's work with INSEAD professor Ethan Kapstein, who helped the company come up with this and other impact figures. 

It's powerful stuff.  I'd like to see how traditional "development" projects can stack up to such impacts, and for how long, given the fixed length of their projects.  Unilever, on the other hand, was founded in 1930 and, so far as I can tell, isn't going anywhere.

Comments

[Helen]

Companies exist for one reason--they provide something that people need/want (or they provide something that other companies need, but ultimately it's tied to providing something that people need/want). If you agree with what I just said, then companies do good by simply being in existence. There is an exception, and that is when people want bad things (e.g., opium, oreo-pizzas). But that is the fault of the people, and not the company.