For The Better - Email 9/5

For the Better comes to you bi-weekly with ideas about how and why to build companies focused on human flourishing and stories of the people who are doing it. Other enthusiasms may occasionally appear.

Standards Need TeethAdhering to standards is one of the ways companies make overt promises to consumers about how they produce and distribute their products. But as this post about labor abuse in the sugar industry shows, standards alone are not enough. As Megha Rajagopalan writes:

Most major companies have policies that ban labor and environmental abuses. To enforce them, they rely on a process known as social auditing. Factories pay social auditors to visit for a few days, during which they look at corporate paperwork and interview workers and managers. These observers look for anything that might be amiss: unsanitary work stations, underpaid or underage employees, illegal chemicals, unsafe conditions.

The problem is that auditors only capture a small period of time, and factories usually know they are coming. So managers have a chance to temporarily clean things up — and to stage-manage the interviews. Sugar mill executives also told me they steer auditors to farms that have the fewest problems. “Sometimes audits can act as subterfuge,” said Justine Nolan, the director of the Australian Human Rights Institute. “They can hide the real problems or give a sense that everything is fine without actually delving into what’s going on in this factory or field.”

She goes on to note an additional problem: “auditors…are beholden to the companies that hire them. Their members can vote on what they do and don’t do. They’re not allowed to publish their findings.” A more in-depth version of the story, which centers on sugar production in India and an auditing non-profit called Bonsucro, is here. Corporate standards are only meaningful if they actually have teeth. In order for that to be true:

1. The entity setting them has to be trustworthy to begin with. I’m sure we can all think of companies we believe when they say they’re committed to good policies and practices, and a whole – and sadly much longer – list of those we know aren’t trustworthy no matter what they claim. 

2. All entities the company interacts with have to be truly committed to upholding the standard. If not, the power of their collective failure to adhere to it will far outweigh whatever good intentions of the company that set it, influencing the original standard-setter instead of vice-versa. 

Every company exists as part of an ecosystem, which means it has the power to help direct the energy of that ecosystem through the choices it makes about who becomes (and remains) a fellow member. In our profit-maximizing world, a huge number of organizations let that power be corrupted by bad behavior in their partners rather than disrupt their operations, and their cash flow, by paying more for resources or kicking out a bad actor.Their promise to do no harm amounts to nothing more than words on a page – a cynical play to capture market share rather than a real commitment. Changing the status quo so that ethical behavior is not just the expectation but the norm is urgent. When companies exist in ecosystems that support the best version of what they can be, rather than the lowest common denominator, the corporate ethics landscape will begin to shift. As more and more companies are touched by that ethos, the positive effect will increase exponentially.

Things I’ve Enjoyed Lately 

🔵 A Brief History of AccelerationismA really interesting history and exploration of a question that becomes ever more pressing as AI continues to permeate our daily lives: “Do we control technology or does technology control us?” Featuring Nick Land and what the author calls his “form of ultra-doomerism, consisting of the belief that technology and humanity will never have a happy long-term relationship.”🔵 I Reviewed Restaurants for 12 Years. They’ve Changed, and Not for the BetterNew York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells devoted his final column to what he sees as the dehumanizing effects of technology’s incursion into the dining world: “We might work silently in our cubicles, rearranging and transmitting zeros and ones. We might walk around with speakers in our ears that played digital music files chosen by an algorithm. We might buy our books and sweaters and toothpaste with a click and wait until they showed up at our door. We might flirt, fight and make up by text. But when we went out to eat, we were people again.”

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🔵 It’s time to challenge Wall Street from the supply side

An argument for why abundance advocates should turn their attention to banking, “the sector that must underwrite the growth they hope to unleash.” Author David Dagan believes their predisposition towards “the vision and patience to think far into the future” is the best possible tool for taking on finance.