Telegraph poles. You see them sometimes by the side of the road. They carry – or carried – telephone signals, and electricity. In our part of Suffolk they are currently being replaced. There is, I learn, a modest market for second hand poles. Yet buyer beware. As with fine wines, it is important to know your vintages.
Poles installed in the 1960s have retained their strength and haven’t rotted. It almost seems a waste to take them out. Poles installed in the 2000s, on the other hand, are much poorer quality. Apparently, we were told, the timber was purchased in Scandinavia and imported while still frozen. The rot in these started early.
Telegraph poles seem like a good metaphor for public procurement. If only the taxpayer and the public servants who spend taxpayer’s money could genuinely distinguish between suppliers whose quality will endure and suppliers whose contractual promises will not survive, or suppliers whose values are rotten on the inside.
So that’s one game-changing idea that I’d love to see come to fruition, that could powerfully improve our system of wealth creation. If there was a simple, reliable test to reveal the character of an organisation – perhaps one that would identify what a company says it stands for and then assess whether it lived up to these promises. The assessment would, among other things, look at the stated purpose and the track record of delivering it; the company’s owners and their stewardship; the board and its system of governance, especially its approach to governing and nurturing culture and ethics.
Tomorrow’s Company has been proposing ideas of this kind for ten years and thanks to BSI, there is now a standard which could be the basis of assessing a company’s character and the quality of its efforts to practise what it preaches. And our two organisations are not alone in seeing public procurement as a game-changing lever for improvement.
Julian Richer, chair of the Good Business Charter has suggested to the current government that they should require suppliers bidding for government contracts to honour the new Fair Payment Code In its Good Business Manifesto, published just before the UK’s General Election last May, the business-led think tank Regenerate came up with six recommendations for a government which wanted to encourage purpose-driven business, of which the sixth was leverage government buying power to align business activity to national priorities.
So here is one example of an idea with an array of different supporters which has the potential to be game-changing to the way our wealth creation system serves society and future generations.
What game-changing ideas would you like to conjure up to address one or more of the world’s great problems?
This search for game-changing ideas, theories of change and other powerful solutions at the last count engaged seventeen different organisations, brought together by Tomorrow’s Company and hosted by RPC, and we hope to widen the tent further in 2025. (The catalyst for these discussions was an event at the Anthropy 2023 Conference entitled Which Companies Should We Buy From, Work For and Invest In? )
It has been fascinating to see what these organisations propose: many suggestions seem intriguingly similar. Think of the impact if all seventeen were able to coalesce on a handful of ambitious ideas that, by working together, they might be able to bring to fruition.
Other ideas are emerging. A leader in the accounting world suggested that his profession should urgently change the way in which profit is measured, and replace it with a form of accounting that credited or debited companies according to their impact on any of the Six Capitals.
Several in our flotilla of organisations, all working in some sphere of business responsibility and sustainability and governance, believe that the reframing of company law, along the lines of the Better Business Act, is or can be a powerful lever. One pointed to the Japanese Top Runner programme, a law-based way of promoting competition towards excellence in energy companies using a mixture of benchmarking, continuous improvement and name-and-shame.
Now the debate moves to Anthropy 2025, which takes place in Cornwall at the end of March. Each of the speakers will be challenged to come up with their own game changing idea. Erinch Sahan of Doughnut Economics Action Lab, who will be speaking, promotes widespread ‘steward ownership’ as potentially game-changing. This is the idea that legislation, policy and tax incentives should all favour forms of ownership that showed a commitment to the long term and to the societal impacts of a company’s activities.
Jyoti Banerjee, CEO of North Star Transition is an impact investor who has been working closely with government and partners in Wales to coordinate investment together with government action in a systemic way. He and his colleagues are experimenting at and beyond the very edges of long term investment when it comes to place and community.
Will Hutton of The Purposeful Company will be there. In his latest, masterful, book ‘This Time No Mistakes’ he develops his proposal for a new legal category of company , the public benefit company, with particular application to the utility companies and to strengthen the accountability of companies deploying AI.
Please accept our invitation, as expressed here by Responsible 100’s Michael Solomon to contribute your own game-changing ideas and theories of change (ideally put forward as a series or sequence of linked game-changing ideas) to this increasingly intriguing and powerful list Let me have your suggestions now and we will build a catalogue of the ideas to take to Anthropy to share and debate them.
Mark Goyder is the Founder of Tomorrow’s Company and Senior Advisor to the Board Intelligence Think Tank. He is the co-author, with Ong Boon Hwee, of Entrusted – Stewardship For Responsible Wealth Creation, published by World Scientific.