Typography Joke
A little typography humor for your Friday.
Via Sean’s Google Reader and Design you trust.
Blogless
Via Sean’s Google Reader and Design you trust.
We’ve been saying it all along. If you commit to doing good, your business will do well; good design and good business sell. Peter Cappelli’s post on the HBR blog describes a study he conducted which cements the case for serving the needs of all business stakeholders – doing good, beyond profits:
My colleagues and I recently completed a study of Indian businesses based around interviews with the leaders of 100 of the biggest companies in India (the basis of our book The India Way.) Every executive we interviewed described the main objective of their company in terms of a social mission. They expected to make money, but they expected to do so while doing good.
He goes on to cite numerous examples of top successful Indian companies that do good in a variety of ways: providing financial help to those with no access to banking, enabling communications by giving out cell phones, improving health care, etc. In all these cases, business and social mission are closely tied. He also cites charitable giving by corporations at a much higher rate than the US: Tata group gives 65% of their profits to charities (and for context, in case you weren’t paying attention to last week’s post on the Goodness 500, most US companies of the same size donate <1% of profits). Cappelli says:
There is every reason to believe that these companies have done well precisely because they are doing good. Helping poor people pays off when those people get money and become consumers, as millions of Indians have done every year. It also helps in a still regulated economy to get government permissions and approvals. But the biggest reason, and the one that translates most directly to the US, is that social mission creates a powerful means for motivating employees. We have long known that employees do much better when they see how their tasks contribute to the overall goal of the organization, and new research shows that the results are especially powerful when those goals relate to helping people.
I agree. Read the whole article.
Procrastination by Johnny Kelly
Graduation film from the Royal College of Art, 2007.
Link.
Hat tip to Thinking aloud.
The Farm Bill, a massive piece of federal legislation making its way through Congress, governs what children are fed in schools and what food assistance programs can distribute to recipients. The bill provides billions of dollars in subsidies, much of which goes to huge agribusinesses producing feed crops, such as corn and soy, which are then fed to animals. By funding these crops, the government supports the production of meat and dairy products—the same products that contribute to our growing rates of obesity and chronic disease. Fruit and vegetable farmers, on the other hand, receive less than 1 percent of government subsidies.
The government also purchases surplus foods like cheese, milk, pork, and beef for distribution to food assistance programs—including school lunches. The government is not required to purchase nutritious foods.
I don’t actually think the question of whether this was the Chinese government or not is all that important. I know that seems strange. The Chinese government has tens of millions of people in it, and if you look at the associated army and whatnot it’s even larger. It’s larger than most countries by far. So even if there were a Chinese government agent behind this, it might represent a fragment of policy, as it were. There are many people there, and they have different views.
If you look at when we entered China with our Chinese operation in 2006, I actually feel like things really improved in the subsequent years. And I know there was a lot of controversy surrounding it, when we had to self-censor a fair amount, but we were actually able to censor less and less, and our local competitors there also censored less and less. We from the outside provided notification when the local laws prevented us from showing information, and the local competitors followed suit in that respect. So I feel like our entry made a big difference. But things started going downhill, especially after the Olympics. And there’s been a lot more blocking going on since then. Also our other sites, YouTube and whatnot, have been blocked. And so the situation really took a turn for the worse.
Read Google’s original statement on China here, and watch the whole interview here.
The Goodness 500 has a premise we at DLB can agree with: help consumers find the most socially responsible companies in an aesthetically pleasing way.
However, looking at the companies in their rankings, I question their definition of good. There are quite a few companies I wouldn’t think to see on this list, particularly the large number of financial institutions.
The rankings appear to be gleaned from several public reports on charity donations, equality, and environmental policy. These issues are important, but don’t tell the whole story. What company would allow itself to look bad on one of those reports when anyone (like Goodness) can easily look up such numbers? Donate some money, follow the rules, and everything looks fine. Meanwhile, the company might use child labor or issue bogus loans. Much more difficult to look up.
What’s missing is the ethical dimension. I’d like to see a Goodness 500 that really quantifies trust and fairness, not the Goodness-On-Paper 500…
The following map shows the flow of carbon emissions in traded goods, and which countries are major exporters and importers of carbon emissions.
As GOOD reports: “When someone in the States buys shoes that were made in China, the carbon emitted in their production gets added to China’s tally, despite the fact that the shoes get exported.”
The visualization and study shows that looking only at domestic emissions is pretty misleading and doesn’t capture the true emissions caused by particular country’s total activity. It also makes a case for changing the way we think about allocating responsibility for products to consumers. Read the full story.
