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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.