It's a simple idea: serve (locally-sourced) pie and coffee, give people a place to sit and talk, and good things can happen. Greensboro, Alabama is the site of PieLab, a community space developed by design group Project M and non-profit housing organization HERO. You can read more about its founders and mission here.

What I like most about it is the earnestness and simplicity of the idea. The New York Times discusses how, early on, PieLab's young designers struggled to fit into the local culture. The latest incarnation is sensitive and helpful, without being patronizing.

Image from the PieLab Facebook Group

Image from the PieLab Facebook Group

Last week, Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry's was in Ann Arbor at the Ross Net Impact conference to talk about social enterprise and distribute little cups of ice cream to the MBAs in attendance. Jerry discussed starting and growing a business while prioritizing social responsibility, and the difficult experience of selling to Unilever (if you’re unfamiliar, a summary). I think a number of Jerry's points are worth repeating and relevant to DLB as we continue to think about how to grow business at our little design firm. Here’s what Jerry thinks:

Businesses should be responsible to society.
Since business is one of the most powerful forces in society, business should look out for the general welfare of society. Most firms, Jerry reminded us, operate with themselves as the major focus, which is unhealthy and even dangerous to society. In the traditional business sphere, making money is the focus, and doing good is something separate: the prevailing wisdom is that you can't be successful and help society as well. Jerry's belief is that there is value in integrating the two and that business strategies can - and should - be used for good.

Align your mission, metrics for success, and your values.
When Ben and Jerry initially decided to grow their business, they insisted on "growing the business in a reasonable way." This meant that they added value to the company by doing business that was aligned with their values. At one point, they saw a need to redefine the bottom line and how to measure success, so they decided to report not just financials, but to also create a social report to maintain accountability around social and environmental performance (see recent examples here).

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Good news this week for MBAs like myself who believe that business skill can be used to do good: we came across a trend towards more ethical MBAs, after last Spring's Harvard MBA class signed a sort of businessperson's version of the doctor's traditional Hippocratic Oath. Since then, schools across the country are adding ethics courses to the curriculum, and MBAs are being encouraged to see the degree as a tool for effective management, not just a ticket to a high paying job.

It isn't yet clear to me exactly how (and if) ethics can be taught to MBAs, however, I'd like to explore this further in future posts. But right now I'd like to turn your attention to an inspiring MBA who is harnessing her business expertise to bring water to developing countries, by helping to spread a simple design, which addresses the root causes that are trapping families and entire communities in poverty.

The Hippo has been in existence for 15 years, originally designed by two South African men and currently produced in South Africa, to facilitate the safe and efficient transport of water in the developing world. The original design cost $100 per unit, and holds approximately 24 gallons of water. For families in South Africa and many other parts of the developing world, water must be fetched multiple times throughout the day, the traditional methods (gerricans and buckets) only holding about 5-8 gallons at any time. The Hippo's volume and ease of use allows households to spend less time fetching water, and more time going to school, running businesses, and with their families.

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1. Far Foods

I caught James Reynolds's Far Foods, an updated design for produce packaging, on Swissmiss. I think the boarding-pass styling might be too clever visually, but I very much like the idea of prominently displaying point-of-origin, distance traveled, and resulting CO2.

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I ran across a semi-recent interview published by the Harvard Business School's "Working Knowledge" site that's relevant to some of the things DLB likes to talk about. A recent paper of interviewees Profs. James E. Austin and Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard focuses on the acquisitions of three small brands with some social cache ("virtuous mice") by three brands lacking that cache, but having instead piles of cash ("wealthy elephants"): (1) Tom's of Maine acquired by Colgate, (2) Stonyfield Farm Yogurt purchased by Danone, and (3) Ben & Jerry's bought by Unilever.

The authors write, "Making a virtuous mouse and rich elephant merger work is a delicate, but potentially high-value undertaking in terms of generating both greater economic and social value." This is the case when such a merger can help mice scale up rapidly and can provide terms of accountability for mice which are not so demanding as those of the market after an IPO. A merger can be good for an elephant because it allows them to explore "significantly new ideas and radically different business approaches," which are traditionally out of internal scope in terms of possible innovation.

Happily ever after?

Our question is predictable here: can these virtuous mice actually pull thorns from elephant feet, or rather are the mice destined to become mere value shills by virtue of the kinds of infrastructure and market commitments that they take on? Many elephants, the authors report, attempt to allow their mice to retain a high degree of organizational independence to prevent "brand contamination," but how plausible is this?

I can't help but think back to Nick's claim last week that corporate promises about values are generally unkeepable because the stakes aren't realistic. I'd add to this that this unkeepability might scale linearly with size. Tom's of Maine may stand for some values, but it's going to be progressively harder for that company to instantiate those values because being beholden to a corporate empire reduces their ability to take action on the kinds of ethical commitments they want to make. Presumably, part of what a mouse gets out of a merger is production and marketing infrastructure that was developed against a set of values that contradict those that the mouse has stood for in the past.

On the other hand, the authors note that "from a broader perspective, these fusions provide additional evidence that social enterprise is becoming an integral and embedded part of the marketplace and enriching the avenues for businesses to generate simultaneously commercial and social value." But even if we can concede that these social mergers are good in the sense that they promote social values, it seems equally clear that the companies doing the promotion can no longer instantiate those values (at least not as well). This in turn makes the promises on which the social enterprises are built less trustworthy. And we all know the rest.