TOKENS PODCAST: S4E18
“What should the right level of profit be for a corporation?” In this episode, Jay Jakub discusses why this question must be asked in order for a business to thrive. To him, today’s widely adopted model of financial capitalism falls short of taking seriously the holistic nature of business; and the longer a business holds to such a model, the less it can be sustained. “It's time to create a more complete form of capitalism by enlarging the definition to include not only financial capital, but also other forms of capital that are non-financial in nature, like social capital, human capital, and natural capital.”
ABOUT THE GUEST
Jay Jakub is the Chief Advocacy Officer of the Economics of Mutuality (EoM) movement for the EoM Foundation and is the Senior Client Advisor for the EoM Solutions consultancy, a subsidiary of the EoM Foundation. In addition, Jay serves as a Strategic Advisor to the Richmond-based Thompson Family Office, which is constructing a smart city in Virginia. He is also an Advisor to the Alliance on Corporate Purpose, which is developing through Singapore’s National Volunteer & Philanthropy Center (NVPC) a national framework and blueprint on corporate purpose for the Government of Singapore.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
There are those who, when speaking of "ethics" or "right and wrong," speak as if the "right thing to do" is but an arbitrary command of God. On the other hand, there are others, with whom I find myself in general agreement, who speak of "ethics" or "right and wrong" as that which coincides with what is actually required for human flourishing. In other words, something is "right" because it ultimately contributes to, or constitutes, in real ways, the bettering of ourselves, our communities, our planet, or "wrong" because it ultimately fails to do so.
If that's true, then -everything- is... well, ethical, or not.
But this stands at odds with many sacred cows of contemporary society. Many think, for example, that public education can be and should be so-called "value free." Or then there are the fields of management and business, in which ultimate ends related to human flourishing have been thought irrelevant.
Jay: Mars is a $40 billion food and beverage company headquartered just outside of Washington, DC. I was working in the headquarters at that time.
Lee: That's Jay Jakub, chief advocacy officer for Economics of Mutuality, recounting an experience he had during his tenure at Mars corporation, one of the largest food and beverage companies in the world. While working there, he was asked a question which, in many ways, changed his life.
Jay: And one of the leaders of the branches of, the family.
He asked his CEO a very unusual question, which is what should the right level of profit be for the corporation.
Lee: The surprising nature of the question was this: here is a major economic player at one of the largest companies in the world, talking about profit levels. And yet, the word he chose in talking about profit was not "best" or "most" as one would expect. It was, instead, "right."
In much contemporary economic thought, this suggestion - that a limitless maximization of profit might not be in a company's best interest - is practical heresy. And yet, the more he studied this proposition, the more Jay realized the value in that question.
Jay: I believe that there's a natural order to everything, including a natural order for the economy.
And so the natural order of the economy, as I understand it is that financial capital is important, but it's at the bottom of the hierarchy. Okay? That, that financial capital is there to support the economy, which through business supports the planet. And ultimately it's people at the top.
So why is it that we would forge ahead with a very almost primitive form of capitalism that was meant to address a form of scarcity that doesn't exist?
Lee: These days Jay works with Economics of Mutuality, based in Geneva, Switzerland. They seek to address this very question: how might business benefit from re-figuring it's primary work or primary concerns - such as the importance of right relationship with people, society, and the earth itself? In other words, how might business endeavors rightly orient its resources toward a more holistic sense of so-called "capital?"
Jay: It's time to really create a more complete form of capitalism by enlarging the definition of performance to include not only financial capital in businesses, but also other forms of capital that are non-financial in nature, but that have significant value, like social capital, human capital and natural capital.
Lee: Today, a fascinating conversation, taped in front of a live audience in conjunction with the Business as Mission Conference at Lipscomb University, coming right up.
INTERVIEW
Lee: Falling 14 years serving in the Mars corporation, global headquarters. Jay Jakub now serves as the chief advocacy officer for Economics of Mutuality, an independent organization headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. He has a doctorate in modern history from Oxford University. And then since 2014, he has directed a multi-year joint research partnership on the Economics of Mutuality with Oxford University Saïd Business School, where he is a regular guest lecturer.
He's also the coauthor with Bruno Roche of Completing Capitalism. Please make welcome. Dr. Jay Jakub.
So Jay, you, uh, your organization, Economics of Mutuality. What is the Economics of Mutuality?
Jay: I'm glad you asked that question. And it's actually my favorite topic to talk about. It's a business model management innovation is probably the best way to describe it. And it was developed by the internal think tank of Mars, Inc. Which was led by the chief economist of Mars.
And I helped to support him in the leadership of that organization for 14 years while I was at Mars. And Economics of Mutuality is really about putting purpose into practice through strategy in a company. And it really starts with the premise that the purpose of business is not to create profit as odd as that sounds. That the purpose of business is actually to create profitable solutions for the problems with people and planet, not to profit by creating problems for people in planet.
Lee: So not opposed to profit, but not making profit the bottom, the bottom line, philosophically.
Jay: It's really about repositioning business from extracting value from its stakeholders, to actuallyorchestrating solutions to the problems of those stakeholders within an ecosystem, grouped around purpose and delivering purpose as a business.
Lee: The Milton Friedman's one of the famed representatives that one of his famous quotes, the sole social responsibility of business is to maximize profit for distribution to show our shareholders. And for any of you not aware, Milton Friedman's one of the, I guess, one of the most famous economists of the 20th century in the United States, uh, and said, this is the sole purpose of business. So you guys are kind of consciously pushing back against that definition of business?
Jay: We are certainly, and you have to remember contextually that Milton Friedman introduced financial capitalism, which is now the dominant model, operating in all businesses virtually around the world. It's the model that's taught in all business schools as almost the only model that's taught, but it was actually created about 50 years ago, uh, in 1970.
And that's when, uh, the, the context of, of the world was very different than it is today.
There was a scarcity at that time in the global economy of money, but there was a surplus of natural resources and there was a surplus of labor. Okay? So it's not surprising that in economists and economics is really about the management of scarcity.
So you would have an economist come in with a model to address that scarcity, that form of scarcity.
Well, financial capitalism has been so successful in addressing that form of scarcity. Then now we have this massive dysfunctional, 50 years later, dysfunctional amount of money in the global economy.
And we have the inverse of the forms of scarcity. So today the real forms of scarcity, our natural resources and their talent matching the jobs that are being created in the new knowledge economy with a different set of rules of the game. So why is it that we would forge ahead with a very, almost, primitive form of capitalism that was meant to address a form of scarcity that doesn't exist.
It's time to really create a more complete form of capitalism by enlarging the definition of performanceto include not only financial capital in businesses, but also other forms of capital that are non-financial in nature, but that have significant value, like social capital, human capital and natural capital.
And those forms of capital are actually the building blocks of the Economics of Mutuality.
Lee: Hm. So you all got started at, you were at Mars corporation, how many years?
Jay: About 13 and a half years. Almost 14 years.
Lee: And so this way of thinking, or this project, began while you were there. And as I recollect, it began out of the CEO of Mars coming to you all with a particular question.
Jay: Actually, it was one of the Mars incorporated, uh, family owners. Mars is a $40 billion food and beverage company headquartered just outside of Washington, DC. I was working in the headquarters at that time. And so it's owned by three branches of a, of one family, the Mars family. And one of the leaders of the branches of, uh, of one of the branches of the family. He asked his CEO a very unusual question, which is what should the right level of profit be for the corporation. Now, a shareholder in the world dominated by financial capitalism, all of Milton Friedman, only asked that question, typically, if they already know the answer, which is as much profit as you can squeeze out of all your, uh, stakeholders, but in actual fact, this particular, uh, uh, Mars family member was asking a different type of question.
His, his belief was that maybe we were taking too much profit and that maybe there was an optimum level profit above which you would actually disadvantage the company by creating the squeezing effect among your value chain partners. And you're only strong as the weakest link in your value chain. So if you had this, phenomena of one value chain partner squeezing another squeezing another for, for as much profit as they could squeeze from everyone else, this would create kind of a disequilibrium in the value chain.
And this would disadvantage the company and his feeling was that maybe there's an optimal level of profit. And if we take too much, we'll really be hurting ourselves.
Lee: So do you receive that question as an ethical question or is that sort of a business strategy question or both of the above?
Jay: Well, you know, when we, when we first got that question, we thought, okay, we're an internal think tank of a major multinational corporation.
So let's go do our research. So we went and did a kind of a literature review around the world to try to see what everyone else has done to address the question of the right level of profit. We found absolutely nothing, nothing that, uh, addressed it in the management literature in any comprehensive way or any really meaningful way.
So we started to think, you know, is this a new question that mankind has never wrestled with before? Then we started to think kind of in historical terms. And actually we found something that king Solomon said, uh, king Solomon, the wise, which is, uh, you know, I think in like 950 BC. It was just extraordinary what he said, which is a man may give freely and still his wealth may be increased. Another may keep back more than his right and still come to be in need.
So this is in the book of Proverbs and this was, you know, thousands of years ago. Really a king Solomon addressing this question of what the right level of profit should be.
So we started thinking, this is not a new question. This is actually a very old question. That mankind kind of put aside for the 50 years of, uh, of Milton Friedman.
And now it's time to really revisit that question.
Lee: Hmm. So you all, one of your descriptions of economics and mutuality is it seeks to meet the needs of the world. It restores broken relationships between companies, wider society, and the environment.
And I'm struck by the way, in which you all use the language of brokenness and bondage. And so kind of two-part question here. What's the nature of the brokenness y'all were pointing to, and can you give us some specific examples of when you think about that brokenness, you all are trying to address, what does that really look like specifically from your perspective?
Jay: Well with the chief economist of Mars, we coauthored a book, the first book on the economics of mutuality back in 2017.
And we struggled with the title. And ultimately we came up with a two part title. Uh, the first part is completing capitalism. So this is to demonstrate this is not an attack on capitalism. It's a recognition that capitalism 1.0 that only values one form of capital money, uh, above anything else is, is rudimentary and it actually needs to be, uh, evolved to meet the criteria today.
The second part of the book is what's really the second part of the title rather was heal business to heal the world. And there's a real reason behind that. And every time I talk to a group and I start to talk about the actual business results, that actually you can wind up achieving a much more profitable business by reorienting yourself, to solving problems with your stakeholders and doing good for people and planet.
Then you could if you were just chasing the money, you know. I really think back to, to, uh, the warning, uh, that, that I received, spiritually actually, because, and when I speak, I'm a man of faith personally. I work in an organization that's secular. And so, uh, so we have to have a kind of a secular vernacular around what it is we're doing, but for me, this isn't just a clever way to make more money.
In the current context, this is really about healing. The broken relationships that business has has with people that's certainly broken and the broken relationships with people that business has with, uh, with the planet. And I find that, uh, that this is really all about healing those relationships.
Lee: You all had a slide in one of your early presentations that I've seen where you talk about the difference between Marxism, capitalism, and ecology. Um, but would you kind of describe what you all were kind of sketching out with that? Because I think especially these days in the kind of highly polarized world we live in, it seems like if anyone critiques any aspect of capitalism, they assume you must be a socialist and vice versa.
Uh, but you all clearly are not trying that or doing that. It was much more nuanced multi-faceted work, but would you kind of describe what you see Marxism, capitalism, and ecology addressing and how you all are trying to do something different than any one of those?
Jay: When you think about the history of economies and prosperity, there's really three aspects that always are consistent. One is the land that provides, then there's the labor that transforms and adds value. And then there's the money, the financial capital that actually is there to create liquidity in the system.
Okay. These forms of capital are very distinctive from, from one another, but they're not remunerated in the same way. So I think the slide that you're talking about was an early slide as we started to put this together, uh, as a concept.
And really, if you think about the different, um, ideologies is economic ideologies, economic systems that were, uh, that were put into place to try to address each one of these three variables that I mentioned. First, you had sort of Marxism that was built on, on the half-truth of the fact that people needed to come first. Okay. There's truth in that. But they tried to remunerate one form of capital, which was really people at the expense of the other two, which was the planet and profit. They really destroyed the planet in very, in many ways, and also destroyed the ability of corporations to be self-sustaining and profitable by really making it difficult to, to create prosperity through financial profit.
Then you had financial capitalism come along and their half-truth was that you wanted to remunerate financial capital, but the expense, the expense of people and at the expense of the planet. And then you had this sort of third half-truth, which is the environmental movement, which is becoming more and more, uh, powerful out there.
And they've got their own sort of economic approach if they're given the opportunity to implement it. And it's really about putting the planet above everything else. And remunerating the planet at the expense of people and profit.
And, you know, our belief in the very beginning, which really drove us, uh, at the start before we had all the business data, was that really, we need to find a way to remunerate each one of these pillars of land, labor, and financial capital by what it brings to the table. And that there's a truth in the wholeness bringing these three aspects of the economy together. And just focusing on one at the expense of the other two is only a half-truth.
Lee: Related to all that, then, you all often use the word purpose. So when you speak of purpose in business, what does that mean and entail?
Jay: Yeah, that's a really big question. And it's one that CEOs of corporations and shareholders and others are, are really wrestling with right now. And I kind of look at purpose in a corporation as something that's become almost a Ponzi scheme of purpose, uh, where it becomes all about the reputation of the corporation and creating something that's really aspiring and really unattainable for that corporation because the corporation that creates these kinds of, really, uh, exciting, uh, types of, of purpose statements often don't connect it to strategy in their organization.
Lee: So it’s compelling marketing, but not necessarily driving the…
Jay: Yeah, that, and that, that doesn't happen everywhere, but it happens in a lot of places. And one of the signs of that is when a purpose is just put into the hands solely of corporate affairs and communications. Now corporate affairs communications has a really important role. Don't get me wrong in this, but if purpose is disconnected from strategy, then it's going to be very difficult to deliver.
Purpose because there's no connection to the incentive system in the corporation that drives management behavior to actually deliver what you say your purpose is. Really if, if you follow the Martin Friedman model, which again, almost all companies do, all those incentives are geared towards delivering maximized financial returns to investors.
So I love this quote by, uh, by CS Lewis, who many of you have probably read, where he actuallytalked about purpose as being like a light. And that he said that if you, you, when you turn on a light in a dark room, you don't do that and then stare at the light. You, you actually look at what the light illuminates.
Okay. And I think this is a really insightful of CS Lewis because when you look at purpose as something that's just meant to be aspirational and disconnected from your ability to deliver it through strategy, what you're doing is you're asking everybody to look at the light, to stare at the light itself and not at actually all the brokenness and the opportunities actually, the growth opportunities, that come with problems that are in your ecosystem of stakeholders.
And so really connecting purpose in a very deliberate and meaningful way with strategy, making it much more holistic in terms of, of bringing in the finance aspect of a corporation, bringing in the, uh, the, the HR part of the organization as well, and, and looking for ways to, to practically implement it. That's the way that you're actually going to, uh, to succeed in, in orchestrating solutions, to the problems of your stakeholder, which will actually supercharge your, your returns, your performance.
Lee: Hm.
Uh, I'm reminded in this competition, uh, Peter Drucker, the management guru had this one essay in which he really took to task higher education the discipline of management in higher education, because he said that they weren't asking the question why, and they weren't asking the question of what's the purpose of all this.
And they were just teaching people to manage stuff more efficiently without asking towards what end. And as somebody in the humanities in theology, I appreciate that he went on to say that the discipline of management and business schools had done a great disservice to their students by not requiring that they take the humanity seriously, because they said the humanities are the place in which historically we ask questions about purpose.
And what's the meaning of life. And why are we working in, what are we doing with all these things? But it seems to, it seems again that one of the things that y'all are doing is trying to take that sort of observation seriously and say, we've got to have a multifaceted, well informed, notion of purpose and what is the meaning of life?
Jay: Absolutely. And we're even taking it more seriously than ever as we try to, uh, to bring the purpose of business, okay? And I mentioned at the beginning, the purpose of businesses to create profitable solutions, to the problems that people in planet, and then to create a purpose statement that we call a meaningful challenge, that's actually actionable. That's looking at how do we solve thethrough our business activity, the problems of someone else, rather than just describing what it is we do, which a lot of purpose statements do, or just creating this value statement that is not, uh, not really actionable.
So that's, the starting point for us there.
Lee: Now as somebody from the field of theology, it seems to me, as I read through some of your work, it seems rather obvious that you are working with constructs that are indebted to theological tradition. You're using, as you said, kind of secular language, but, you know, as I would read it, it's like, well, there's another theological concept at play in this.
And there's another kind of concept from moral philosophy. And I've got students here today who were thinking a lot about your Aristotelian moral philosophy that asks questions about what's the meaning of life and what is the nature of human flourishing. So is it fair to say that you all are kind of doing a engagement with business that's really taking seriously theology and moral philosophy around human flourishing?
Jay: Well, I can certainly speak for myself in this and I want to make sure to make that distinction because, uh, anything that is of a biblical nature that inspired this work, and it did inspire that there is biblical truth that inspired this work, that is not necessarily a position that a corporate entity that is secular, would we feel comfortable taking and that's fine.
So some of us that work on this are, are believers and some of us are not. And, tend to think that God uses all of us to, to achieve his ends, but actually the inspiration for this work. And we've been quite open about this, since the very beginning of it, even though we were in a secular environment, trying to take this to a secular marketplace was really found in the Old Testament.
And maybe, uh, what many would think was an unlikely place. I was talking to somebody the other day last night, actually it was a pastor. And he said, he said, you're talking about Leviticus chapter 25 as being the inspiration for an economic model? Leviticus, you know, is that something we really want, really want to spend a lot of time on?
And when I took another look at Leviticus and you know, if you remember anything about Leviticus 25, it's really laying out God is Jubilee. And it talks about how God remunerates people, planet, and profit, really with, with rest. And remunerates, uh, people with one day of a Sabbath, uh, out of, uh, out of every seven. And remunerates the land with one year of rest out of every seven and remunerates, uh, capital financial capital every 49 years, seven times, seven years for one year, which gives us that 50-year Jubilee cycle.
So that was really the inspiration that, that came from this work. But the more that I, uh, I work on this.I find that I often am speaking in biblical terms that I'm, but I'm not sourcing it necessarily in that way because it's, I believe it's truth. And I believe when the truth comes out, that it never comes back empty.
And so when you're repositioning companies through a business model management innovation, away from simply extracting value from its stakeholders and trying to keep for themselves, you know, with that, that kind of lie, I think, that's out there, which is if you want to have for yourself, you need to take from others and keep it right.
That ultimately is where financial capitalism has put us in many ways. After 50 years, one Jubilee cycle, interestingly of a financial capitalism, but really it's about focusing on the means economics of mutuality, how you treat the others. If your end is profit maximization for yourself, you need to put that aside.
That can't be your motivator. The ends do not justify the means.
This is all about focusing on the means, being faithful in the small things, orchestrating solutions to the problems of your neighbor. Okay. Really in its most literal sense. And it really demonstrates in a very practical ways, with real business data that it's better to give than to receive, because when you actually orchestrate solutions to the problems of your stakeholders around a purpose, that's actionable, what you're doing is you're creating a much more healthy ecosystem of stakeholders. And that creates a much greater performance, including financial performance, even in the short-term.
So everyone actually gets a double blessing in this. If you focus on the means and not on the ends.
Lee: Will you talk us a little bit through the notion of nonfinancial metrics. So GDP, as I understand it, you know, has one set of things that measures, purely financial and it would be of a particular kind of financial sort as I understand it.
But it seems like there's a movement apparently for the development of a lots of different kinds of metrics to try to take into more of the kinds of things that you all are pointing to. So could you kind of school us a little bit about that kind of conversation and what you all are doing with a different set of metrics?
Jay: Sure, you know, metrics can be used and they can be misused. And there, there are a lot of metrics out there and dozens and dozens of metrics that are, that are around what's called ESG right now. So that, uh, that's something that's very much, out there. And that, companies are trying to figure out how you can focus on environmental, uh, and the S is social and governance.
And there's a lot of…
Lee: ESG, environmental, social, governance.
Jay: … environmental, social, and governance, and there’s a lot of kind of effort and metrics around the E piece of this. Not a lot around the S and really not a lot, either around the G. And one of the problems with metrics is that in business, you only manage what you measure, but you need to be measuring the right things.
And you look at ESG metrics and on the surface, they're not connected to value creation, okay? They’re metrics and they do a count for something, but there isn't a specific link, a causal link between each one of these metrics and the creation of value in a particular business context or in the sector of the economy.
One of the things that we did, and right from the beginning, is we took a look at the fact that, I think I mentioned at the beginning, financial capitalism 50 years ago, just looked at measuring and managing one form of capital.
And you only manage what you measure in business, as I mentioned earlier. Well, that form of capital now is diminished in terms of its relative value to these other forms of capital that actually exist in the management literature.
There's really four of them. Financial capital is one social capital, which we discovered that you can be. You can measure this in a very robust, scientifically way. Uh, also in a way that's very simple and stable and usable in business around only three sorts of variables, which is trust, social cohesion within a community, and the capacity of that community to work collectively towards a common good. That's essentially the, the thumbnail way in which we measure social capital as a metric.
There's another form of people capital which is called human capital, which is expressed at an individual level in terms of wellbeing in the workplace. But the way in which you go about measuring that is, is very different than the way you'd measure social capital. And it's really designed to identify within a corporate cultural context, which could be different in every company.
So you get some slightly different results. What are the true drivers of wellbeing in the workforce? So,uh, if all of you out there are working for a particular company, there are things that you value above anything else. And knowing what those things that you value, knowing what those things are, it gives you a real window into what sort of intervention as a company that you could do to grow the human capital.
And when you grow the human capital, you get three things that are really connected to the performance of the company. So you get talent attraction, and you know, most companies are in a war for talent right now. There's just not enough talent that is matching the jobs being created in the knowledge economy.
The second thing is talent retention. Most companies know that it's the best and the brightest, the ones that are most talented that will leave first if they're not having their purpose met in a company and they cost the most as well to a company. So getting more talent, attraction, more talent retention that has huge potential payoffs to your performance.
The third is really about optimizing performance because people whose individual purpose or vocation, if you want to use a, another way to describe individual purpose, if that's being fulfilled within the corporate purpose, which is also being aligned with the purpose of business, then you really have a more seamless life for individuals, and they're going to want to stay attached to that corporation to, to do that. So we measure human capital, social capital, natural capital, which is really about natural resources, but on the inputs. So we have a small number of universal metrics that together account for the vast amount of natural resources that go into the manufacturer of anything from a, from a Mars bar, to a bag of rice, to an automobile, actually they're the same sort of core metrics.
And if you start to utilize non-financial forms of a value, these, these non-financial forms of capital human, social, and natural capital, you find also that there's this strong correlation between how much you grow those forms of capital and how much economic performance is released in a business activity.
So they're all interconnected in a very deep manner, but businesses ignore that. They ignore the value of human, social, and natural capital because they think it's too fuzzy and they don't realize there's this connection with value creation that also pays off in terms of financial value. So we measure, we try to measure the right things and we try to focus on these four building blocks, human capital, socialcapital. Those are the two people parts of the people pillar, a natural capital, which is that land piece, that environmental piece and financial capital, which is about liquidity in the system.
Lee: You all are also trying to develop different sorts of accounting practices, even to take account ofthese things. But what does that look like or mean?
Jay: We are. And for those of you are familiar with, uh, with business and business accounting, uh, you know, there's something called the management accounts P and L the profit and loss statement, which is really, um, almost a filter for the purpose of the company. So if it's, it's a purely financial P and L statement, which virtually all PNL statements are. You've got your, your line and your P and L that's, that's tracking your, your profitability.
And you've got your purpose of the company that kind of goes through that filter. And if it's only financial outcomes that you're looking for to maximize your return for shareholders, then you're driving your managers with incentives to just deliver more and more profit, even if it's directly diametrically, opposed to what you say the purpose of the company is.
Now, because we know how to measure human, social, and natural capital in simple, stable, and robust ways now, and businesses always in any business activity you create, or you destroy human, social, and natural capital.
So let's say you've got a coffee business, uh, and, and it's vertically integrated, meaning that you, you actually have a plantation as well, that you, that you own where you grow coffee. Well, this coffee plantation has to be close to a water source. So the company will extract water periodically from the river.
It'll wash the drying cocoa bean or coffee beans that are on the shore to wash out all of that acidity. That's in that, in those beans, the water then becomes very polluted because it's very acidic. And then what happens? You dump it right back into the river. Well, now you've become a polluter of the river.
You've become a net user of natural capital. We know that natural capital actually has a relationship, towhether you're going to be more or less profitable, but you don't see any of that in your P and L because it's purely financial. So natural capital assets, we actually drew a drag on your P and L that you don't see.
Also when you're polluting the environment, you may also drive the social capital down the trust of the community.
That's using the water that you're polluting towards the company. And when that social capital goes down, that also acts as a drag, but also has an opportunity to maybe create a business management practice that grows the social capital that becomes a net, uh, not just a net user of natural capital, but maybe a net supplier of natural capital by maybe cleaning that water before you put it in, there could be significant value for that.
And then human capital is the same. If people are having poor, uh, lesser wellbeing as a result of what's happening with this business activity, this is also going to drag your financial... So what we're doing is we're creating through a hypothetical cost of replacement formula. It's very, very simple actually. We're adding what we call a mutual profit line to the P and L that accounts for how much that business activity is creating or destroying human social or natural capital. So when some business activities, you might have the financial profit line up here, and then below it, you've got mutual profit.
And the distance between those two lines become a conversational topic for managers, as they start to see this greater transparency and this, these kinds of conversations that managers start to have about a more transparent P and L starts to change their behavior and they start to deliver, um, more investments and other types of management decisions to make sure that those lines are not too far apart.
If similarly, you may have a business activity where you're human and social capital that you're growing in that activity creates a mutual profit line that's higher than your financial profit line. So then you want to try to, to have to figure out what that means, and that might change some of your decision-making as well.
Lee: So that goes back to I've, I've heard, uh, environmental activists say that the way businesses has done profit and loss statements, don't show the full cost of really what they're producing. And, and I hear you saying there's some truth to that. Then in many cases, it might not in fact represent really what it's costing the community or the larger globe.
Jay: Right. And that's exactly why we're doing this to mutual profit is really, and we don't have a lot of data on this yet because we're just experimenting with it. But, uh, but our early, early returns are, are pretty exciting. And we think that, um, that this is, this is going to be a management practice, that all companies are eventually going to adopt creating a mutual P and L that truly gives you insights into the, the more holistic nature of the four forms of capital, which all have value and are interlinked interrelated with one another.
Lee: Are there, are there fairly accepted formulas for calculating that mutual profitable?
Jay: Not yet, we're working with our partners at Oxford university to help to develop this and to test it, to roll it out in national businesses. So we're doing that in some of the businesses at Mars. And I'll get back to you when we have results that we can utilize.
Lee: You're listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. We’re most grateful to have you joining us.
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This is our interview with Jay Jakub, formerly with the Mars Corporation and now with Economics of Mutuality, based in Geneva Switzerland. This interview was taped at Lipscomb University in conjunction with the Business as MIssion Conference, and our thanks to Rob Touchstone for the collaborative endeavor. You can learn more about the Business as Mission Conference by visiting BAM323.org.
Coming up, we'll hear more about a holistic approach to business, as well as some practical ways such principles might be applied.
Part two in just a moment.
HALFWAY POINT
Lee: Welcome back to Tokens and our interview with Jay Jakub.
So, I'm imagining, some colleagues who could, I'm imagining how they might respond. And I, and I hear one or two in my head being bothered by using the word 'capital' for your different buckets. So financial capital, human capital, social capital. And I can imagine that they would say one I, that they would appreciate the fact that you were pointing toward a multiplicity of concerns and taking seriously the biblical witness about the nature of what true flourishing looks like.
But I can imagine some of them saying, but to put all of that under the label of capital, ultimately commodifies everything so that you might be undercutting your own larger agenda by using that kind of language. What, what would you say to that?
Jay: Well, you know, language is important and that could certainly be true, but we didn't make it up. I mean, it came from the management literature.
So there are different forms of capital. If you look at the entomology of the word capital, it really comes from capital, which is heads, and it was heads of animals. Again, getting back to this notion that how do you create liquidity in the economy? So you can move animals from, from one place to another.
And eventually that became, that became currency. But I mean, I think, I think, um, there's a real challenge in working in this space and making sure that you create some standard way of communicating value and forms of value. So if you're going to embed this as a business model management innovation, that could be potentially transformational for the way businesses operate, not just one company, but all companies.
Then you've got to have a kind of more standardized way of communicating what it is that you're doing. So you have to settle for something. And I think capital's works for us now, but maybe, maybe not forever.
Lee: What sorts of mistakes along the way have you all made to this point?
Jay: Well, I'm glad you asked that question because, uh, you know, this is not complete by any means. And we have really learned by doing, and we've learned by making mistakes. And I guess a couple of mistakes that come to my mind is that when we first cracked the measurement challenge, which actually took us about five years, we were doing other things as well, but it took us the first five years of this program to really figure out with our academic partners.
Can you measure human, social, and natural capital, the way that you can manage, you can measure financial capital? And when we, when we cracked that piece, we, uh, we were talking to the president of the Mars Wrigley segment, the business segment, Mars had recently acquired Wrigley, the chewing gum company headquartered in Chicago, but it has a global presence.
And the president of, of that segment has been a great supporter of Economics Mutuality, need more grad van, somebody taller than me, and I'm quite tall. Uh, Martin said, okay, now it's time to test this out. Uh, I buy that, uh, what is your doing, theoretically, but I want to see this executed in a real business activity.
So he said, sure, where in the world can we, can we roll this out?
And he said, well, you know, uh, I've got one Wrigley factory in all of Africa. And it happens to sit in,uh, in east Africa, in Kenya, just outside of Nairobi. And I'd like you to go to east Africa and, uh, and try to start a route to market business for chewing gum using this new approach, these new, new metrics, these new management practices, and see if you can help us penetrate the African demographic, because we don't have a business model that actually works in Africa. So we went there and we, uh, we presented our findings to the general manager who was really inspired. And then he said, you know, this is great stuff, but you know, I have really ambitious financial targets I have to meet. If I don't meet them, I'm not gonna get my bonus. My people aren't gonna get their bonuses aswell.
So I want you to, uh, to work someplace, we're never going to work where we don't, where they, where we don't work, where you can't disrupt our business. And so as we're working, we do that. And they said, well, how about working in these huge slums that are the largest slums in all of Africa? They hold about 2.2, 2.5 million, absolutely impoverished people, no visible, natural capital, no visible financial capital, no visible human capital, a little bit of social capital, but not much else.
Right outside of Nairobi, Kenya adjacent to where the the Wrigley factory was. So I, I won't have time today to go into the details of how that business was set up and operated, but we actually set up asuccessful route to market business, using some really innovative practices, changing the metrics, the KPIs, the key performance indicators that managers have to deliver against to get their bonuses.
But in the course of this, of this work, in monitoring this program and helping the Wrigley business in east Africa start to take ownership of what was going on. We gradually stepped back and tracked the retained earnings and the sales, which are kind of the traditional KPIs for, for any business. Uh, but we also helped track the human and social capital because those were the KPIs that we wanted the managers to deliver. We wanted them to create interventions to grow more human and social capital. And then we would see what would happen to the business performance in this activity, right? So we started to see just tremendous scaling up of this program.
Also, we started to see a retained earnings that were twice that of the neighboring business it was working with all of the advantages that you would think of a profit maximizing business, wealthier consumers, better brand recognition, master distribution, better infrastructure, all those things that we didn't have working in the slum areas.
But then there was kind of urgent, emergency flare that was sent up by the by the business, the Wrigley business in east Africa at one point. And they said we were seeing a human and social capital drop. We're seeing our, our financials go down as well. Something is wrong. We think maybe it's corruption in the, uh, in the value chain somewhere inside this business.
And we said, okay, well, let's go in and let's do a diagnostic of what's going on. And what we discovered was that a new manager had come in on the business side of things and had decided to adopt an old technique that's more part of the traditional ways of doing business was to put sales targets on the micro distributors.
Now the micro distributors of this chewing gum, we scaled this program by just recruiting more and more micro distributors, but we didn't tell them how much Wrigley product to put in their basket, okay. So if they wanted to sell 10% of Wrigley products or 50%, and we're a hundred percent, that was purely up to them.
If you put sales targets on micro-distributors, in an area where people are barely living from day to day, they're just going to walk away from the program. And that's what we were, that's what we were seeing. So we thought, okay, we have to get rid of these sales targets because that is a business, uh, management practice that does not work with the economics of mutuality.
So we threw that out. We then, uh, about a year later, we had another downward spike after things had returned to normal and to the upward trajectory. And this time we didn't, we didn't go and waste a lot of time trying to figure out if there's corruption in the system. We actually went right to the, right to the managers and said, okay, did you introduce anything that was, that was new here, uh, that maybe be that is more traditional and sure enough, there was another management practice that was, uh, put forth that also was causing the, the disruption in the activity.
So, and then there were partners that we, that we partnered with, uh, in some of these businesses that just turned out not to be the right partners. So we had to go through some disruptions to, to deal with that. So there were bumps in the road all the way, but we kept learning and learning and learning, uh, and, and gradually we, uh, we automated more of the data collection and it just became something that's now scaling up globally for
Lee: So what are some of the measurements of things that indicated the flourishing of that approach in that given case?
Jay: Well, I started in, but I started to mention that before, you know, for social capital, it was really the trust social cohesiveness and the capacity to work collectively. We also found that, um, that not working with master distributors, they're working with local micro distributors that were recruited from the people that actually lived in these communities that were trusted, that had the social capital of, of the little retailers in the, in the places, that that was actually something that we really wanted to leverage.
And we found that, that as we grew, that, that social capital, we drew that trust among the value chain partners, that we really saw the performance takeoff. And human capital was the other really big capital that we focused on was really trying to identify, you know, what are the drivers of wellbeing of each of the stakeholders within that value chain of this route to market for delivering chewing gum from Wrigley factory to the kiosks that would then sell it.
Once we learned what those were, we were able to create interventions to help grow the things that were important to those people increase their individual sense of wellbeing, make them feel more connected, make their lives feel more seamless from what they believed with what they actually did. And actually we, even, again, this is a secular business that I'm talking about, and yet one of the key partners that one of the key stakeholders that we recruited was a megachurch, uh, that was called Mavuno. That was right outside of the slum areas. And they came to us one day when I shared with the pastor who happened to be a friend, uh, what we were doing in these, in these slum areas.
And he said, you know, we have thousands of parishioners that live in these slum areas. And many of them are unemployed and they're young entrepreneurial, uh, energetic, Kenyans, men and women. And how about if we, uh, partnered with Wrigley there on the ground in this and that we became a pipeline for talent so that you could scale up your program faster.
And in exchange, we would commit to have our people mentor those young men and women to keep them on the straight and narrow path. And so there you had, uh, secular company agreeing to partner with a church in that place. And it worked and it worked for many years and they may still be a partner. I'm not sure anymore, but that was, was remarkable, I thought.
Lee: Yeah, I’m mindful of a metaphor that gets used a lot of times in theology in which the, a lot of times, the way people will talk about faith informed ethics is they'll describe it in a way, which it sounds like it's kind of cutting against the grain of the universe. That if you're going to be truly Christian, truly Jewish, truly Muslim, that you're having to push against really what is going to, seems to be pragmatic and helpful. But you're describing something. And then there are others who say, no, actually, what we're doing at our best is describing practices that go with the grain of the universe.
And I hear you doing that is you're saying there's true goods all the way around for all of us, if we'll take a different set of considerations into play, is that fair?
Jay: I'm glad you, I'm glad you mentioned that because it reminds me of the fact that as a believer, I believe that there's a natural order to everything, including a natural order for the economy.
And so the natural order for the economy, as I understand it is that financial capital is important, but it's at the bottom of the hierarchy. Okay. That, that financial capital is there to support the economy, which through business supports the planet. And ultimately it's people at the top.
And as a believer, I believe that the only thing that is above people is, is God himself, okay? I believethat's the natural order of things. Well, the 50 years of Milton Friedman has actually inverted this natural order.
It's turned it on his head because now I think it's safe to argue that people have found their way to the bottom of the order of hierarchy and importance in the current system.
And the planet is just above people. And people in planet are there to support the economy, which through business supports what? It supports finance, which supports what? It supports itself. So you're really, you've inverted this, this situation and you've gotten mammon at the very top the pyramid with the crown.
Uh, and that's not right, and it's not sustainable. That is not truth. And it's going to collapse. And I think COVID is helping to accelerate that. I think Economics of Mutuality is there in part to help restore that natural order of things and put financial prosperity where it belongs, which is there to support the economy, which the business supports the planet and his people.
Lee: We've got number of great questions here from those here in the audience. So let's try to work through them.
Jay: Hope I don't disappoint.
Lee: Let’s work through a number of these fairly quickly. Um, how long does the Economics of Mutuality model take to have significant effects?
Jay: That's a great question because some of that has to do with how much a client, so a business unit, is willing to take on. Because, if you're a HR part of an organization, maybe you decide that, the Gallup Q 12 survey of engagement that a, the Gallup organization does once a year for your company to give you an engagement score based on 12 questions.
Maybe that's not enough to give you any insights into what are the true drivers of wellbeing in the workplace. Okay? So maybe they would want to, uh, adopt just the natural colors. It's just a human capital aspect of what it is we're doing. What we would really like to do is to do the soup to nuts version of all of this.
it's difficult to put up, to put an exact number on it because every time you work in a new sector of the economy with a new type of company, there's new lessons to be learned that are contextual, that you have to adapt model to. I find that that if you were going to, um, to approach this with a purpose piece, and then an ecosystem mapping of the stakeholders around that purpose and orchestrating of, uh, interventions to grow the forms of capital to help solve pain points that we surface through that process.
And then kind of codifying this in a mutual P and L you could probably do this in about six to nine months, but again, it just depends because it also depends on how many resources that we would have available. Our unit is fairly small. You know, we're an organization of about maybe 20 some people. So we have limited capacity to work with everybody really intensively.
Also the business units have to decide how much resources they want to commit to a, to doing this because, you know, we can come in with all the, all the right ideas and so forth. But if we don't get the full cooperation of the right people to collaborate with, and for the business units we're working with to actually take ownership, uh, over the work that we do collaboratively together, it takes longer and longer.
So again, the, the rule of thumb maybe would be six to nine months, but, you know, it could take longer or lesser time depending on what you're…
Lee: Yeah, six to nine months, though, seems to be rather encouraging to consider that as a possibility.
Jay: Yeah. I'm sure that some of my colleagues were really involved in the, in the really practical aspects of the rollout. They'll probably pull their hair out or mind if they, if they hear that I said that, but, uh.
Lee: Here's a two-part question. How does a company invest in human capital and how does an individual invest in their own human capital?
Jay: Those are two, two great questions. Maybe I'll take the second one first. Cause the first one is a little easier to answer.
But on the individual human capital. I think this gets to this vocation piece and it's a piece that we're really starting to work with some partners on now, because you know, we've spent a lot of time working on the purpose of a corporation and how do you implement purpose as strategy?
But what we've just started to work on now is that how can you really engage individual employees of a company, uh, at every level, in a discussion about who they are. And what they're there to do in life. Okay? And most people will get very intimidated, intimidated when engaged on the concept of vocation or purpose.
And I'm using those kind of interchangeably intentionally because they realize if I think too big about what my purpose in life is, it's going to be something that'll disappoint because I can't possibly deliver it. So they tend to start to narrow their focus down to what can I deliver sort of in the next quarter or in the next two quarters, for example.
And that really removes your ability to think big. I've got a great friend named Steve Garber who is a real, uh, expert and author on the com on the concept of, of individual location. And he's working with us on this as well. He's written the book, great book called Visions of Vocation. And Steve came up with a concept that I love, which is called proximate justice. And proximate justice for him is really about freeing yourself to realize that you don't have to seek perfection.
You just have to really reach for what you really believe you're meant to be here for even if it seems unrealistic. But, as you progress in delivering pieces of that, that you need to get close to, you need to get proud. You need to get comfortable with the idea of, of being proximate to be adjacent to that, but you don't have to actually achieve all of that.
One of the stories that he loves to tell is about a company called Wedgewood that makes, uh, it's in the UK, it's in the midlands, I think Yorkshire, and it makes these kind of, uh, blue China plates that are decorative and, uh, and quite expensive. And back in the 18th century, you may remember that there was a, the William Wilberforce story of, uh, parliamentarians that’s led by Wilberforce, trying to figure out how they could convince, um, the, the British parliament to outlaw slavery in the British empire.
And they wound up engaging the Wedgewood company and its leaders and its owners in this discussion about what can we do together to abolish slavery in the British empire? The British empire was, you know, uh, the biggest empire in the world, the most dominant in the world. Now that's a pretty daunting kind of vocation to take on, but they actually decided to get engaged in that.
And one of the things that, which it produced was this beautiful plate that has a black slave in chains on it. And it said, uh, am I not a man and a brother? And so what they did was they, they manufactured this plate and they sold this plate and really used this as a way to start to raise awareness about the evils of slavery.
And, you know, it took 40 years of efforts by, by Wedgewood and by Wilberforce and others to outlaw slavery in the British empire, but they played a role in that. Okay. Maybe an approximate way, but they did that and every employee in the company that was part of the manufacturing of these plates that helped raise awareness and eventually turn public opinion against slavery.
You know, they played a much bigger role. So really addressing that issue of individual vocation and creating a seamlessness between what you do on Saturday and Sunday and on the evenings and what you do for five days a week. That's what this is all about.
Lee: So, so you're making space for companies to actually ask those kinds of questions of employees and then help their desire to contribute to the world or their sense of vocation in the world to contribute to the actual business venture itself.
Jay: Absolutely. I mean, because I don't think that they need be divorced from one another. And this is a kind of a market you can think of yourself, vocationally and your work, and it can become almost like a marketplace ministry for you as, as a believer or, or not.
It can be something else for you. I think the other part of the question was how do you invest in, in human capital? And what I say is that, you decide to actually collect the data and analyze the data in such a way that you can determine with a high level of confidence. And we think we can do that, with our clients of what the true drivers of wellbeing are within a particular organization.
I'll give you an example at Mars. You know, Mars, many, many people may think that that a true driver of individual wellbeing in a workplace is how much money you make. Okay, so wage disparity. Well, of the top five variables that account for, you know, in order what's most important to a Martian, you know, Mars, a Mars associate is what they're called. Wage disparity isn't even on there in the top five. The number one driver of wellbeing among the Mars workforce, we determined through our methodology of identifying what human capital is there, was do managers walk the talk of the values they espouse. And that's a really important insight to have.
And I think prospect of upward mobility was number two. So that was about how much responsibility that you could take on, how much independence as a manager, as you, as you grow into that job. So knowing those things, investing in that knowledge and acquiring that knowledge will then give your HR people, the insights they need to create interventions to address the things that really matter to that particular workforce within the culture of that company.
Lee: Yeah, fascinating. Can you describe the way, someone asked, can you describe the way an established company can measure social capital and what are the outcomes you were looking for in that regard?
Jay: Yeah. I mean, uh, I guess the best way to answer this question because I can't, I can't really divulge exact all the questions that are on our, uh, our survey instrument, uh, which was, uh, you know, is part of the IP of the company. But basically when we looked at social capital, uh, it was really the most intimidating of all the forms of capital in terms of being able to get our arms around it.
And I say that because we discovered that their social capital had been around for a very long time as a concept. And as we dug into it, we found that there were between 60 and 80 variables that together accounted for, or described, what social capital space could look.
Well, this is a nightmarish number of variables that create an impossible amount of complexity for a company, because let's say you were able to look at only eight to 12 of those variables to measure social capital in one part of the world or one market situation.
And then there were another eight to 12 variables that were different from those eight to 12. If you were going to measure social capital somewhere else.
Business would just say, forget it. We can't, we can't work with that. Well, we discovered something that was a universal truth about social, about social capital, which again, as a believer, it doesn't surprise me, but it may surprise others.
Everywhere we tested social capital when we were exploring this among impoverished coffee farmers in Papua New Guinea, among impoverished cocoa farmers in west Africa, among distributors of, uh, of, uh, chewing gum in, uh, in Vietnam and multiple other market situations. We always found that there were only three of those 60 to 80 variables, three.
They were always the same, that together accounted for about 80% of what any social capital space looked like. The ones that I've been mentioning, trust, social cohesiveness, the capacity to work collectively. These three things made it very easy to measure social capital. And we created a survey instrument and actually we built it, built the survey instrument on the back of something that the world bank created to try to measure social capital back in 1999 and then never used.
And we took this and we brought in anthropologists and sociologists to help us calibrate that survey instrument. So we tested it pretty extensively, gradually it became easier and easier to deploy. And there's basically a series of questions that give you a really good insight into what the social, what level of social capital you have in a, in a community.
Lee: Fascinating. Last question here. On August 19th, 2019, 181 of 188 CEOs on the business round table voted to change their charter from stockholder primacy to stakeholder primacy. So do you believe business is changing? Do you see U.S. firms being slower to change than European and Asian firms?
Jay: Stakeholder capitalism is definitely something that is helping to change the outlook of corporate leaders.
They're very well aligned, many of them now, around this concept of stakeholder capitalism and delivering more purpose and not just profit, but they're aligned around the why you need to do that.
What they're not aligned around at all is how you do it. Okay. So we've been focusing almost exclusively since we started. We started with the why question, but really we've got more than a decade worth of experience in deploying the, uh, the model itself in real businesses and developing, uh, uh, real data upon which we can demonstrate that this is a true superior form of value creation. And that is the how question and, you know, the business round table, you know, we'd love to do some work with them.
Um, Jamie diamond from JP Morgan was the chairman of it. Uh, Larry Fink, who I don't know is, uh, this is the guy who runs BlackRock, which has about 11 trillion with a T, uh, of dollars under, uh, under management. So it's a huge investment, one of the largest in the world. You know, both Larry and JP Morgan's, uh, uh, JP Morgan CEO, Jamie diamond, they were leaders in 2019 and August, 2019.
And coming out with very public statements, got a huge amount of press attention that really stakeholder capitalism and purpose is what needs to have privacy. But what has happened since then, I think, some of their shareholders are even asking that question and they're not getting answers yet. So I think we really need to accelerate the, uh, the how, and, you know, maybe what we're doing, isn't the only way.
And certainly we're on a journey. So we need the right partners and we're learning every time we go, but we've got a lot of insights on the how. It's time to get on with it because people are tired of hearing about why we need to do it. They agree it needs to be done.
Lee: Thank you. This is a remarkable and fascinating it's, it's a, it's a delight to get, to have a conversation with somebody that feels like they're, they're on the cutting edge of the change of a, of a discipline. And so we're grateful for your work.
We've been talking to Jay Jakub, currently the chief advocacy officer for the Economics of Mutuality independent organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. Thank you so much, Jay Jakub.
Lee Camp: You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life.
This interview was taped at Lipscomb University in conjunction with the Business as Mission Conference Special thanks to Rob Touchstone. You can learn more about the Business as Mission Conference by visiting BAM323.org.
If you would like to hear more about alternative ways of doing business that take into account the personal and the ethical, then check out our recent episode with Ben Cohen, who happens to be theBen in Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream. And if you'd like to hear more about the wholistic concerns raised by Dr. Jakub, especially as it relates to care for our planet, then check out the episodes with Chris Doran, Katharine Hayhoe, and Peter Harris.
Remember you can subscribe to our podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Castbox, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.
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Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this podcast possible. Executive producer and manager, Christie Bragg of Bragg Management. Co-producer Jacob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios. Associate producers Ashley Bayne, Tom Anderson, and Brad Perry. Engineer Cariad Harmon. Music beds by Zach and Maggie White and Blue Dot Sessions.
Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
The Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.
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