In the early 2000’s I started my career as an environmentally conscious designer, full of excitement for the opportunity to help solve real world problems. I dreamed of a utopian future where a fair and peaceful society lives in harmony with nature. It might sound naive now, but the idealism of youth is somehow quite beautiful. There is hope in naivety, and it is hope that drives us forward.
Back then I was like many environmentalists in being highly critical of businesses that exploit people and our natural world in the pursuit of financial profit. However, as someone with an entrepreneurial spirit, my perspective on business seemed at odds with many others in the environmental world. I did not believe that business was fundamentally bad. It is, after all, just a means by which humans create and exchange value with each other. Surely that cannot be a bad. It seemed to me that the problem must not be the concept of business itself, but the way in which we were doing business.
The solution, I hypothesised, was “sustainable business“, or business that respects both humans and the natural world. If we could change the way that businesses operated for the better, then we we could transform not just the world of business but society itself. Business could cease to be the problem and become a driver of positive change. The problem was that back then, I struggled to find many examples of businesses that proved my hypothesis and perhaps more importantly, businesses that I myself would actually want to spend my life working for.
It seemed like there was only one option… to start my own business.
Lucky for me, my then fiancee (now wife) Vineeta was equally mad. She agreed that the sensible thing to do would be to start our own business and use it as a model to prove that a business can be socially and environmentally responsible. More specifically, to prove that “sustainable business” is not an oxymoron.
So in 2007, without any real business experience, we went online to register a company and set out to prove that we knew a better way of doing business. That business, the digital agency Wholegrain Digital, surprised almost everyone we know (including ourselves) and actually did pretty well. It became renowned not just for its quality of work and customer service but for its environmentally friendly business practices and pioneering work in digital sustainability. Mission accomplished!
I think to many people on the outside, we’ve proved our point. We’ve shown that business can be environmentally and socially responsible as a well as financially profitable. And yet, the truth is that I still don’t fully believe it myself.
As we pass the 15th anniversary of the business and I approach my 40th birthday, I look at the world around me and I feel like I know less than when we started. Far from having proved that sustainable business can change the world, I feel as unsure as ever whether it is possible at all. I guess that naive young me from 20 years ago thought that we would have solved the big problems by now. Instead, we have an increasingly urgent environmental crisis and record inequality. Far from solving the problems, businesses seem to have just kicked the can down the road to 2030 and beyond.
And so I’m going back to the drawing board on a journey to find out whether sustainable business is in fact an oxymoron. I invite you to join me on this journey as I dive into this topic, with an optimistic heart and a critical eye, to try to get to the bottom of it once and for all.
Is sustainable business an oxymoron?
I love the honesty and reflection in this statement: "As we pass the 15th anniversary of the business and I approach my 40th birthday, I look at the world around me and I feel like I know less than when we started." For what it's worth, Tom, I feel the same way about so much approaching the 31st anniversary of our B Corp.
Awesome, Tom! Excited to see where you take this discussion. Looking forward to following along.