While there is much to celebrate in the rise of businesses that do good for people and/or the environment in Northeast Ohio and globally, we offer the following resolutions for the new year on how to prosper as a business in 2025, while making the world a better place. The goal is not to turn for-profit businesses into nonprofits or philanthropies. It’s to make them smarter by approaching social, health and environmental issues as opportunities to create additional value, rather than only as constraints that incur costs.
1. Rethink Your Purpose. Business as an Agent of World Benefit (BAWB) can become a powerful and inspiring purpose of economic activity. Involve your employees, customers, suppliers and local community members in developing such a greater purpose. Mobilizing “whole system” dialogues that invite all stakeholders to imagine a higher purpose for the business triggers “mirror flourishing,” where concentrating and connecting their strengths in the service of building better, high-purpose organizations, communities — or the world — they also begin to activate the mechanisms for their own and others’ flourishing inside the organization.
2. Focus on Strengths and Solutions that Inspire. Research into human behavior offers compelling evidence that people are more willing to change — and that the change is more enduring — when built on shared strengths rather than weaknesses, and on positive images of the future rather than negative triggers such as fear, threat or anxiety. Research demonstrates that engaging in a discovery of the practices and behaviors that have helped us succeed thus far will immediately increase engagement, trigger the nervous-system response that orients us toward learning and improvement, and foster new images of future possibilities.
3. Clarify the Desired Impact. To maintain the credibility and legitimacy of their sustainability initiatives, companies need to consider these possible impacts:
* The first is doing less harm, where the goal is to minimize negative social impacts and to reduce ecological footprints.
* The second is incremental positive impact.
* The third is system-wide positive impact, where scalable business innovations have the capacity to “move the needle” on complex challenges, such as climate change, the ethical use of artificial intelligence, pollution affecting human health, and reducing income inequality.
All three business-innovation types are needed. Doing less harm is important, but by itself is not, and cannot be, a solution to a sustainable flourishing future for all.
4. Pay More Attention to Well-Being:.Attending to your well-being and that of your employees through daily practices that increase a sense of connectedness to others and to the world around us is a necessary ingredient in the recipe for doing good to do well. Such “Practices of Connectedness” include meditation, walking in nature, art and aesthetics, gardening, appreciative inquiry, physical exercise and gratitude journaling, among countless others. Such practices quiet the analytic mind and expand a person’s consciousness so they’re more aware of how their actions impact others and the world around them.
Whether you are a business executive, manager, entrepreneur or change consultant, these four resolutions can lead to greater personal satisfaction and professional success in the year ahead.
Chris Laszlo is Professor of organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management.
Ronald Fry is Faculty Chair at Case Western Reserve University Weatherhead School of Management’s Fowler Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit.
