Forces for Good, Creating a better world through purpose-driven businesses, reviewed

By @SimonCocking, review of Forces for Good: Creating a better world through purpose-driven businesses. Available here.

There’s a new generation of businesses emerging. They’re working together to make a positive impact on the world by redefining what it means to be successful.

By changing the way you work and considering the impact of the decisions you make, you can join them in reducing poverty, injustice and environmental damage by balancing purpose with profit. In this ground-breaking book, you will discover how these purpose-driven businesses work and how you can:

Increase productivity by fully embracing diversity and developing an inclusive culture. Put respect, courtesy and compassion at the heart of your business.
Maximise profits whilst prioritising the needs of people and the planet.
Attract an engaged and motivated workforce that’s focused on success and sustainability. Join the growing global community of leaders and like-minded businesses that are putting what they do to work as a force for good.

This book is an honest appraisal of the ups and downs of running a business, with a willingness to be self critical, and to assess what the author and entrepreneur did well and not so well. He seems to have had the common experience of persisting with less than adequate staff for too long.  Suffering the consequences as they stole stock and sold it to third parties, confirming once more the need to hire well rather than hiring quickly.

Overall the author is very much on a quest to explore what it means to build and grow a purpose driven business. This is an interesting quest to read, though at times it can feel a little whistle stop in terms of the topics he discusses before quickly move onto other topics. That said these are important issues to raise, discuss and look for the best way to deal with these challenges. We enjoyed his honest and self reflective approach, with the recognition that the solutions are not always easy. He covers a lot of areas well, but we had imagined that there would perhaps be more on the area of sustainability as this seems like an integral part of purpose driven goals. It is touched on, but it might have been useful to dig into a little more detail in this area too, especially as he does cover the B-Corporation Movement. Which is where, hopefully all companies will start to gravitate, and in a more than mere greenwashing strategy too.

Hargreaves writes well, presents the issues in an engaging way and hopefully will continue his writings and journey along this path.

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