Blog Post: Emily Van Mourick

Corporate success may be the means to social
responsibility, not the sacrifice for.

One of the biggest struggles young people emerging
into the business world face is the difficulty of
finding a balance between maintaining financially
successful careers while keeping a socially
responsible lifestyle. Somehow in the last few
decades, students in business schools and in the MBA’s
that our nation’s CEO’s, they have been trained that
the object of their business is growth, as if that
were an end. It’s not an end; it’s a means. If we can
get the end back, the quality of life, then we have to
look at the contradictions, because the wrong kind of
growth reduces our quality of life.
Americans are wasting their time working and
spending. The average American goes shopping one way
or another five times a week. During the day we spend
most of our time working to make money so that we can
shop. There’s a growing weariness of having to hold up
the global economy, of having to sort of keep up with
the Jones’. While everything is getting bigger: our
houses, our vehicles, our waste-lines: we’re running
out of time. We have less of the things we care about.

People here are so insolated by our astonishing
concentration of wealth. Americans spend more money
maintaining our lawns than India collects in federal
tax revenue. Our defense budget, which is a trivial
percentage of GDP, is larger than the entire economy
of Australia. So obsessed by our own wealth, we forget
how the majority of the world lives and how the
majority of the world looks.
Too many entrepreneurs today believe that the choice
is between money and growth or social responsibility
and changing the world they live in. The fact is that
it doesn’t have to be an “either or” decision. True
success exists in realizing that the two are not
separate from each other, but rather, very dependant
upon on another. No true success can be accomplished
at the expense of sacrificing socially responsibility.
Acknowledging that the ability to create change
through the means available through corporate success
is what truly creates complete lifelong success, is
what separates those wandering and searching for a
higher calling from those who have empowered their
business success into a life filled with the purpose
of improving the quality of life for everyone.

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