FOUR HATS - Work Smarter

Changing the world

"Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn." - Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate Technology It's a fair comment. Most businesses don't actually do a hell of a lot to make the world a better place. They're just not in that market. Businesses exist to make more money than they consume. If they're successful in that goal, they can provide for the workers that make up the business. Sometimes the distribution of the profits is rather too uneven, sometimes not. But ultimately, the vast majority of businesses aren't going to change the world through what they do. And it's not going to happen by accident.

My view is that if you want your work effort to be both profitable and beneficial to the wider community, you have to actively plan it in, as part of the way you do business.  Just like planning for your core business, you need to plan your philanthropic activities too.  FourHats is a new business, and I hope it becomes large and profitable.  But I also hope it finds the time and makes the effort to do some things that are worthwhile along the way.  The founders of the company feel this is an important part of what we’re trying to achieve, so we’re planning it in up-front.

Getting it planned

So, we’ve used the tried and tested approach we take to our business, to plan our community efforts too:  Core values and beliefs, Strategy, Tactical Action.

First we tried to identify some of our Core Values and Beliefs - the things that underpin what we want to achieve.  We came up with four guiding principles:

• A bit like Google’s famous (and now rather controversial) “Do no harm”, we decided that our first aim had to be to get our own house in order.  We don’t want to make things worse, so we’ll try to ensure that FourHats doesn’t leave a negative footprint on the world.
• Secondly, we wanted to be able to demonstrate true results from our endeavours - we didn’t like the idea of just dropping money into the coffers of large charities, and having no real proof that we’d actually achieved anything for our efforts.
• Thirdly, we wanted to invest in projects that were self-sustaining.  If we were going to donate, where possible we didn’t want just to solve a specific symptom - we wanted to try to fix the cause.
• Finally, we felt that whilst donations of cash are useful, and we hope to be in a position to donate cash, we’re also experts at some things (like websites!), and we wanted to be able to use our skill to the benefit of others - donating our time, but donating our time in the most efficient way possible, using our experience and doing what we do best.

I think these are good principles, and will be a useful test when it comes to defining what it is that we can do to help our communities.  Today, we haven’t got much further than this, really.  We’ve started to think about some practical approaches that we could take to bring these to life.  One of our first aims is to make FourHats carbon-neutral in terms of our transport.  We intend to raise money and donate it to projects that will at least cover the carbon dioxide that our business produces.  We’ve also started work on a project to help an exciting emerging charity to bring their website to life, as the central repository of their activities.  It’s a great project, and I think we’ve got the chance to both work with some exciting people, and achieve something quite special.  Finally, we’re researching the world of micro-credit, loans for the poorest people in the world.

I’m sure future blog posts will update you on how we’re getting on.  But what about you?  Are you doing anything exciting where you work?  Do you work for a company that plays a part in the local or wider community?  Are you sceptical that corporations are only putting something back because it’s a good corporate image to adopt?  Let us know what you think.

If you’re interested, read the Fortune interview with Bill Watkins.  It’s a lively article, and has plenty of other juicy quotes.