Liam Black
Liam Black is probably Britain’s leading social entrepreneur, a pioneer of the progressive approach to business that combines commercial nous with a sense of social purpose – the double-bottom line (the triple-bottom line adds sustainability to the mix). Having ignored the initial calling to be a priest, he’s arguably achieved more positive outcomes through business than he would have done as a member of the clergy. In the early ‘90s he helped lead, as CEO and then as Chair, the Furniture Resource Centre in Liverpool, recruiting the unemployed into work making second-hand furniture available to people on low incomes. From there, he joined Jamie Oliver to launch his Fifteen restaurants around the world. His most recent project is the creation of Wavelength with Adrian Simpson and Jess Stack, which connects and inspires corporates and social enterprises. He also mentors young social entrepreneurs, speaks at international events such as Skoll, is a prolific Twitter user (@LiamABlack) and blogs at Pioneer’s Post.
I’m particularly interested in understanding how the tools of conventional business, including marketing, can be used to create organisations dedicated to social change, rather than just ‘selling stuff’, and how existing companies can be encouraged and mobilised to consider the world beyond the bottom line in the way that they carry out their commercial activities.
Martin Williams: As one of the country’s leading social entrepreneurs, it goes without saying that you believe business can be a force for good. Doesn’t it?
Liam Black: Yes it does! The part of that field that I’ve ploughed for the last bazillion decades has been that there’s something very powerful about enterprise and business when applied to a problem that I’m interested in, whether that’s unemployed people in Liverpool or youngsters in London that need a start up, and I think that if you can get it right, the rigour that it brings [is valuable], because if someone doesn’t want to buy your furniture in Liverpool, or your very expensive food in Fifteen, or your leadership programmes that we run – if no one wants to buy them, then maybe you haven’t got anything worthwhile.
And also, in my experience with young people at Fifteen, and the long term unemployed guys [at FRC in Liverpool], if you’ve got a real business, doing real stuff, then the training you give will be real training and they are more likely to be employed by somebody else. So I’ve been a great believer in that, absolutely. And look around me - I’m wearing clothes, I’ve got shoes, I’ve got a phone, I’ve got an iPad, I’ve got a car, I’ve got a house, all of those sorts of things have been produced through businesses.
Martin: Am I right in thinking that social enterprise was looked down on a little bit by charities, originally?
Liam: Oh, yeah, and I was very looked down upon. [In the] late ‘80s early ‘90s, [we’d] come down from Liverpool to the City, go and see lots of foundations, tell them that we’d cure poverty in Liverpool for 20 grand, if they could only give it to us, in the days when 20 grand was a lot of money; [we’d] go away, spend the money, come back…. This is a dishonest way of making a living actually. [So we said] ‘Can we not make market-facing, viable enterprises, that would not only allow us to put furniture in the homes of very poor people and create jobs for long term unemployed Scousers and others, but in the doing of that make some profit and then be able to innovate and create new stuff? How about that?’
Now, I’m making it sound a lot more coherent than it was at the time, but that was the fundamental drive, and once we got cracking – and 1994 was when we launched that new 2.0 idea - I was literally booed at conferences. I’d go along to conferences and I’d say ‘This isn’t for everybody, but those who want to come down this route, I think it’s really powerful’, but I had people booing me, hissing me. I had someone throw a shoe at me once at a conference in the north east, and for a number of reasons, which is kind of germane to this conversation. One was, in order to be making a profit, you must be ripping someone off somewhere, because a ‘profit’ means you’re making more money than it costs to produce something, therefore you’re passing that price on to someone else, blah, blah, blah.
And also I went out of my way to provoke the sense of entitlement, and lack of innovation and sloppiness in a lot of thinking that there was in the voluntary sector at that time. I’m going to Skoll tomorrow and I’m going to OxfordJam, and it a) makes me feel very old, but b) also makes me feel like we have come some way. You’ll have a whole generation of twenty-, early-thirtysomethings for whom the idea that you can create a market-facing enterprise with a strong social purpose is just a given, rather than just a minority point of view that has to be defended against attacks from all over the place. So yeah, I have a great belief in it.
Martin: So what about marketing within that, marketing in business. Is that a positive thing?
Liam: Well, marketing is kind of a neutral thing, isn’t it? Take this glass. I could drink water out of it, I could give a glass of water to the homeless guy outside, or I could smash you in the face with it. It’s not the glass, it’s what use that’s put to. I feel the same way about marketing.
When we were doing the furniture business in Liverpool, or with Jamie at Fifteen, we had to communicate to potential customers what it was we had, and make them want it, and we did that really, really effectively. And we didn’t lie about our products, but I think lots of people do. We didn’t create demand where there wasn’t any demand. I think that helping young people is a good thing to do, and getting unemployed Scousers out of jail and off the streets is a good thing to do, and I think we were actually very good at marketing that.
The interesting bit was, and I remember having these [discussions] at FRC in the early days: to what extent, in our marketing, should we include that we were a social enterprise? How important was it to our customers we were a B2B [Business to Business] company – housing associations, local authorities, private landlords we sold lots and lots of furniture to. What should we turn the dial up on? In the beginning it was ‘Hey look at us! We’re helping the poor! Buy our furniture!’ And as soon as people heard the ‘We’re helping the poor’ they thought ‘Charity, amateur, not interested’ – so in the end, we would dial that right down, and the messages we went with were quality, price, service – ‘Oh and by the way, in using us, we also help lots of unemployed people and we’re a social enterprise’. So that’s the way we went with it. Would it be a bit different today? Probably not, but certainly, I think in those days, it would have just confused people. Mention anything other than price, quality and service, and you’re into a conversation that takes you away from the sale, and who wants that?
So I think a lot of social enterprises sit with that issue of how to balance, in the marketing and in the messaging, the product and the service, and the purpose behind the marketing of that product and service, and I think that will be a conundrum forever. I think it’s marginally less difficult than it was twenty years ago when we were doing this. Take Divine Chocolate – their Fairtrade-ness is all over it, but they’re still a niche player. The fact that it helps farmers in Ghana is not going to get them from a £10 million business to a £100 million business, it’s going to be the price and the quality.
Martin: So the benefits of the product are the cake, and the way that it’s delivered is the icing? Or not? Maybe layers?
Liam: Yes, it’s a layer cake. In a business that has as its primary purpose a social change agenda, if we’re going with the cake metaphor, it needs to be baked in. If it’s just icing, then I think that is a problem – yes, it’s in there, but when you’re talking to potential customers about buying the cake, emphasising the quality of the eggs, the flour, and then talking about this extra ingredient that’s in there would be the order in which I would do it. I don’t think people buy ‘purpose’. In a charity they might - you know, here’s ten quid because I want you to help starving children in Africa or dying kids in the UK – but if it’s a genuine social enterprise that is trying to sell you something, then the quality of the product is what you’re interested in. Purpose might get you into the conversation, but what will keep you there is the quality of the product. You’ve got to have an authentic product, and then I think the purpose, in some cases, will help.
Martin: Yes, because when I first heard you speak, I remember you talking about Michael Porter and this idea of ‘shared value’ and he says that social enterprise can’t only be for social benefit, it must be a source of competitive advantage, so do you think companies who have a social purpose have a competitive advantage that others don’t?
Liam: I think that’s unproven, I would say. [At a recent Wavelength event we had a speaker] from Lifebuoy talking about their alignment between selling more soap, getting more kids to wash their hands, fewer children die of diarrhoea, and Lifebuoy sell it by the truckload and kick P&G and all their competitors in the nuts. Fantastic! But if you back out and look at the big picture with Unilever, and Procter & Gamble to a certain extent, Danone, those sorts of companies, I think it’s unproven that a shared value agenda is a competitive advantage.
I think there are many of us who want it to be, that really, really hope that it could be, and at an intellectual level, all things being equal, will I pick Product A or Product B, when price and quality are the same, knowing that Product B will have this social [or] environmental impact? Intellectually, yes, but I don’t think there are enough examples yet in the world [where we can see] that, in a mainstream economy, that’s true. What’s encouraging is that, in a way that didn’t exist certainly 10 years ago, and maybe even 5 years ago, is that there is enough of a shared narrative and vocabulary to be having these conversations with the likes of Michael Porter and some of the major companies in the world. That’s a big step forward. But, you know - Paul Polman is three loss-making quarters away from death and sacking all the time, isn’t he? So I feel a bit about it like I felt about social enterprise 20 years ago - there is a phase with any social change thing where you have a choice whether you believe it or not. And we chose, in the early ‘90s, to say ‘Right, we believe in this, we believe it is possible to run a genuine double-bottom company, and so we’re going to ignore everyone and we’re just going to plough on and do it’, and look at us now – there’s all sorts of stuff going on in the world which, at that point, we would never have had any idea would happen, and I’m sitting now on a social investment fund that’s worth £30 million.
So I think there’s a bit of faith in it still, and a bit of wanting it to be true, but I think that in a lot of social change moments, that’s what you need. You need lots of people to believe it’s true, and if enough of us believe it’s true and demonstrate in the ways that are open to us, that a social purpose at the heart of enterprise can be a competitive advantage, well guess what - it will become that. But I think we’re very much at a few early adopters, [there’s] not enough shared narrative about it, but hopefully we’ll get there. But at the moment, I think it would be just not true to say that having a social purpose and being able to demonstrate shared value is a competitive advantage. I don’t think we’re there yet.
Martin: Yes, Tim Smit of the Eden Project talks about Tinkerbell theory – if you believe in it, it exists.
Liam: Yeah, I’m a great believer in the Tinkerbell thesis. These are all clichés now, aren’t they? But they’re clichés because they’re true. Nobody would set out to create a business, or do anything, unless you had a kind of stupid belief that it was going to happen. And, again, a terrible cliché, but was it Henry Ford [who said] ‘Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right’? I think there’s a huge amount of truth in that. If you believe it’s not going to happen, it probably won’t. If you believe it can, it still might not, but you’ve got a much better chance of it happening, and also – and Tim is a good example, isn’t he – that Tinkerbell theory compels lots and lots of people to also believe it and get behind that agenda, making it more likely that it will happen.
And the other answer to that is: talk about fucking Tinkerbell theories – what was the theory that the bankers have had? That is the biggest Tinkerbell theory – ‘I know, let’s create products that none of us understand, keep passing them on to another financial institution who probably won’t ask any questions and that will be alright, won’t it?’ Well – bollocks! That was an example of Tinkerbell theory based on greed and corruption. I have this row all the time with bankers and financial services people. Don’t tell me I live in a make believe world when I foresee a world in which the way we create wealth is about equality, because you have demonstrated your own fatuous fantasy world and look where that got us.
Martin: So it’s the sort of ‘Evil Fairy’? Maleficent rather than Tinkerbell?
Liam: Absolutely, we’re with the Good Fairy!
Jamie Oliver (Image: Scandic Hotels/Wikipedia)
Martin: So let’s talk a bit about Fifteen. We’ve talked about the great food, but also providing the training for disadvantaged young people. How much is it about the great food?
Liam: It’s completely about the great food. If we had a bad review, income fell through the floor. Our life, certainly for all the foodies in the company, was governed by what Jay Rayner and Fay Maschler said, and if they said ‘Oh it’s a good cause, but the food is crap’, or even ‘mediocre’, it wouldn’t happen. We had one really bad review – we’d had a really bad night, and we were right to get a caning – and people cancelled their bookings. People were spending £100 a head, and these aren’t just City boys who don’t think about it, these are ordinary people who are saving up for their 40th wedding anniversary or their ‘I’m going to ask her to marry me there’, and they’re just not going to go. So I think it was all about that. What we tried to avoid all the time, to take a phrase of [Big Issue founder] John Bird’s was ‘We didn’t want to be a pity purchase’ because you only pity purchase once, don’t you? So we wanted to be about absolutely fantastic food, fantastic experience, ‘Oh, and by the way, your pasta was made by a [disadvantaged] youngster’. So that phrase of [founder of The Body Shop] Anita Roddick’s, ‘Product with a purpose’ - it’s got to be that way round, it can’t be ‘Purpose with a product’.
Martin: Though it’s quite interesting that a lot of the publicity that Fifteen got early on was around the TV documentary, and there wouldn’t have been a documentary without the purpose, because that was the story - for the TV company it was a people story, wasn’t it? So it was helpful in getting the publicity.
Liam: Oh absolutely. Totally. But it was a real double-edged sword - Jamie’s celebrity. It was a double-edged sword in many ways. If you didn’t like Jamie Oliver, and lots of people don’t, ‘Well fuck it, I’m not going to put money in his pocket by going to that restaurant’ [even though that’s not the case at Fifteen]. Also people came with the highest expectations about how brilliant it was going to be, so even if it was really, really good, for some people it couldn’t have been good enough. There are lots of restaurants in the world that take on disadvantaged young people. Why does everyone know about Fifteen? Because of Jamie’s celebrity, and good on him. But he [understood], right from the beginning, that it’s got to be about the quality of the product, driven by a purpose, but it can’t be a purpose with a product limping along behind, because it just won’t become a successful business.
Martin: That’s really interesting, because in marketing terms, I’ve always thought, it’s got to start with the product. Yes, the purpose is very important, of course, and as you say, it’s baked in. But there was a publicity benefit from that.
Liam: Yes. I remember a call from the office that there were some women in having lunch and they were saying ‘This food has been cooked by young people.’ ‘Yes’, [we said], ‘they’re in the kitchen, it might not all have been cooked by young people, but they’re part of the brigade and once they get close to graduation, they will be running the kitchen, yes’. ‘And these young people come from prison, and a lot of them are taking drugs?’ [they asked]. ‘Well, some of them have, some of them haven’t – but in most restaurants there are people who have taken drugs.’ ‘So how do I know they haven’t got AIDS and they’re not taking drugs in the kitchen now?’ ‘Well, I don’t know where to start with that level of ignorance but….’ There was all of that. So it’s a much more complicated proposition and interaction with customers than simply ‘Isn’t it fantastic that there are young people here, eat up your pasta’. It was a much more complex interaction.
I used to talk about this sort of balancing act between the commercial reality and the social purpose, but if the product is so far ahead of the purpose…. So in a restaurant situation, you’ve got great food but the young people are getting a really poor experience, that doesn’t work. If the purpose is way ahead of the product, and you have a fantastic training programme, for young people, and they’re having counselling and feeling great about themselves, but actually what they’re producing is mediocre, that doesn’t work either because they’re not going to be employable as chefs elsewhere, and I think the challenge for leadership in all businesses, but certainly social businesses, is making sure that gap is not too big and not too narrow, so that you have a profitable company which enables this [the social purpose] to really work. But you’re not trying to get to an equal balancing of them, I don’t think - you’re trying to get to a really good product with this purpose pushing it; but the product has got to be there.
Martin: In marketing terms we talk about differentiation. There are plenty of great restaurants in London serving great food, but one of the key things that differentiates Fifteen is the purpose behind it.
Liam: Absolutely. With Fifteen Cornwall, their differentiator was that they’re Cornish – we’re helping the locals. That was not at all part of London, which was just one restaurant amongst… well, how many places can you spend £100 on dinner in London, even twelve years ago when it started? Down in Cornwall, as you know, they had to think in a different way – yes, it’s about young people, but it’s also about Cornwall, local supply chains, all of that. I think they did that really well – the way they communicated what Fifteen Cornwall was about was really skilful. They were able to not make the mistakes that London made and they weren’t the product of a TV show which let’s say, at best, is a mixed blessing. Their differentiators were different to London, and we were dead lucky with the Ashworths [the local hoteliers who partnered with Fifteen], that they really got that, and were great at marketing – superb at telling that story. I think the social purpose can definitely be part of what differentiates you, but unless the product on its own is really, really good, then all you have is bullshit marketing.
Martin: It’s interesting this idea of empty marketing. Many companies are engaging in CSR, corporate social responsibility, setting aside a proportion of profits to do good. Is that mainly about assuaging guilt, or avoiding government regulation when they should be baking those principles in, or is that disingenuous, and it’s actually quite admirable?
Liam: I think it’s all of those. Emmanuel Faber, the CEO of Danone, one of the first things he did was to abolish the CSR department and he said ‘We have no mandate from the shareholders to give money away, and also, if giving money away is trying to be socially innovative, it’s either all our responsibility to [do that], or its none of ours. Either it sits in our innovation pipeline or, fuck it, we’re not going to do it’ (only he said it much more articulately than that!). Now, I think he’s way at the extreme of pioneering thinking, and his book that he published in France two years ago, which he hasn’t published in English yet, is his unbelievably intelligent, quite anguished, very Gallic [version of] ‘What is business for?’
But I think for most companies, CSR and philanthropy is an afterthought. It’s carried out by people who aren’t at the centre of the business. I think in the last ten years there has been more of a movement amongst the financial services and big food retailers, particularly, to think about ‘Actually, how do we align what we do a bit better with [CSR considerations]?’ But I think there are very, very few companies who think about how they engage with the communities with which they do business, globally and locally, in a way that aligns that [engagement] with the actual business.
But I’m sure some of it is guilt money. You know - the cliché of volunteering to go and paint the community centre, whether you want it painted or not. At Fifteen we used to laugh: I’d get a call from Bloggs Sprockets’ Head of CSR on the phone. I’d say ‘What does he want?’ and they’d say ‘Oh, he’s offering us a team of ten to come and paint the restaurant’. Well a) it doesn’t need painting, and b) if I’m going to get the restaurant painted, I’m not going to leave it to ten volunteers who turn up on a Wednesday afternoon, if we’re lucky!
I’ve yet to come across a company where the CSR thing is really cynical. What you get is disconnection from the core activity of the business and a lack of intelligence and creativity in how the business in total can engage with the world around it. That’s not surprising, given the crap business schools that we have, that turn out people with this kind of binary view of the world, and I think business schools are a major impediment to changing the world through business. Business schools are a sort of combination of parasites and sheep, aren’t they? So I don’t see a lot of conscious cynical ‘We’re fucking the world up over here, let’s give some money to puppies over there’.
Increasingly, the conversations I have with companies are ‘There’s got to be a cleverer way we can engage’. So [at] Centrica, [for example], I’ve just helped create a £10 million investment fund there to invest in energy entrepreneurs, and it’s the first time a FTSE 100 has thought ‘How can we use some of our wealth in a way that tries to align what we exist for, how we might help communities, how actually it might be another way of us engaging with the world and our innovation pipeline.’ Not perfect, still early days, but I’m really encouraged by that and I think the reason I stay involved in it is it might be a model for the way [things] might go. And also I think companies spend way more on ‘CSR’ [than they think they do]. They don’t put a price on their volunteering, on lots of things, but when you actually aggregate that, they’re spending a lot, and my pitch to them is ‘You probably don’t have to spend any more money to do something a bit cleverer with how you engage with the world’. And, as we’re seeing with Centrica and LGT and the Berenbergs that are involved in this other fund, IVUK, it really engages people, especially people in their early- to mid-forties who are beginning to think ‘I don’t really want to do this, I wanted to save the rainforest, and here I am, selling sprockets for a living’. I think that’s what gives me a bit of hope, is that it engages the whole person – ‘I get the business case for this, and all these whizzy entrepreneurs doing all this interesting stuff – oh, and actually (as we have with one of these funds) there might be a tech idea that can go to big scale that will really help the business’.
I think that’s what I’m really interested in and with Centrica, I’ve been quite impressed with the way they haven’t marketed it, they haven’t got up on their high horse - a lot of people, unless they’re told, don’t know [about] it. So I think there is some cynicism out there, but I think it’s more sins of omission and lack of imagination than ‘Let’s pretend to the world we’re great by spending peanuts on this particular social cause’.
Martin: That seems to be the real test, doesn’t it: whether it’s publicised. If it’s not publicised then it’s probably done for the right reasons.
Liam: Yeah, and I have to say, particularly financial services, and some other industries and big businesses within them, they do [think] ‘Let’s just keep our mouths shut about this and just get on and do it’ because there have been so many cases of just ‘Look at us! Look at us!’ I’ve known RBS Community Banking for years – they funded stuff in Liverpool, they funded stuff at Fifteen, they did all sorts of great stuff, they were the sponsor of our first Wavelength event five or six years ago, but little did we know that at the same time as doing that, they were bringing the economy to the point of collapse.
There’s [now] less of that ‘Look at us, aren’t we fantastic’ kind of stuff. I think there’s much more [modesty], even if it’s a self-defence mechanism – ‘Let’s not draw too much attention to ourselves, because we don’t want the media here anyway’. But I’m encouraged enough that there are more interesting conversations going on about how companies might move beyond a CSR agenda to a social innovation agenda, but there’s still a long way to go, and there’ll be a lot of mis-steps, a lot of failures, but how else could it be when something new is trying to be born?
Martin: You talked about banking. A lot of people thought, with the banking crisis, is this the end of capitalism as we know it? Is it going to change? Will businesses with social purpose become more prevalent? Will ‘caring capitalism’ come to pass, or is that a contradiction, do you think?
Liam: If you’re going to give an honest answer, you have to say ‘Don’t know’. Is capitalism going to go away? Hard to see that at the moment - I don’t see anything on the horizon that would do that. The only thing you could say is going to have a really big impact is climate change - companies’ supply chains, consumer behaviour, consumer patterns, all of that, is inevitably going to change. So if you’re a company that relies on water in East Africa, and [that’s] just not going to be there in the forseeable future, you’ve got to engage creatively with the whole [situation]. I suspect that it will be a chaotic, hard-to-read period we’re going into.
The choice I make is to assume that you either sit here wringing your hands that capitalism is going to destroy us, or that there’s something good in that way of organising ourselves – is there a better way of doing it that doesn’t inevitably create inequality? I don’t believe it inevitably creates inequality. I think the particular model that we might have at the moment [with the banking crisis], that’s not all business – family businesses don’t behave like that, and they loathe the bankers every bit as much as the Occupy movement and Uncut do – they say ‘No, there is a better way of doing business’.
Certainly the choice I’ve made is to try and do my little bit to be the midwife to that new way of doing business. If the social enterprise experience I’ve had helps develop the thinking for big businesses, then all the better. I think the issue is in that space where business, society and the social entrepreneur rub up against each other. There are very few people who are multi-lingual, who speak Corporate, who speak Civil Society and who speak Social Entrepreneur. There just aren’t enough people in that space that can articulate clearly enough the benefits there might be if we got that into a different sort of alignment. So you have lots of people from the non-profit world who look at big business and think ‘What a bunch of wankers – let’s try and screw some money out of them’; and then you’ve got people in big business thinking that anyone who’s not in a privately held company must be fairly amateurish, their hearts in the right place but they’re really poor at execution and scaling things; and then people in civil society are going ‘Well, not sure – I don’t quite understand who these social entrepreneurs are, and we like big business because it employs people, but I don’t like those [other bits]’. I think there are few people that speak it. Michael Porter coming out with the shared value vocabulary has been important beyond it just being ‘Here’s the big guru from the business school world talking [about purpose]’, but also it’s helped convene a space in which people who speak different languages can come together to try and get a shared language - but there just aren’t enough people who speak it.
Martin: It’s almost as if, with capitalism, the rules are the same, but the way you’re choosing to play the game is different.
Liam: The idea of the creation of goods and services to meet the needs of people, in a fair exchange where there are markets that are regulated, but free – I don’t think in itself that that’s a bad thing. It’s where regulation is shit, like it was here, that allows Fred Goodwin to talk crap, and most people knew it, but not call him to account until it was almost too late.
So that’s the space I think is very, very interesting. Plus the fact that, whether we like it or not, big businesses have got the scope, the range, the power to execute which, if [their needs] can be genuinely aligned with the needs of the world, [it] can be really good. The problem is there aren’t enough people that yet see the benefits of that, still less that can enrol people inside those companies to make it happen, and I think (back to business schools) we’ve got still too many CEOs who not only don’t want to change the world, don’t want to stick out in their own industry. They’re being rewarded by short-term results, know they’re only going to be there for a few years and then they’re going to move around, and that’s no way to think long term – different from family-owned businesses, co-operative businesses where there’s a bit more of an opportunity to think longer term and really understand your role in the world.
Martin: Is playing by the rules the only way to achieve social evolution? Or the best way, and there are others?
Liam: I’m sure there are lots of others. I think hanging on to radical pragmatism is where I’m at, at the moment. I would want to see an alternative that looks viable, that isn’t going to create the chaos and breakdown – we’ve got enough of that in the world. Whether we’ve got time, who knows? If you’ve a Lovelockian view of the world its kind of ‘Stop fucking about with all that stuff and just get ready for what’s just over the horizon there, guys’. I’m a Gramscian – pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will (which is pretty much an Irish Catholic view of the world anyway!)
Martin: You’ve talked about business schools and you’ve created Wavelength, with your colleagues. I was lucky enough to do it and got a huge amount out of it, and my take on it is that it brings together leaders from corporates and from social enterprises to inspire each other. Is that right?
Liam: Yeah, I think that’s part of it. There are all sorts of reasons for it. One of the reasons for me was to create a space in which people from those different worlds could be in the same space as equals; and in learning stuff together, would enhance [each other’s] learning, and I think that is definitely happening. The agenda about social innovation, how the world can be different through business, is part of the mix. We thought a lot, in the beginning, about should we make it a ‘CSR sell’? But what Wavelength is about is all this social innovation stuff, so we rejected that for a couple of reasons. One – there’s not much of a business model in that, and two – equally importantly (and at a philosophical level, more importantly) I want to talk to the Operations Managers and Directors, I don’t want to talk to the CSR people. I want to talk to the Heads of Marketing, the CEOs, not the Heads of Sustainability, etc., because that makes you have a different conversation, in terms of winning people over. The fund with Centrica would not have happened if I’d gone in the door marked ‘I’m Going To Kick Your Head In About Social Innovation’ or even ‘I’m Going To Seduce You About It’. It came about through a three-month programme with twelve of their top leaders, and it was about innovation and leadership. In that [programme] I was saying ‘Actually, there are different ways of engaging with the world’ and then they came up with the idea of this fund at the end.
In changing anyone’s mind about something, you’ve got to start with what they’re sitting with, and most of them are sitting with ‘How do I get better service?’, ‘How do I get better at managing my supply chain?’, ‘How do I make this a great place to work so I can attract young ‘uns to come and work for us?’ Most of them aren’t lying awake at night thinking ‘How do I make this company more socially innovative?’ because no-ones had that conversation with them. So the pedagogy of Wavelength is to get people sitting at the table having a conversation about the sort of stuff they’re really interested in, and then in the course of that, say ‘By the way, let’s have a conversation about [social matters]’. And of the 500 people who’ve been through [Wavelength flagship programme] Connect now, I reckon maybe 15-20% really, really get it, and it’s quite surprising sometimes who gets it and who doesn’t get it. In our next iteration, we will really be working with those people, with Connect as the funnel that keeps us having lots of broad conversations.
And I think we’ve created an eco-system with our alumni, with our speakers and hosts that we have all over the world now, and with these other networks, Ignite, IVUK and others – I think the challenge to us is how do we galvanise those to really make some change, in the individual members of that network, but also in the world. The reality is most people will come through and think ‘That was really interesting, that really helped me, but has it changed the way I view the world [and] business? Not really’ but I think that’s OK – we’ve got to have that broader conversation with a bigger group of people so that down here in the funnel we’ve got the real instigators and change makers.
Martin: And have you seen any particular results from your approach?
Liam: Yeah – God, yeah! For example, a major retailer has radically changed their buying in Asia as a result of it. There are loads of things like that. Quite a few people giving their jobs up, quite a lot of existential angst. I mean, you can’t listen to Tulsi Ravilla [of the Aravind Eye Care Hospital in India] or Tim Smit [of the Eden Project] without thinking ‘Am I doing what I really love doing? Am I? No I’m not!’ and decide to leave your corporate world. I think Faber talks about the traps and the cages that get built for you the further you rise up a big corporate. He says that private jets, big salaries, private schools, chauffeur-driven cars, people telling you how fucking great you are all the time, all those things are there and they’re traps to disconnect you from your true self.
I think a lot of people in those companies are like that, whether they know it or not, and we start talking to them about… well, I won’t mention the person or company, but in the first year of Connect, in the bar one night there was a table that was really [full of angst], and I went over and said ‘Everything alright?’ and one guy said ‘Can I have a word with you? I’m really confused – what do you want me to do? Do you want me to give up my job and go and work with the homeless like all these social entrepreneurs?’ I said ‘Well, we come to a choice moment now – do you want me to answer that glibly or answer it honestly? I’m guessing it’s touched something quite deep in you, and this aggression, negativity means you’re unhappy.’ He said ‘No, no, I’m not, I love my job.’ So I said ‘OK, here’s my honest answer. How old are you? Forty? Big job – you’re earning top end of six figures with share options? Great pension? Kids in private school? Fast forward to when you’re 70, your children are grown up, your grandchildren are there – what’s the conversation with them you’d like to have? Is it a) “Yes children, for 40 years I worked for Bloggs Sprockets selling shit I didn’t believe in because of you and your private education, and I didn’t achieve my potential” or b) “Actually, when I was 40, I decided to save the homeless, and I left the big job I was in, took you out of your school, put you in the perfectly good school in your little village in fucking Berkshire (as it turned out – I got to know him quite well after this!) and I didn’t actually solve homelessness in the UK, but I did have a big impact in the organisation I set up to [achieve] it, and I reckon we [improved] the lives of several hundred people as a result”. Which conversation do you want to have? I think that’s the choice you’ve got – I think you know, and when the homeless charity spoke earlier, that’s what I think is being evoked in you, not this fairly bullshit anger towards me. What do you think?’ And he went ‘No, I think you’re completely wrong’. I said ‘Well, you’re here, the company’s paying for you, trust me – it’s going to be interesting’ and he did stick around.
Fast forward three years, he walked into one of our alumni meetings – I was gobsmacked! I said ‘What happened – did you go off to save the homeless?’ He said ‘I didn’t, but I left my company shortly after Connect finished, I work somewhere different and I’m much, much happier – you were right’. I said ‘And you can still go off and save the homeless, because if that’s what you want to do in your soul, don’t make the fact that your kids are in private school the issue, because you built that cage for yourself, and the fact is that ninety-six percent of the population don’t send their kids to private school – I didn’t – and do you know what? They’re perfectly fine!’
So I think there’s loads of that that goes on, and I think one of the things Wavelength does, for some of them, for a moment at least, is it drops away those goggles, and they can say ‘Actually, there is a different way of doing things, and that person over there, who’s the same age as me, who works in a social enterprise – actually, the world hasn’t collapsed for them, and they have a happy family, etc.’ So it continues to be very, very interesting.
And also the powerlessness of those in positions of power is interesting, isn’t it? ‘There’s nothing I can do!’ ‘What do you mean there’s nothing you can do? Look at the resources you’ve got! Look at these entrepreneurs, with nothing, who are doing this stuff in the world!’ I think it can be so disempowering for people.
Martin: And I guess for some of them it’s not about packing in their job – even if they stay in their job, it’s about having a different attitude to the way they do business, influencing the company positively.
Liam: Totally, and I think when we agonise over ‘God, are we having enough impact?’, part of it is that this is a long term game. Yes, we’ve got some short term gains with the Centrica thing, the IVUK thing, and others, and then all of the great stuff that has happened with social enterprises as a direct result of what we’ve done – there’s enough to make us go ‘Actually, yeah – pretty good’. But we could do so much more, and some of the people I can see in my minds eye who have been through Connect, they will be CEOs of big companies, and once they’re there one would hope that the impact we’ve had on them at this time in their career will have an influence.
Martin: Great stuff. Are you able to name any of the companies you think have got the balance right between having a sense of purpose and managing the bottom line?
Liam: Are there any companies where I think ‘They’re the finished article’? I don’t see them. Do I see companies where I think ‘I can see enough people having the right conversations about how that business could be?’ Yeah. I think obvious ones like Unilever, I definitely think P&G, the big FMCGs - they have to change because where they do their business in emerging markets, you can’t ignore the social conditions and environment, in the way you can here, so I think they will change. I think some of the privately owned businesses like Kia are really smart about what they do, Timpsons I’m really, really impressed with, Greggs have a fantastic impact (who knew?), Nike. BASF – really impressive; I heard someone from there speak at [Wavelength’s] sustainable brands [event]. I think they’re right up there, but none of them are themodel; but there are pioneers, and to the extent that we can help them, we should help them. I think the other thing is that some companies that wouldn’t see themselves as particularly socially innovative, like [some of the big retailers] of this world, I think one of the things we have done for companies like that is given them a vocabulary to reassess what they do, and they say ‘Actually, framed like that, we do do some really good stuff, we’re just not putting it together as part of our business model at the moment’. So I think there’s a lot of that, but no, I can’t point to a company and go ‘There’s the finished article’.
Martin: It’s work in progress.
Liam: It’s absolutely work in progress.
Martin: Anything you wished I’d asked you but I didn’t?
Liam: Do you want a martini now? I think with Wavelength, what I’m personally involved in, what I write about, what I talk about, is marketing, isn’t it? Trying to sell a story, a narrative about the future of the world that’s exciting enough to people to have them enrol on it. And is it completely true? It’s one of Tim Smit’s future truths, isn’t it? And as long as my story doesn’t get too far away from what’s happening, I think that’s alright – I think the world needs marketers who are good storytellers, whose product is a vision for how the world might be different. Muhammad Yunus [the pioneer of microfinance, who founded Grameen Bank] is definitely that, he’s marketing that world in which poverty is in the museums. But are there a lot of wankers in companies selling us shit we don’t need, and being clever about it? Yeah, loads.
Martin: A perfect way to end. Liam, thanks very much for speaking with me.