I have been wanting to write this article for a long time as it is at the basis of the reason why I have started this blog. This blog is called Business with impact because I care about integrating into the economic scheme other values that are excluded in the calculus of the added-value of an economic activity. Having been quite fashionable for many years by now, the environmental issues are well implanted in our consciousnesses and when we speak of CSR, we immediately think of reforested zones, electricity savings or waste management. I find we easily forget about the third dimension of sustainable development: its social part.
To me it is however very important and in some way even the basis for the two other dimensions. What do I mean? My point is that we want to turn our non-sustainable societies in sustainable ones. We have to radically transform our economic and energetic (see my blog Energy in transition about this subject) systems, we have to change the way we relate to the environment, we have to integrate social values and the respect of different cultures into our living mode.
Who will do that? Who will drive the implementation of these changes? Who will have to change? It’s us. It’s each and everyone of us who will have to move from today’s world to a new conception of it, to find their own place in a new system. Of course it won’t be all changing in a day but anyone living in this century probably has a role to play in the global scheme.
That’s why, although I’m not insensitive to the environmental dimension of sustainable development (I treat it in my own way in another blog), I here mainly discuss the impact of business on people.
Business with impact 