How to build a responsible business by finding its essence

Executive overview

Most businesses try to improve by fixing individual problems — sustainability initiatives, supplier audits, community programmes — but each fix opens new ones. The real lever is different: find the founding essence of the company and use it as the single focusing device for every decision.

Responsibility means building others' capability to do what they want to do — not solving their problems for them.

What responsibility actually means

• Kindness, empathy, and compassion are all lower rungs; responsibility is the fourth level.
• Responsibility = caring about someone's ableness — their capacity to pursue their own goals.
• A single action ripples through an entire ecosystem: employees, customers, suppliers, communities, environment.
• Fragmentation happens when you improve one thing without a unifying direction; every fix opens new gaps.
• The antidote is not balance across all factors — it is orientation toward one essence.

Finding the essence of a company

• Every company has a founding essence: the initiating energy that makes it distinctively what it is.
• Merida (textiles): essence was showmanship — not of Merida but of the interior designers it served.
• DuPont: essence was managing risk, traceable to its 206-year founding with dynamite.
• Seventh Generation: essence was the ability to discern dissonance between stated and actual values.
• Once essence is named, every investment, product, or initiative is filtered through one question: does it lead toward this?
• This cuts the cacophony of competing improvement priorities down to one thread.

Merida: growing 35–40% annually by surfacing hidden artisans

• Merida sold rugs through box stores (Pottery Barn) with no brand recognition.
• Its workforce was full of migrant artisans from Vietnam, Thailand, and Brazil whose craft was invisible.
• Reframing the essence as showmanship shifted the channel: away from box stores toward interior designers and architects.
• Studios were set up inside Merida where world-class designers worked directly with artisans.
• Revenue grew 35–40% annually; the company shed commodity positioning entirely.
• Work also extended to Brazilian suppliers — protecting elders who were being cut out by fair-trade criteria that ignored the village.

DuPont Australia: turning a lawsuit into a proprietary advantage

• DuPont's titanium mining operation was being sued by the Australian government for destroying rivers, streams, and local economies.
• Rather than running a sustainability programme, the team asked: what is the essence of this mine in this location?
• The result was an invented proprietary mining process that reduced mountain extraction from 90% to 5% and rebuilt terrain as it went.
• Deep-well injection was eliminated; margins tripled industry average.
• Government dropped all lawsuits; Chad Holliday was subsequently promoted to DuPont chairman and CEO.
• Key principle: a generic "do good for everyone" programme would have missed the specific opportunity locked in that site.

Colgate-Palmolive in post-apartheid South Africa

• Goal was to build a great company in a country emerging from apartheid — simultaneously addressing racism, toxic manufacturing, and dangerous conditions.
• Approach: don't tell people what to fix; educate them to assess themselves using a value-adding process framework.
• When workers assess themselves, they don't hide problems — because there is no judgement, only inquiry.
• Teams in Soweto and Alexandria used the process to build small businesses, run township councils, and launch oral-health education campaigns (90% of children were losing teeth by their teens).
• The company grew 65% quarterly in revenue.
• Mandela awarded the programme the Constitution Award, citing proof that workers assumed to lack education could reach the top 5% of company leadership.
• The operation became 95% Black in leadership.

Kingsford Charcoal: 75% market share and zero layoffs

• Workers averaged an eighth-grade education and were treated as machine operators.
• A "promise beyond ableness" process asked every employee and supplier to commit to something they knew needed doing but didn't yet know how to do — backed by infrastructure to help them learn.
• One team invented a closed-loop retort process that dramatically cut particulates, reversing charcoal's reputation versus gas grills.
• Kingsford went from ~11 large facilities to 6 while eventually producing 100x previous output.
• When facilities closed, Kingsford committed: no one loses employment until they have the same or better job and pay elsewhere.
• Workers with an average eighth-grade education gained reading, writing, and vocational certifications; many started businesses in the towns being closed down, replacing services the towns had previously driven 100 miles to access.
• Kingsford still holds ~75% market share with margins that exceed all competitors.

The four levels of doing good

1. Kindness — being generous and pleasant to others.
2. Empathy — "I've been there; I feel what you feel."
3. Compassion — "I want to remove your pain."
4. Responsibility / Caring — "I want to build your capacity to live your own life."

Levels 1–3 position the helper as the source of the solution. Level 4 makes the other person the source.

Agent vs instrument

• Agency is necessary: you need ego and courage to act and absorb failure.
• But treating yourself as the sole agent limits impact to your lifetime and your reach.
• Acting as an instrument means your work builds capability that outlasts you; no one needs to remember your name.
• The practical test: can the people you worked with continue and extend the work after you leave?

How to build responsibility into a company

• Start by uncovering the founding essence — what the company was born to do, not what makes it "unique" in a marketing sense.
• Use the essence as a filtering device, not a branding exercise.
• Educate workers to assess themselves rather than audit them from outside.
• Invite promises beyond ableness: commitments to outcomes workers don't yet know how to achieve, backed by real development support.
• Extend responsibility outward — suppliers, communities, the broader ecosystem — but always through the lens of the specific location and moment, not a generic programme.
• Responsible operations consistently outperform peers financially: higher margins, faster growth, stronger retention, fewer regulatory crises.