Principle 1: The Dual Responsibility
The 1st Principle of the Contributist Business Model
This is the first of the three principles of the Contributist Business Model, part of the Reclaiming Business series.
Principle 1: The Dual Responsibility
A contributist business leader understands that their primary responsibility is not to endlessly increase their own wealth or that of their shareholders, but to steward their business’s contribution to its community. More specifically, this core responsibility can be understood as having two parts:
1) Effectively managing their business’s unique contribution to society.
2) Enabling their employees to participate in that contribution (to give).
They, of course, also care about their own wealth and that of their shareholders. But they recognize that economic well-being is not equivalent to holistic well-being, and they know that doing something useful for their community is what will ultimately generate the greatest benefit for everyone involved.
The capitalist, on the contrary, sees this responsibility to provide a valuable product and care for employees as secondary to the responsibility to generate wealth for themself and their shareholders.
To be clear, the capitalist mindset still allows capitalists to do some good, because in many cases, the goals of contributing to society and increasing shareholder wealth are aligned. But when these things come into conflict, the capitalist is oriented more towards the extraction of wealth than the generation of value — they will usually choose to cut corners in their pursuit of their business’s mission or their responsibility to their employees before they will abandon an opportunity to increase their profits.
The contributist business leader sees this as backwards. Their goal is to give something of value to society, not to extract value from it.
Managing the business
Consider, for example, when Facebook’s internal researchers found that their product’s algorithm was polarizing its users, pushing them away from agreement and towards heightened division and extremism. This ran directly against the business’s unique purpose, as represented in their mission: to "give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together." The researchers warned that, if allowed to continue, this problem would only get worse and worse over time. But on the other hand, they also found that the divisive content increased engagement, which in turn brought in more advertiser dollars, and shareholder wealth.
If Facebook’s leaders were contributists, they would have immediately directed their engineers to find a way to solve this algorithmic problem. Regardless of the impact on shareholder wealth, they would be opposed to offering a product that did the exact opposite of what it was intended to do — harming society rather than contributing to it. Failing to accomplish the business’s mission would mean failing to effectively steward their business’s contribution to society, and thus failing their role as business leaders.
But Facebook’s leaders were not contributists. They were capitalists. This means that they understood their primary responsibility to be the generation of shareholder wealth. When that responsibility came into conflict with the business’s effectiveness, their capitalist mindset led them to choose profit over effectiveness. Facebook’s leaders chose to bury the findings, and to leave the algorithm as it was.
When a business chooses profit over mission, as capitalist businesses often do, a contributist would say that that business has become less effective, not more.
Giving employees “the right to give”
Equally important to the contributist business leader is their responsibility to ensure that the humans under their direction can spend their days participating in joyful, dignifying, meaningful, and productive work.
With respect to their employees, the contributist business leader is operating on the second level of social involvement — they are not only concerned with their own right to give, but with providing that right to others as well. This is the special role of the employer, and it is the main reason why business leaders are some of the most important members of society. When they are effective, they give the rest of us the opportunity to find our place — to have a role to play in the continued thriving of our communities.
This means more than simply providing employees with a set of responsibilities and a salary.
In order to be truly enabled to give, we must not just have the opportunity to give, but also the time, resources, and energy to do so. Additionally, our work environment must also be one that we can gladly participate in — we must not feel that we are exploited or coerced, or else we are not giving; we are being taken from.
The contributist business leader understands the complexity of this responsibility to their employees, and works to ensure that their employees’ needs are met (financial and otherwise), so that they are able to give freely to the business, rather than being exploited by it.
This has many important consequences for employee well-being. For example, while a capitalist business leader might happily lay off an employee if it makes their business more lean or efficient, the contributist business leader understands that this is ultimately a failure to uphold their core responsibility. Even though it may help them meet one side of the dual responsibility (ensuring the effectiveness of their business’s contribution), it comes at the direct expense of the other (enabling their employees to participate in that contribution).
The contributist employer would instead do all that they could to protect the employee’s right to give (including attempts at reskilling or upskilling) before laying them off. And if they find that there is truly nothing that can be done to ensure that a current employee is able to give effectively to the organization, they would at least do what they could to help the employee find a new role elsewhere.
Even what the outcomes are ultimately the same — sometimes the market is unforgiving, and people simply must be laid off — this difference in the employer’s motivation has a profound impact on the experience of the employee. Capitalism has become so deeply entrenched in our society that some of us have come to believe that its cold and antagonistic employer/employee relationship is a necessary part of business. It is neither necessary nor natural. Contributism restores the dynamic between the employer and the employee from one between economic actors to one between humans.
For more on this dynamic, read Olivia’s Remorse, the second part of the short story series The Contributist and the Capitalist, which traces the diverging trajectories of a successful contributist business and a successful capitalist one.
This first principle — the dual responsibility — recasts “business success” from the brutal and unfeeling profit motive that is encouraged by capitalism, to something more human. And although finding ways to satisfy both responsibilities isn’t always simple, the contributist business leader strives to try, because this effort is precisely what makes their work meaningful.