Can One Person Make a Difference?

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From the course by University of Virginia

New Models of Business in Society

535 ratings

University of Virginia

New Models of Business in Society

535 ratings

In this course we will be discussing the emergence of a new story about business. This new story locates business within a societal framework. Almost every business creates or destroys value for customers, suppliers, employees, communities and society, in addition to shareholders and other financiers. A number of new models of business can be built on this idea such as corporate responsibility, philanthropy, shared value and sustainability. Profits and stakeholder value go together, and this course explains how. The final session explores the idea of how to become a stakeholder entrepreneur and create a business that makes money and makes the world a better place.

From the lesson

Becoming a Stakeholder Entrepreneur

We close the course by learning how to become a stakeholder entrepreneur by discussing specific examples. This module concludes with an opportunity for what your next steps might be as a stakeholder entrepreneur.

Social Entrepreneurship to Stakeholder Entrepreneurship 6:01

Husk Power 2:01

Maggie's Ethical Auto Repair 5:28

Red Goat Records and Passion 4:41

Can One Person Make a Difference? 5:54

Summary and Next Steps 3:41

Meet the Instructors

R. Edward Freeman
University Professor; Elis and Signe Olsson Professor of Business Administration
Darden School of Business

Can you make a difference? Listen to John Mackey and

his advice on starting a business. Hopefully there'll

be a lot of young people in the YouTube

generation who see this. hopefully

someone, maybe you maybe me, maybe others, will inspire

them to start a business.

Any advice for them, as they think about whether to

do that or not, what kind of business to start,

>> Well my first advice that I always give to

young people as I, I do talk at a lot

of business schools and I often time would ask, how

many people here, someday, plan to open their own business.

And surprisingly I get half.

>> You get a lot of hands obviously, yeah.

>> I get a lot of hands, half to three quarters.

>> Yeah.

>> But my follow up question is, how many

of you plan to start a business immediately after school?

Very few.

>> Why, why, why is that do you think, first of all?

>> I think most of them owe a lot of money.

>> A lot, yeah. >> Yeah, they gotta pay it back.

But they have a fantasy about doing their own

business, but they're not quite ready to do it.

And my first piece of advice is that: young people

don't realize this, but life is, actually goes by pretty fast.

And it's too short to do anything less

than following you passions to follow your heart.

Things that you deeply care about or

the things that you should involve your life energies in.

you shouldn't be preparing in a sense to

follow your passions later because you may end up

getting trapped in a job or a career that

you, that doesn't really engage your, your deepest passions.

The things you care most about.

and you do it simply to make money.

And, again, there's nothing wrong with making money.

I think that's a very good thing.

But for people to want to start their own businesses.

Most entrepreneurs just go out and do it.

I mean, if you look at the great entrepreneurs of this, of my generation.

People like Bill Gates and, and Michael Dell and Steven Jobs.

they, they were on fire and they just went out and did their businesses.

And they, it's, it's so

follow your passions. Follow your heart.

Follow your bliss.

However you want to call it, I think is a

key strategy for not only business but for life.

>> I think you can make a difference as an entrepreneur, as

a customer, as an employee, as a citizen, and a community member.

I know not everyone wants to start

a business but everyone can make a difference.

You have

the tools now to think differently about a business,

first as an entrepreneur. And you can start something that matters.

Maybe it starts with a pain point in your life.

Maybe it starts with something like Tom's Shoes.

But the idea behind being an entrepreneur is often times you don't think about risk.

I remember a time in which my son and I

were talking about Red Goat Records and an MBA student

asked us, asked him as a young guy, how did

he think about the risk of doing this to his career?

And he had an interesting answer.

He said, I never thought about the risk until you just raised the question.

You feel the passion to do something and the risk is in not doing it.

As a customer, you can pay attention to the companies you do business with.

You give them your hard earned dollars.

You can pay attention to how their products are made.

You can pay attention to the conditions

under which those products are made and sold.

You can pay attention to what those

companies are dong, how they're making society

better, how they're making your life better.

As an employee, you can engage.

So many people in the world today go to work every

day, and they are not engaged in what their companies are doing.

Now I'm not arguing it's always their fault.

But sometimes you can push, you can try to make your company purpose oriented.

This is hard to do and

again I don't want to be Pollyanna about this

but you can think about one or two things

you can do maybe within the work group that

you're in, to make your company a better place.

You can think about as a citizen, as a community member,

about being active, about the companies that are in your community.

What are they doing? Are they community destroyers?

Are they community builders? Are they good citizens?

There's a lot that needs to be changed in the world.

Business has to be a part of that change, and we need to

be able to do it for ourselves, as well as our companies.

I'd like you to think about the issues we've talked about

for the past several weeks, and discuss them in the discussion forum.

Focus on what are the two or three important ideas from your perspective.

Why are they important? And what are you

going to do

with

them?

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