A Company’s Main Objective is to Make a Profit

“Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.”

-George Bernard Shaw

I thought of this as I paid the room service guy under the table for the beers I was illegally ordering in Chennai, India during elections. Admittedly, I was also wearing shorts, something I would never wear in public. All cultural norms therefore broken, I found solace in this quote. Ironically, the more I travel, the less I believe in culture. What is culture other than some way of doing things a long time ago for some reason (usually now unknown) that is no longer applicable?

Three years ago I was walking through the streets of Thiruvananthapuram (seriously, that’s what it’s called) in the southern Indian state of Kerala when I found myself walking behind two women – one was a Muslim in a Burqa and the other was a Catholic nun. Do you know how you tell the difference between a woman in a burqa and a woman in a nun habit from behind? You don’t. Because they are both wearing the exact same outfit – an outfit that was designed to fend off high winds in a hot, sandy desert 2000 years ago.

I bring this up is not to say that wearing flowing robes in a humid jungle climate is incorrect, but because culture goes beyond country and religion and permeates organizations too – making change difficult. I have spent the last 2 months of my life trying to teach my NGO client one thing:

1. A company’s main objective is to make a profit.

Surely feels somewhat remedial for some of my MBA friends. But what if you had worked for an NGO your entire life? Your thoughts might go something like this:

“Companies want to exploit the poor.”

“Companies don’t care about CSR or doing good.”

“Companies think our money is never-ending and that they can just use us for free.”

I’ve also met with 10-15 Indian, Bangladeshi, and multi-national corporations while being abroad. Here is their side of the story:

“NGOs don’t realize that we have to make money.”

“We are interested in working with the poor, but we can’t do it for free.”

“NGO's think our money is never-ending and that we can just give them money with no strings attached.”

Did I mention my job is to get NGOs and companies to work together? This was clearly not going well… The next two rules I tried to impart were these:

2. An NGOs main objective is to create a social good.

3. An inclusive business model is when 1 & 2 occur at the same time.

The good thing about a company is that they believe in capitalism, which has proven to be one of the more adaptive religions of our time. So when we met businesses and discussed offering (profitable) pro-poor products and paying NGOs for their services in making these pro-poor products successful, companies were pretty much like, "where do we sign up"?

NGOs were a little slower coming to the table. First we had to remind ourselves that NGOs are not very good at a few things: Making soap and oral rehydration salts, providing banking services and disability insurance, creating industries and long-term employment, buying farming outputs and selling them on the free market, or providing new mobile health technologies. Once that was established, we started to see that companies could be kind of helpful. Now if only they weren’t such dicks…

So, this is why I get paid 50% of my salary to live in India. We decided that if we could make it profitable for companies to leverage what they are good at (employment, innovation, goods, and services) and ensure that their business models provide a social good for the poor (without being exploitative), then perhaps companies could be incentivized to create more inclusive business models that start to include those at the base of the pyramid, who have historically been left out.