“If we can be more beautiful in our thoughts, in our actions, and in how we interact with the world, we can build beautiful businesses – and beautiful lives.” – Alan Moore
Alan Moore is a business innovator, author, and founder of Beautiful Business, a philosophical teaching programme developed to help founders find and instil true purpose into their operations as a means of driving profit not to the detriment of people and the planet but for the betterment of it.
Alan is the scribe behind a collection of ‘business-improvement’ titles, include Do/Build and Do/Design, in which he shares his philosophy on how business can be used as a force for good by channelling the ‘beauty’ and craftsmanship of purpose.
Borrowing from and building upon the work of Paul Polman (former ceo of Unilever) – particularly his ground-breaking work in Net Positive – Alan presents a school of thought that business without purpose cannot succeed, and that true purpose is the only way in which a business can drive meaningful profit – providing both for its people and the planet. Or, the stakeholders, including nature herself, without whom a business will ultimately fail.
From the Products of Change Academy this summer, POC members can re-watch Alan Moore’s keynote speech from the Sustainability in Licensing Conference 2022, when the author and pioneer ‘blew the roof off the auditorium’ when he challenged business to be activists and act for nature, not against her.
“Mother nature has run the greatest R&D project ever known. And she has worked out how to hang around for quite some time, creating the conditions for all life to thrive. Without wasting a single atom.
“If we want to hang around for a bit longer in this world, I really suggest we need to be thinking about nature’s design playbook.”
WATCH: Alan Moore in Action
In this bite-sized blast of brilliance, Alan Moore discusses with a live Sustainability in Licensing audience the importance of finding beauty within and applying it to everything you do, including running a business that benefits people and the planet.
CASE STUDY: Veja trainers
Veja is a French trainer brand with a Portuguese name that translates as ‘to see through’. It’s a sentiment that runs through the very core of the operation. In his book, Do/Build, Alan writes about Veja as an exemplar of a beautiful business and one that is on a mission to transform culture.
With a background working with a variety of brands and NGOs and shocked by what they saw across the supply chains of many of the high end labels found in Kensington, the founding duo behind the Veja brand chose the trainer as “the symbol for transforming culture and restoring the equilibrium between the economy, our ecology, and the communities in which we serve.”
The first move was for the French duo to spend two years negotiating with tribes in the Amazon to harvest sustainable rubber. As part of the brand’s mission to transform the marketplace, Veja’s team pays five times the market price for this rubber, including a bonus for quality and Social and Environmental Services.
The reason for doing is a simple one. The company’s goal is solely to enhance the economic value of the Amazon forest in order to protect it.
Elsewhere in the value chain, Veja purchases its organic cotton at pre-harvest prices directly from farmers in Brazil and Peru to give security and better lives to farmers. The price paid for organic cotton is market uncorrelated and mutually agreed upon in advance with the families that farm it.
The price paid for that harvest is set at the start of the year every two years, covering the agroecological cotton production costs and allowing producers to earn a decent income in the process.
Veja also has a strict policy on how workers are paid and the conditions in which they operate in their factory in Brazil. And the best part is, the Veja brand is only growing stronger.
ACTION: Alan Moore’s Field Notes on Trans/formation
Taking Veja as the example, Alan breaks down the core sentiments a business should internalise in order to be something transformational and leave a legacy that protects and regenerates the planet.
- Be unreasonable – Don’t settle for incremental goals. If you want to transform something, set a goal that you don’t know how to achieve yet.
- Hearts change worlds – Embracing the need for change with your heart and mind is essential.
- Supply chains can be beautiful too – You can make progress by building a circular system, but this only goes so far on your own. To change your entire system, you have to engage your whole supply chain to create a truly circular model.
“Veja proves that supply chains can be beautiful, too. Once upon a time, people didn’t ask ‘where do my clothes come from?’ People didn’t ask ‘where was my food grown and what is going into it?’,” said Alan.
“There’s a whole generation in this world now, which is asking these questions about where things come from, They have completely different value set.”
- To change everything, you need everyone – Getting every single one of your people connected. This means inspiring everyone to feel personally invested in playing their part.
- It’s not a mistake, it’s a learning experience – Embrace failures as necessary steps on the path to progress.
- Be transparent – Be so transparent that it feels uncomfortable. Tell the full story and share ‘whole company metrics.’ Pilot and push new approaches to disclosure and transparency that can be scaled to your industry and beyond.
- Leadership as activism – To have a real impact on the world, you need to influence others to follow your lead and help them to lead the way for others. Be generous.
- Constant dialogue – Challenge yourself to embrace a transformational next step. Create the processes and dialogues internally and externally to help you see the future.
NEXT STEPS: Recommended Reads
To continue our education with the ‘purpose over profit’ philosophy towards business, Products of Change recommends the following titles.
DO/BUILD – How to make and lead a business the world need, Alan Moore
DO/DESIGN – Why beauty is key to everything, Alan Moore
Net Positive – How courageous companies thrive by giving more than they take, Paul Polman and Andrew Winston
NEXT STEPS: Recommended Education
There are plenty of free resources and learning platforms available to business leaders and professionals looking to deepen their knowledge with the subject of sustainability, including those curated for POC Members on the Products of Change Educational platform and free courses hosted by the United Nations System College that anyone can register for.
The Products of Change Educational Modules
The Paris Agreement on Climate Change as a Development Agenda
NEXT STEPS: Recommended Event
Taking his work from the page to the classroom through his Design School for Beautiful Business Education Programme, Alan is hosting a programme designed for an intimately and highly immersive interactive exploration of the key themes feeding into a regenerative – and therefore beautiful – business, and just how to design one.
POC is proud to be partnering with Alan to bring a POC x Beautiful Business Workshop to the industry, taking place on October the 18th in a Central London Location. Please reserve your space by registering here.
