Working to Restore: Harnessing the Power of Regenerative Business to Heal the World
Esha Chhabra
304 pages, Beacon Press, 2023
In over a decade writing about mission-driven companies and changemakers for various media outlets, I didn’t see any business books that gathered their stories—across industries and geographies—to paint a broader picture of a global movement through a journalistic lens. Many business books were led by theory of industry jargon, but I wanted to write something that would engage young people passionate about climate issues, rising entrepreneurs, and consumers, as well as industry veterans who are seeking inspiration from one another.
Working to Restore: Harnessing the Power of Regenerative Business to Heal the World aims to do just that, exploring solutions-oriented businesses in food, fashion, travel, health, finance, and energy to suggest that these concepts are not restricted to any one industry. And in the last five years, I’ve begun to see a shift: more and more greenwashing. To break through that noise, I am honing in on companies that were going beyond surface-level sustainability. In fact, most of the entrepreneurs I spoke to were not a fan of the term anymore. They felt it didn’t encapsulate the depths of their businesses. Instead, they were keen on building a regenerative model for business. For that reason, this excerpt explores the evolution of mission-driven companies, why sustainability isn’t enough anymore, and what this regenerative era could look like.—Esha Chhabra
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When I began my career over a decade ago, I wrote about social enterprise, the concept that business can have a social (or environmental) bottom line. The term “social enterprise” was coming into the everyday lexicon of the business world. People were asking, “Is the sole purpose of business to make money for a select few at the top?” Although there had been talk about the shortcomings of our global capitalist system, these social entrepreneurs were operating rogue—building nimble enterprises and often not well known to the public.
That changed in 2006 when Muhammad Yunus, of Bangladesh, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for founding Grameen Bank, a microfinance institution that gave loans to individuals and small businesses that traditional finance deemed unreliable. He then went on to argue for “social business,” a term that challenged the mandate for profit maximization. Instead, he argued that business should have earnings and profits, but these needed to be funneled back into the business itself and serve a greater purpose. All of a sudden, media started covering this convergence of philanthropy, business, and finance more closely. Yunus joked that he had been talking about these concepts for decades while building Grameen in the 1970s. But his ideas had been ignored until he won the Nobel Peace Prize.
We humans sometimes need a wake-up call. So many of the injustices and the damage we see in the world today are not recent developments. Remember the Disney movie WALL-E, which came out in 2008 and was some years in the making, about a lonely robot cleaning up mounds of junk, courtesy of our obsessive consumption as a species. That was well over a decade ago. The alarm bells were ringing then; they’re still ringing.
It’s hard to ignore the reality that we humans are changing the climate, and we’re adding pollution and waste into the earth’s system daily. Apparently, only 13 percent of the oceans remain unaffected by our plastic trash.1 That plastic has now entered our digestive systems—yes, we’re excreting plastic.2 And all this plastic waste for what? Stuff. Stuff that supposedly makes our lives better, easier, and faster. But are we happier?
We have offset the balance. Just as our bodies rely on homeostasis for health, the earth does too. And many would argue that the “stuff” is not making us a happier species; it is just making us out of balance. Surely there must be a greater meaning in life than just acquiring things, accruing debt, and living on a hamster wheel in an endless pursuit to pay the bills?
This may all sound quite bleak, but there are solutions on the horizon. Companies are looking to connect with a younger generation that wants business to have a greater purpose.
Business is a powerhouse that can steer the economy and consumer behavior, and the impact all that has on Mother Earth, in a direction for the better. Business plays a major role in social and environmental problems: businesses employ people, source materials from remote corners of the globe, and move millions of people and tons of cargo around daily. The business community can put us on a different path if we support the type of businesses that prize restoration over growth. The pandemic compounded this reality for us: while working from home had its comforts, it also led to thousands of Americans quitting their jobs, seeking change, thinking about the preciousness of time and what they want to do with their waking hours and healthy days—ultimately, trying to understand their role in this larger web of capitalism.
We have seen the results of business that is fixated on ROI (return on investment) and providing wealth to an elite group, its shareholders. Many people are fed up with this approach. Will it always be necessary to be a global force in order to be profitable? Will it always be necessary to build supply chains that favor only the few at the top to make the business a so-called successful venture? Certainly not.
As I have been reporting on the evolution of this business landscape, I’ve seen it mature from the simple idea of “buy one, give one”—a model that utilizes philanthropy by giving away free product for every purchase—to a more nuanced examination of business, leading to the rise of the B corporation, the benefit corporation, the purpose-driven economy. This is all part of a new lexicon and is a real challenge to the conventional thinking that business is primarily a profit-seeking enterprise.
But to build a company with a purpose requires more than just writing a progressive mission statement and slapping up some inspirational quotes around the office. Political and corporate leaders say that we can build a more “sustainable” world. Yet they’ve been trying since 1987, when the term “sustainable development” entered the lexicon in a three-hundred-page document known as the Brundtland Report, published by the United Nations under the title Our Common Future. The report talked of building a more sustainable future. It listed the interlocked crises affecting humanity, including water shortages, drought, famine, pesticide runoff, and overdependence on chemicals.
So can we really build a more sustainable world, given that we’ve been talking about the same issues for the past three decades? Everyone I spoke with for this book was pretty fed up with the word “sustainable.” Sustain what? This imbalance?
Instead, these entrepreneurs want to rewrite the rules of business to focus on transparency, simplicity, compassion, and equity. If these values were upheld and put into action every day, we could begin to restore the balance, ecologically and socially.
Let me be clear: there is no ideal solution. Humans create a footprint. It is in our nature to desire, lust, and run after what we do not have. Even many of the companies highlighted in this book acknowledge that they’re producing a physical product that has a footprint. But they can do it without the injustices of the modern supply chain, without exploiting populations, without over-extracting resources, without damaging what we need for life itself: the earth.
In a global economy, it’s hard to operate in isolation. It’s unlikely we’ll go back to cottage industries and entirely local economies. Thus, it’s vital to look at companies that are working at scale, and across continents. These businesses are proving that we can source coffee from East Africa and have small farmers be a bigger part of the business model; have fashion-forward ethical shoes that are made entirely in one country, using natural materials, and shipped in empty spaces in containers; and take textile waste in factories, cut it up, and turn it into usable fabrics. The models exist if we want to explore them, invest in them, and let them function without obsessing over growth.
The capitalistic world order has deep roots around the globe. Designing this new economy is not an easy or overnight task. In fact, many of the companies discussed in this book have been at it for more than a decade, and progress is slow. The tentacles of dirty money have gone far and wide. The business practices that have led us to this point are entrenched. A quick cleanup will not work. It requires thought, reflection, tenacity, and a certain stubbornness by CEOs and founders to slowly build a new model along with the employees and workers to carry that out.
There’s one critical difference to start with, though: these companies are built around a challenge, a larger problem, or an issue. Hence, the goal is not growth, but to solve a dilemma: How do you create a closed-loop product? How do you make sure that every bit of your supply chain benefits from the business? How do you feed the planet while not pilfering from it in the process?
These entrepreneurs are in the business of restoration, fixing a system that has long been lopsided and is fundamentally broken. No perfect or single solution exists for each of these monumental challenges, but this could be the beginning of a new era of regeneration. Let these stories serve as a brainstorm for what can happen, if business thinks beyond profit.
So let’s address the G-word: greenwashing. It’s definitely an issue. I’ve seen countless examples of entrepreneurs who love to play up their green impact, who make grandiose statements about their company’s reach—frankly, if you’re a customer just reading marketing jargon on their website or social media feed, it can be hard to determine what’s genuine and what’s phony.
Yet what I saw over and over again as I engaged with so many of the CEOs and founders when researching this book is that the ones who are truly looking to redefine business often walk their talk. They’re living simple lives; are approachable and eager to debate and listen; spend time one on one with partners in their supply chains; refrain from seeking the limelight; and are more involved in the intricacies of their business than in marketing lingo.
In fact, most of the leaders of the companies featured are not pursuing this because it’s trendy, or because they think the time has come to pay attention to their impact. Their motivation comes from their conception of a business, and that is the driving factor. Call it regenerative, restorative, or any other word you’d like. For them, it’s not about a buzzword. It’s about facing a deeper dilemma that needs to be addressed. Buzzwords come and go. But the impact that a business makes, either good or bad, is lasting. And thus, that’s where they’ve placed their attention.
It’s worth noting that some of these companies may fail in the long run; that’s the reality of it. But these entrepreneurs chose to try an alternative, and I believe it’s worth examining their work to see what gems can be taken away for the 2.0 version of business.