Section 2: Making Profit with a Purpose Real 7. Putting philanthropic efforts aside, can you share with us your business’ approach to linking profit with purpose? 8. Do you have any examples that come to mind of what your business has done to link profit with purpose? Please elaborate why you chose these measures and on how any hurdles that were faced to implement these measures were overcome. 9. How have you aligned corporate vision and goals, strategy and risk assessment processes, policies, and resource allocations of your organization to advance profit with purpose? What are the biggest challenges to implementation? 10. Considering it has been argued that getting the buy-in of key individuals is often a significant barrier to including linking profit with purpose amongst an organization’s core principles, how have you ensured the buy-in of shareholders, board members, senior management, and other employees? 11. How do you obtain the best, most recent thinking on effectively linking profit with purpose (e.g. consultants, advisors, business/industry associations, internal experts)? 12. Do the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (often called SDGs) play any role within your business? Could the UN SDGs help your business to identify challenges, to measure success, to communicate vision and accomplishments? 13. Which SDGs are more important or relevant to your business and industry? How did you go about deciding which ones are more important?
Section 3: Collaborating for Impact 14. How should a business engage with stakeholders and even its competitors on shared challenges and opportunities with regards to profit with purpose? 15. Is the business involved in initiatives that have businesses, industries, and stakeholders working together to address societal issues? 16. It has been suggested that collaboration between businesses and civil society is strained due to distrust and cultural differences. Considering many people have signaled that there’s a need to further encourage multi-stakeholder collaboration on the subject of linking profit with purpose, how can the following groups strengthen effective collaboration with business:
a. NGOs and other civil society organizations; b. Community groups; c. Media; d. Academia; e. Governments or other regulators; f. Other industry players; and g. the Society & Business Initiative 17. What advice would you have for other business leaders that want to build profit with purpose into the core principles of their business? Are there areas where you have had key successes and lessons learned that should be more broadly shared? 18. Are there areas that your business is still wrestling with to advance linking profit with purpose? How could the Society & Business Initiative assist? 78
