For me there are few speakers more interesting to me that Gary Vaynerchuk, Social Media’s poster child and author of The Thank You Economy, and at a recent keynote he said the following:
Imagine if business, because of the way the world is going, had to actually for the first time in about a hundred years started really caring about the people they sold their products to?
It was a statement was meant to highlight the point that it in today’s world any firm that fakes it is going to get burned, and it is only firms that authentically engage that will be able to build an ecosystem around their products/ services that is sustainable.
The topic of conversation at a lunch I had last week with the sustainability team of one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers., and when I mentioned the amount of problems their industry faced on the factory floor, at eWaste sites, and in areas of privacy, they firmly believed that their industry would be one that would be forced into drastic changes in the near future.
That their firm, and others in their industry, were finding it more difficult to not talk about issues as investors, government agencies, and consumers find and distribute information in new ways. In ways that cannot be contained (like the past).
For them, firms were going to have to begin caring, lest they risk government action, consumers action, and (ultimately) investor action.