The Common Good: Justice As Strategy

One of the problems with constantly measuring the “values gap” between your company’s conscience and the conscience of the various stakeholders is the difficulty of “staying the course” based on public opinion. (Wait – does your company have a conscience?)
We decided to try another method, a more consistent way to measure brand activism, that we think will make sense for all.
It’s based on the concept of the Common Good.
Wikipedia defines the Common Good as follows:
What is shared and beneficial for all or most members of a given community, or alternatively, what is achieved by citizenship, collective action, and active participation in the realm of politics and public service.
The question then arises, what is the community?
For the multi-national business, community is local, regional and global.
It matters how you treat your employees all over the world. It matters how you treat the community you operate in. It matters how you treat Nature.
The “Common Good” refers to the collective well-being, interests, and benefits of a community. It emphasizes the importance of community values, resources, and goals that contribute to the overall well-being of the community. Decisions and actions that promote the common good are those that consider the needs and rights of all members of the community and seek to create a fair and just society. A city council, for example, allocates funding to improve public infrastructure such as roads, schools, and parks. This benefits all residents of the city and contributes to the common good by enhancing the quality of life for everyone.
In our latest book, we define the 9 domains of the Common Good, tied to the essential freedoms they provide:

Polluting one side of the world to profit on the other side is not a viable strategy, in fact, it is a crime.
With this in mind we can define regressive brand activism as company actions that go against the Common Good.
Progressive brand activism promotes the common good.
The strategy is justice. In an age of instant transparency, companies that do the right thing will increasingly command a premium. Progressive brand activism becomes brand equity.
ASK: Where are our progressive stakeholders headed? What are the values of the future?