1. First and foremost, each enterprise must be a strong contributor to a collectively resulting healthy society – without a reliable and sustainable economic engine, the society is one of despair, not hope and opportunity. 2. In doing so, the enterprise must create a healthy, motivated, and proud community (or society) of workers, where the individual worker is respected and the “whole” of the collective group of workers is greater than the “sum of its parts”. 3. The enterprise must also take full responsibility for mitigating the “by-products” or “social impacts” of its operation – such unintended by-products include air and water pollution, consumer waste generation from excessive packaging of products, land degradation from mining, sourcing from locations where workers are underpaid and/or underage, etc. Mitigation costs money, so the enterprise must build this need into its financial model without penalizing the consumer for these costs. 4. Finally, because of the success of business (and perhaps, the cumbersome bureaucracy of many governments), corporations are being called on to tackle “social problems” that exist independently of the domain of a given enterprise. Such problems would include poverty, malnutrition, obesity, widespread diseases, human rights violations, global warming (a problem that the social impacts of business have clearly contributed to), etc. Here, there is much that businesses can do, especially when they parse the challenge into opportunities that are consistent with their purpose and strategy. However, in doing so, management has to be very careful to not take on problems beyond its competence and to not inadvertently take accountability away from government and other organizations whose special purpose is to solve social problems.
