Please REALLY Think About the Poor This Holiday Season

This post is not a plea for you to give money or charity to the poor this holiday season. In fact, I’m asking you to do something harder.

If you are a business leader, you have more power to help the poor than you know. You need to use it.

Over the last three centuries, during the time when our modern economy was built, it was built to maximize profit. Most businesses on our planet are profit maximizing businesses (“PMBs” for short — a definition from Nobel laureate Mohammad Yunus.) Profit seeking (and its protector — externalizing risk) is the concept around which all business activities are organized. I’m not saying anything new; this is a simple definition of Capitalism.

Regardless of whether you are in agriculture, industry, or a service business, there are poor people in your supply chain somewhere. More than 700 million people around the world still live in abject poverty (less than $1.90/day), another 2.1 billion (all World Bank estimates) live below their society’s definition of the poverty line, and another 1.4 billion members of the working poor globally.

By this expanded definition, that’s 3.5 billion people, or nearly 50% of humanity. Numerically, it’s just not possible that you don’t know, work with, have people in your supply chain, or are served by someone who isn’t poor.

This is also true as a consumer.

Fair Trade chocolate looks and tastes just as delicious as any artisanal or commercial chocolate.

Do you like chocolate? I certainly do, a lot, but have you seen the latest Netflix documentary about what the life of chocolate producers in Ghana is like? Whether or not you know it, if you’re eating non-fair trade chocolate, you’re contributing to global poverty. That is a fact.

It should be noted that many of the largest global agricultural conglomerates have been doing good work to try and wring poverty out of their supply chain, and the Fair Trade movement was born more than 70 years ago to bring attention to the plight of the globally poor that produce some agricultural products. And yet, poverty persists.

It persists because the organizational force of PMB are what drive almost all behavior in our economy. Our global supply chains are organized by PMB’s, to work with other PMB’s, and all the actors in these markets are very careful to ensure that they profit. Of course, they have to be profitable; if they don’t, eventually, they will cease to exist.

Or will they? Currently, I’m betting my personal career, reputation, and money to prove that a non-PMB can do a better job at serving clients in the Outsourcing industry than a PMB can. That’s why it’s called “Fair Trade Outsourcing.” If the international trade between a source of work and the producer of that work (in our case, our Agent in a call-center or back office) can’t be done to our fair trade standard, then we don’t do the trade.

I want to introduce you to a very important fact of international trade. Our prices versus our competitors are the same. We charge the same price as competitors, but have organized our supply chain to fight poverty while doing business. It costs us no more (in fact, we have reason to believe our margins are higher) to do this, we’ve just decided that in the people-intensive business of outsourcing, we don’t want to be in a contract with a client unless it’s fair trade.

Removing poverty from our supply chain is a feature, not a bug. And, I’m betting my career that you can do the same in your supply chain.

For some of you, it will be much harder than for others. For example, the global agricultural supply chain has many layers of counter-parties handling products from field to table. These layers necessarily mean that there are many businesses and business models that have to be evaluated for their poverty contributions.

But, chances are, your global organization already has work underway to address this. If not, there are many resources within your industry that are already working to address this problem. Where can you contribute?

If you are in global manufacturing, again, it will be hard, but you have more resources, and your industry has more years of experience trying to tackle this problem. Have you looked into this issue yourself? Or maybe — can you get the leaders above you to recognize how you’re already interacting with the poor — and to care about this crucial issue for humanity?

Those of you in the service industry — like me — have the greatest opportunity. My observation is that much of the service industry — food service, personal services, and outsourcing — are not thinking much about how to help alleviate global poverty. It’s ironic because we’re the ones that work the most closely with, and rely upon, poor people to make our businesses work. We’re confronted with it every day, but are we the most blind?

So in summary, in this holiday season, if you’re thinking about giving to charity — don’t. Instead, spend that time thinking about how in your business, you can both touch and alleviate poverty. It will be the best New Year’s resolution you’ll ever make.