FOREWORD  

The Future of Business Is Delivering Value to All Stakeholders

Even before we sold AND 1—the company I co-led with some of my closest friends that grew into a $240 million global basketball apparel, footwear, and entertainment brand—I knew it was time to do something different.

In our decade plus of building a global brand, we learned a lot about how business works. Not just what they teach in MBA classes, but what it actually takes to go from selling T-shirts out of the trunk of a car to competing successfully against Nike and other multibillion dollar businesses with way more resources.

Among other things like smarts, hard work, and luck (and in our case some race, gender, and class advantages I wasn’t fully appreciative of at the time), AND 1 was successful because we had a clear purpose that spoke to the hearts of our incredibly talented team. AND 1’s mission was to become the number one basketball company in the world. We would accomplish that by being the brand for ballplayers who talked trash and had the game to back it up. People love an underdog, and that was true not only for the 200 people who worked directly for AND 1, but also for our global distributors, suppliers, warehouse and financing partners, retailers, and of course the millions of basketball players who saw themselves (or who they wanted to be on the court) in our brand.

In addition to shared purpose and a great place to work (with a gym, full court hoops, yoga classes, and lots of family-friendly activities), AND 1 shared the upside of building a successful brand with all of our employees through stock options. Following the lead of trailblazers like Patagonia and Ben & Jerry’s, AND 1 generated those profits responsibly, primarily by implementing a best-in-class code of conduct for all of our footwear and apparel suppliers, ensuring that the 10,000 young women who worked in our suppliers’ factories were paid fairly and treated well in safe and healthy working conditions. AND 1 also donated 5 percent of its net profits, cumulatively more than $2 million, to youth and education programs that benefited our target customers. As a result of this culture and these practices, all of our team members, suppliers, and other partners felt vested in our collective success so they stepped up in various ways to save our company from numerous life-threatening situations.

When we sold AND 1, it didn’t take long for the new owner, American Sporting Goods, to gut all of those responsible business practices. ASG turned a stakeholder-driven business into a shareholder-driven business, with only one shareholder. It’s not surprising to me that AND 1 as a brand has deteriorated largely into “whatever-happened-to” status, and that AND 1 as a business is no longer a good bet for long-term shareholder value creation because it has been resold at least three or four times, and has likely not produced any meaningful value for the rest of its stakeholders.

My AND 1 experience showed me both the power of delivering value to all your stakeholders and the perils of focusing exclusively on delivering value to shareholders. As I began the mental transition from AND 1, I wanted to find a way to support business leaders and investors seeking to practice this better way of doing business—better for themselves, better for their workers, better for their communities, better for the environment.

Luckily, as with AND 1, I was joined by two of my closest friends—Bart Houlahan, AND 1’s president, and Andrew Kassoy, an original AND 1 investor and Wall Street veteran—and together we cofounded the nonprofit B Lab in 2006. B Lab is best known as the certifier of B Corporations, businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. The “B” stands for the benefit they create for all stakeholders—their customers, workers, suppliers, communities, and the environment. There are now more than 4,600 certified B Corporations across 155 industries and 78 countries, including disruptors who have gone public at billion-dollar valuations like Allbirds and Guild Education, planet- and people-first icons like Patagonia and Ben & Jerry’s, and Fortune 500 multinationals like Danone North America and Natura (owner of The Body Shop).

Beyond those businesses who have earned status as certified B Corporations, the innovation that creates legal accountability to balance profit and purpose is now being used by more than 12,000 businesses. This was made possible after B Lab and the community of certified B Corporations helped pass laws in nearly 40 US states, including Delaware, the legal home of the majority of publicly traded companies, and about a half-dozen countries, to create a new corporate structure called a benefit corporation, which upgrades the fiduciary duty of directors to include a requirement to consider the impact of their decisions on all stakeholders, not just shareholders. In one indication of mainstream market acceptance, BlackRock, the world’s largest investor with more than $10 trillion in assets under management, recently announced in their 2022 proxy guidance to equity investors that they were generally supportive of management proposals to adopt the benefit corporation’s stakeholder governance structure.

I am currently the CEO of Imperative 21, a network of allied organizations, including B Lab, The B Team, CECP (Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose), Common Future, Conscious Capitalism, the GIIN (Global Impact Investing Network), JUST Capital, and Participant Media, who believe the imperative of the twenty-first century is to transform our economic system so that it can fulfill its higher purpose to create shared well-being on a healthy planet. In short, we work in radical collaboration to shift the narrative about the purpose of business and to accelerate mainstream adoption of stakeholder capitalism as the next normal for business leaders.

This trend toward credible stakeholder capitalism with true accountability for stakeholder performance is accelerating because of rising expectations of customers, workers, and investors. If you want to compete successfully for customers, talent, and capital, you need to do more than talk about purpose, you need to know how to deliver value to all your stakeholders. That’s why this new book by Tynesia Boyea-Robinson is so important and useful.

Tynesia Boyea-Robinson (or Ty, as she encourages those who know her to call her) knows what it takes to integrate this stakeholder orientation into day-to-day business decisions about how we as business leaders make money, spend money, and invest in people. Many people talk about stakeholder capitalism, “ESG,” “sustainable business,” “impact investing,” or “social enterprise,” but Ty actually knows what’s behind this language. As you will read, Ty has collected a career’s worth of insights by operating at the intersection of business, government, and nonprofits. She knows what it takes to deliver value to all stakeholders, and this book has everything you need to build a great business by doing the same.

More pointedly, two years into a long overdue racial reckoning, societal expectations to advance racial equity are rising. Through a group I’ve been involved with since June 2020 called WMRJ (White Men for Racial Justice), I’ve seen Ty help business leaders learn how to use their positions of power and influence to build businesses and a supportive economic system that work for everyone regardless of where they were born or the color of their skin. With deep insights, contagious passion, and infectious humor, I’ve seen Ty help business leaders learn how to integrate an equity lens into every business decision, and, importantly, how to respond to understandable concerns that delivering on racial equity will be bad for white people. Ty has helped me and other business leaders see that the opposite is true.

I wish I had had this book 15 years ago when I was starting B Lab, or even better, when I was starting AND 1. I could have avoided many mistakes, and I would have been able to do so much more for my company and our stakeholders so much more quickly.

A stakeholder orientation is better for your business, better for our humanity, and better for society. Proof is everywhere you look: for example, JUST Capital, one of the Imperative 21 network steward organizations, found that public companies who deliver value to all their stakeholders outperformed Russell 1000 Index companies by roughly 30 percent.¹

As Ty says, your customers—and your current and potential employees—do really want you to be good. You can choose to meet this customer and employee demand and benefit from it, or you can ignore this trend and lose your customers and talent to another business.

I’m glad you are reading this book. Your customers will thank you, your employees will thank you, your investors will thank you, and, most importantly, your children will thank you for showing them what it looks like to live a life with purpose authentically at the center.

JAY COEN GILBERT

entrepreneur and cofounder, AND 1 and B Lab; CEO, Imperative 21