Build Your CapEQ™ to Make an Equitable Impact

Here we are, getting close to the finish line. Thank you for sticking with it! If you are still reading, you have probably looked through all the resources, completed all the iterations of the Good Business Worksheet, and are excited to start talking with your teams about how to implement what you’ve learned and harness the full potential of your business.

Before you go skipping off into the sunset and close this book, I want to pull you back a bit and temper your expectations. The resources I’ve shared so far will help you begin increasing your equitable impact and improving your engagement with your customers, but they are only tools, not guarantees of success. Implementation is harder than filling out worksheets—plans are important—execution is the real challenge.

The truth is, you will probably face resistance to some of your equitable impact strategies. If you are a junior staff member, the leadership of your company may not be on board immediately, no matter how well-crafted your proposals are. If you are the boss, some of your staff may pay lip service to these ideas, but not commit fully to their execution. You may struggle to find the right partners to help implement your process; you may have some quick early wins, only to struggle and lose focus after a few months executing on your strategies. I’ve seen it all before—the path isn’t linear, and can be frustrating.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to leave you without any support as you start your doing well BY doing good journey. The way that you mitigate these ongoing challenges to implementing the plans you developed using the Good Business Worksheet is by increasing your company’s overall capacity to do this type of work. Plans are great, but if you are running a business, you know that success comes from more than just good planning. You need a strong, competent team with the right skills and knowledge to be able to execute on those plans, test them out, and see what works.

Building this skill set in your company may require a culture shift or a reorientation of your company’s purpose. Maybe your company has primarily been motivated or driven by profit margins without regard to its effect on all stakeholders; if so, you’ll have to ease off that for a bit in order for these changes to take hold to create your desired longer-term impact. Maybe you have a very established hiring process and culture onboarding process; that may need to shift. Your team may have to alter their focus, if only slightly, to acquire new knowledge and put their energy into different things.

But if you can make these cultural shifts and strengthen the resiliency and capacity of your organization, implementation will be easier. This cultural reorientation is big and will take time, but it will make your company stronger. You will be able to benefit not only from what you have built with your business to date, but you will expand on that success to acquire a new customer base with deeper engagement.

As I’ve said throughout this book, you should start this process wherever you think is right for you, your team, and your business. It may be with how you invest in your people, or it could be with a very specific procurement request for proposal (RFP) you have coming out next week. Starting somewhere is better than starting nowhere—as long as your goal is embedding equitable impact everywhere.

However, If you want to go deeper into what it takes to truly leverage the benefits of equitable impact with your customers, I will now walk you through a series of resources that can strengthen your company’s ability to do well BY doing good, not just instructions on how to put a plan together to change a product line or create a new community partnership.

I developed the CapEQ™ Continuum to help businesses walk through a step-by-step process for increasing their capacity to create equitable impact while expanding their profits. You can think of the capacity-building efforts as a parallel track to the advice I presented in earlier chapters. Usually, I recommend that my clients pursue both tracks at the same time: what they develop through the Good Business Worksheet can be thought of as an initial pilot program to test out immediate opportunities for equitable impact. The capacity-building work occurs throughout these pilots, and when the business is able to pick all their low-hanging fruits, they have the ability to take on more costly, but higher-impact projects.

CAPITALISM + EQUITABLE IMPACT

You’ve probably heard of IQ, that supposed universal test of intelligence. You may have even heard of EQ, which measures someone’s aptitude for emotional intelligence. But have you heard of CapEQ?

CapEQ™ is not only the name of my firm, it’s a concept I developed to help you and your company understand your capacity and willingness to do well BY doing good. It’s what happens when you use the tools of capitalism to create equitable impact.

We need to add equitable impact to capitalism because, although the engine of American capitalism has been proven to be a wealth generator, it has also proven to be a disparity generator. Despite all the inequities that capitalism creates, working within the capitalist system offers great potential in order to achieve the promise of the American ideals of freedom, mobility, and opportunity for all. It’s just hard to do—as almost 250 years of disparity and inequality have taught us.

During the Gilded Age of US history there were challenges to democracy—voter fraud, monopolies, and other forms of corruption and intimidation. The more wealth people amassed, the more they worked to keep it for themselves at the expense of others, even if it meant rigging the fight in their favor. As a result, income inequality skyrocketed to untenable levels. Labor, which produced the goods and services, was not earning wages commensurate with the value they created, not too different from when our country was founded and our national wealth was amassed through slave labor.

As a result of the disparities of the Gilded Age, the United States built guardrails around its capitalist system through a series of policies that protected workers by standardizing working conditions, limiting the total number of hours in the workweek, setting a minimum wage, and introducing other reforms. These policies were an attempt to begin defining and refining the ideals of American capitalism, and brought us back closer to the ultimate promise of capitalism: Hard work should pay off. Competition should be fair. And aligned incentives should yield mutual benefit for the employee, the consumer, and the company.

Our capitalist system has not always lived up to these ideals. The 2008 financial crisis showed us what happens when the guardrails come off and a small group of powerful decision-makers have free rein to do whatever they want with the markets. The fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic illustrated how frontline workers don’t get the protections or support they need, whereas wealthier “knowledge workers” were permitted to work from home and, therefore, protect themselves and their families.

Despite these warranted critiques of how capitalism has functioned in the United States, we still have the opportunity to make capitalism work as it was intended. That is why I am so dedicated to the capitalist model and capitalist ideals. The beauty of the system is that when capitalism functions well it should result in mutual benefit, that holy trinity of capitalism I discussed in Chapter 1. The idea that we can work together to better ourselves and others in fair and competitive trade is still worth fighting for.

Capitalism has had its failings, but by intentionally addressing the inequities in the system, we can make it a powerful tool for change. We need to combine the principles of capitalism with the strength of equitable impact to ensure that we are operating in a way that aligns with the promise of capitalism—that we can create mutual benefit for everyone.

This is the reasoning behind CapEQ. Fundamentally, your CapEQ measures you and your company’s willingness to rebuild capitalism and to simultaneously be driven by the values and culture of equitable impact. Bringing an equitable approach to capitalism allows you to see the human impact of your company, not just the financial impact, and helps you understand how the results of your business affect people and communities in unintended ways.

THE CapEQ™ CONTINUUM

The CapEQ continuum was developed by me and my team after working with hundreds of companies, nonprofits, and government agencies to help them create financial and social value. It is a simple, easy way for you and your company to determine what areas within your company need investment so you can successfully execute on the plans you created using the Good Business Worksheets. It evaluates your company’s practices based on a series of elements and places your company on a continuum from high CapEQ to low CapEQ. Improving your capacity in those areas can move your company from a low CapEQ to a high CapEQ.

There are five elements to CapEQ: buy-in, knowledge, quick wins, resources, and business model.

Buy-In

If you are reading this and you are the boss, then good work! You’ve already gotten buy-in—or you are on a good path to do so.

For the rest of my readers, the major gating factor to being able to implement new strategies for equitable impact is whether or not senior leadership has bought into the concept of doing well BY doing good. Nothing stands in your way like a boss who isn’t interested in what you are selling. Such resistance can be subtle—they are all smiles in meetings, but there’s no follow-up—or it can be explicit: a door slammed in your face! (Maybe not literally. . . .)

You may face resistance, as some business leaders hold fast to the mantra of “the business of business is business.” They do not want anything to do with something they see as irrelevant to their business model. Or, and this can be even worse, they already think they are doing enough through their corporate philanthropy or company volunteer program. They don’t want to push themselves to do more than the bare minimum.

Unfortunately, without buy-in at the top of the company, or at least in critical departments, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to implement much of my recommendations. All is not lost, because a critical part of increasing a company’s CapEQ is to make the case for why the company needs to integrate equitable impact into their operations.

Securing this buy-in is similar to any change management activity you’ve completed at your company—whether it’s rolling out a new HRIS system or onboarding a new CEO. You should first identify your problem areas (or people) as well as your areas of strength. If there are a few people at the company really passionate about this work, create an informal team and strategize how you can get more buy-in from the top. You can figure out a pilot opportunity; that’s a type of low-hanging fruit you develop using the Good Business Worksheet, and generate some quick wins to illustrate potential. You can also share some of the information and trends we’ve discussed to demonstrate the need to take on social causes in order for your company to remain competitive.

The remaining elements of the continuum can help you with the buy-in process. If you know that building capacity in one area would support this change management process, dive in and go from there!

Knowledge

Central to a strong CapEQ is staff knowledge on how to do well BY doing good. This is an easy fix—just give everyone at your company this book! If you are reading this, you’ve acquired enough knowledge to be considered the resident expert.¹

If making your whole company read this book isn’t feasible, you can share individual resources that I’ve highlighted in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 that you think might resonate with your coworkers or employees. Just as you need your staff to have a basic understanding of the ins and outs of your industry, it’s important that everyone on the team has a shared understanding of why you are making these changes to your company and how they will lead to greater impact for your community and your profits. This foundational knowledge will set your company up for success in the long run.

Increasing capacity in this area isn’t tricky—it just takes commitment. Study, study, study!

Quick Wins

Knowing something isn’t the same thing as doing something. To increase your CapEQ, your company has to demonstrate its ability to create equitable impact. What are the things you can change in your company to show that doing well BY doing good is possible?

When I work with clients, usually they have no idea how to start integrating equitable impact into their operations. But a few small changes and some evidence of success are enough to show what is possible and create momentum inside the company. It also helps to balance a sense of urgency to take action with the reality that long-term cultural shifts within a company take time and investment.

Small wins will lead to further success and build a foundation for future work. This is where that low-hanging fruit comes in and why it is so important. Determining where easy solutions can be implemented will help to show your staff and leadership what is possible and create the goodwill to move further up the CapEQ continuum.

As you build capacity in the other elements, these quick wins will turn into sustainable shifts within the organization. You’ll develop systems and infrastructure to support equitable impact across your company. Combining the lessons learned from these wins with the resources to grow your impact will help change your business model to maximize the full potential of your company.

Resources

If a business wants to do anything, it needs the money and resources to do it. Before setting off, it’s important that your company sets aside resources for equitable impact or social engagement. Without adequate resources committed to this process, it will be hard for your company to successfully implement all of the solutions identified by the Good Business Worksheet.

This may also seem like a pretty straightforward capacity area—either you have dedicated resources for equitable impact or you don’t. But actually, it’s not that simple. Many companies will start an “office of impact” or assign one staff member to coordinate involvement with social causes. There’s nothing wrong with approaching your resourcing of equitable impact in that way, but it can create a “siloed” effect. Remember, equitable impact should be a main course, not a side dish, and setting up a small “team of impact” may have that effect.

If you do have dedicated staff, make sure they are seen as facilitators or as a support team that’s coordinating activity across the company. If you are resourcing the work across the company, you can assign a point person to be the lead for that team or department and encourage coordination among these individuals.

Essentially, you cannot expect to be able to implement your good business plans unless you recognize implementation takes time and money. Once you’ve identified the changes you want to make, ensure that your staff or team members have the resources they need to execute on those plans, in whatever way they need to do so.

Business Model

If you want to make equitable impact your company’s main course, you’ll have to understand how your core business model aligns with the equitable impact you want to create. To have the highest CapEQ possible, your business should operate in a way that creates equitable impact whenever you bring in revenue or make a profit.

This may be the hardest area to change within your company, and it requires strong capacity in the other CapEQ areas. Some companies can easily shift their business model to align with equitable impact, but for some it’s much harder. Greyston Bakery, discussed in Chapter 4, has a very clear, socially-aligned business model. They say, “We don’t hire people to bake brownies, we bake brownies to hire people.”² For others, like Doc-Scan (see Chapter 2), changing a business model may be uncomfortable or may not always be feasible, at least not then.

To truly do well BY doing good, your company’s purpose—its business model—must be fully aligned with the equitable impact you want to create. Doing this will take all of the other elements of the CapEQ continuum:

•   Buy-in from senior leadership to begin and continue the process

•   The knowledge of what it takes to create equitable impact

•   Quick wins to demonstrate success and build momentum

•   The resources to keep everything going

All of these combine to shift your business model and create a company that exists to create social and financial returns.

This of course takes time and energy. It won’t happen overnight. But many companies have developed a business model that combines the financial and the social—you can too.

WHAT’S YOUR CapEQ?

Now that you know these elements, let’s figure where your company fits on the CapEQ continuum. The five elements of the continuum track to the five levels of impact readiness (see Figure 5.1). Because this is a continuum, there’s a spectrum of possibilities for where your company fits; most companies move from one level to the next as they increase their CapEQ.

FIGURE 5.1 The five levels of impact readiness on the CapEQ Continuum

Below are some guidelines that will help you determine where your company is on the continuum:

Level 1: You are here if you have not progressed in any of these areas—no buy-in, no activities to support equitable impact, no internal knowledge about what it takes, no dedicated resources—and your business model does not contain any equitable impact element. If your company is at Level 1, don’t worry. Let’s keep moving up the continuum to see how you can improve.

Level 2: At this level, you are just starting the process. You have buy-in across your company, or at least from your leadership, but you don’t have much more than that. You may have a few quick wins, but they are recent, and equitable impact has not yet been integrated beyond these few activities.

Level 3: Now your staff has the knowledge to implement innovative equitable impact strategies, which means your activities are stronger and you are developing some established infrastructure for equitable impact.

Level 4: To reach this level means you have started to dedicate resources to equitable impact, but mostly in the form of staff. To get to the next level, you’ll need to rethink your business model to bring in a dedicated income stream that connects to your equitable impact goals.

Level 5: You’ve made it! You are firing on all cylinders. You’ve successfully built capacity in all areas, allowing you to create a business model that helps you impact your main course. You are fully equipped to execute on all elements of the Good Business Worksheet.

THE SECRETS OF BUILDING YOUR CapEQ

Let’s take another step deeper into the CapEQ continuum and how you can use it to strengthen your company’s capacity for equitable impact. As I said at the beginning of the chapter, building your CapEQ requires making some fundamental cultural shifts within your company. Because your company culture is made up of individuals, there are some things you and your employees will have to grapple with to help orient everyone toward a more equitable capitalism.

We all have been taught or learned things about how our society works, which influence how we behave and what we think about the world. Some of these things are good and useful, and can help you survive, for example, treating others like you want to be treated, working hard and following through on your commitments, and telling the truth

But there are other things we are taught that may not be true, or may not be the whole truth. These may be prejudices or biases, but they can also be mental models for how we think about the world. One example I referenced earlier is that businesses should focus only on making profits and nothing else. We know now that isn’t true, but for a while it was considered gospel (and some people still think it is!). You also may have been taught that people who work hard succeed, and if someone isn’t successful, or lives in poverty, it’s because they haven’t worked hard enough. Walk into any fast-food restaurant or other place where people work (often at multiple jobs) for minimum wage and tell me they aren’t working hard—or even harder—than someone who has an easier job for better pay.

As you implement your plans using the Good Business Worksheet and build up your CapEQ capacity, you may run into coworkers who believe these learned mental models, which can make it hard for you to move forward with implementing equitable impact strategies. Or there may be people in your company who hold mental models that make them resist working differently. This makes it harder to secure buy-in and integrate equitable impact throughout your company.

Challenging these beliefs is normal and a part of the process. I have seen this happen time and time again. That’s why the real secret to building your CapEQ is to confront these beliefs in yourself and others and work to shift mindsets to be more open to what doing well BY doing good can do for you, your company, and society.

I have identified three of the major mental models that limit a company’s CapEQ. Shifting these mindsets can help you and your company rethink how you do business and create value.

Mindset: Winner Take All

The first shift to help you build your CapEQ is to move from a place of scarcity to a place of abundance. You often hear phrases like “dog-eat-dog” or “zero-sum game” with respect to the business ecosystem, which makes it seem like an overcompetitive, I-win-you-lose atmosphere. That’s because, for the most part, we operate in a society that is zero-sum and relies on a framework of scarcity.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Approaching things from a scarcity mindset—whether that’s thinking about your quarterly sales, your supply chain, or something as large scale as the global economic market—will only limit you in what you want to achieve. Shifting to a mindset of abundance can help you realize the many resources you have at your disposal to create the impact you want to see.

At the project management software company Basecamp, for example, employees work no more than 32 hours a week.³ Its CEO isn’t impressed by staff who work overtime, and celebrates that his employees have abundant, full lives. Yet they are still able to maintain thousands of customers.⁴ How?

Instead of thinking of their time as a scarce resource, the company prioritizes treating their employees right. And by limiting work hours to allow staff to invest in other parts of their lives, the company is able to prioritize the things that matter. They have shifted their mindset around what it means to work hard and have found that there are enough resources for employees to both be successful at work and live full lives.

To shift this mindset in you and your company, consider your true strengths and the strengths of your network, and how you can nurture your network while also growing your company. There may be customers you never considered before, or a talent pool you never tapped into because you were focused too much on limits and not enough on potential.

Mindset: The Great Man Theory of Success

We all know the story—the exceptional founder starting a company in his (it’s almost always a “he’’) basement, working at it for years, and turning that company into a multibillion-dollar enterprise. This heroic story doesn’t only apply to businesses. We remember presidents or other public figures as great men who turned the tide of history, and forget the social movements that led to and supported the changes ushered in by these individuals.

But most of us also know that the heroic story isn’t the full story. That individual founder had a team behind him, and presidents have their cabinets, supporters, and grassroots volunteers. No one ever really does anything alone.

Companies are beginning to understand the power of community in their consumer base. Many are nurturing “brand ambassadors”—customers who love their products and want to support the mission of the company. Athleta, the fitness wear company referenced in Chapter 2, has developed a network of Athleta Ambassadors⁵ to spread the word about their products and live its mission of empowering women. Relying heavily on social media, these ambassadors form a community to expand Athleta’s customer base beyond what the company could do on its own.

Consider how you understand and authentically connect with your community to identify your unique value proposition. By figuring out what your customers want from you, you can begin to invest in and grow an interconnected community that thrives together. You will be surprised what you’ll find when you look beyond the individual and see the community support that exists for those that need it.

Mindset: Survival of the Fittest

Thinking in abundance and building a community requires a collaborative mindset, different from the competitive approach most businesses take. I’m not saying that you should drop all elements of competition—that’s what allows capitalism to thrive, after all. But a collaborative approach can help you see where your strengths complement the other company’s weaknesses, and how you could both grow together in a sustainable way. For this reason, I refer to CapEQ’s clients as partners; we are building a collaborative network of companies and organizations committed to doing well BY doing good.

One of the first things I ask my clients when working with them is: Who is your competition? Is it another company with a similar business model? Or is there some systemic issue that you want to eliminate from the market that will help everyone?

Take the example of Griffin Hospital, an acute care hospital in Connecticut. In the 1980s, they were known as a hospital to avoid. Today, they are an award-winning, patient-centered hospital with great results.⁶ How did they make this shift? Well, when the CEO decided they needed to make a change, instead of focusing on growth that took clients away from another hospital, they focused on something bigger: the entire way of doing business in the healthcare industry. They focused on building community with staff, patients, and volunteers, and developed a culture that helped them thrive.

When you set your sights on solving a problem that is bigger than an industry or market, you can collaborate effectively with others. Making this competitive/collaborative mindset shift can help you see your business model in a whole new way and fundamentally change how your business does business.

THE ULTIMATE GOAL: CHANGING SYSTEMS

The CapEQ Continuum helps increase your company’s capacity to do well BY doing good, and the Good Business Worksheet helps you implement your solutions and plans to harness the power of equitable impact to secure new customers and strengthen your relationship with them. If you commit to these processes and dedicate the right amount of resources and time to them, you can transform your business to become a company that is fully aligned with equitable impact. There is no difference between your ability to generate profit and your ability to generate equitable impact. You can become a company that is fully equipped for the opportunities of the modern business climate.

If you undergo this transformation, you will be undertaking what academics and researchers call “systems change.” This is a hard concept to grasp, but it is a critical concept for the creation of equitable impact, whether at the company level or the societal level.

The great systems thinker Donella Meadows describes a system as “an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.”⁷ This is a simple definition of a complex idea. Systems are all around us—we have an educational system that teaches our children, a criminal justice system that punishes people who break the laws we have agreed to, a financial system that distributes money across our economy, and an agricultural system that produces food for us to eat. Systems don’t have to be social or require human intervention: there are environmental systems like the water cycle, weather patterns, and ocean ecosystems.

Talking about systems is so challenging because, as individuals, we don’t really see them. We just live our lives, and the systems produce the outcomes we want. Our kids go to school, traffic flows on the highway, the lights turn on when we flip a switch. The problem arises when the systems we don’t really see produce outcomes that aren’t great. Black men go to jail way more frequently than white men, income inequality skyrockets, our world gets hotter and hotter.

Because we don’t see these systems, it is much harder to change them when we want to. John Kania, Mark Kramer, and Peter Senge wrote a report called “The Water of Systems Change” for FSG, the social impact consulting firm. They tell a variation of a story that’s commonly used to discuss systems and systems change:

A fish is swimming along one day when another fish comes up and says “Hey, how’s the water?” The first fish stares back blankly at the second fish and then says “What’s water?”⁸

How are we expected to change the water all around us if we can’t even see it? Luckily, systems experts have been thinking about this problem for decades and have some suggestions. Kania, Kramer, and Senge distill some of the major lessons of systems thinking and the experts who study systems to come up with what they call the Six Conditions of Systems Change (see Figure 5.2).

FIGURE 5.2 Six conditions of systems change⁹

The authors define each condition as follows:

1.   Policies: Government, institutional, and organizational rules, regulations, and priorities that guide the entity’s own and others’ actions.

2.   Practices: Espoused activities of institutions, coalitions, networks, and other entities targeted to improving social and environmental progress. Also, within the entity, the procedures, guidelines, or informal shared habits that comprise their work.

3.   Resource Flows: How money, people, knowledge, information, and other assets such as infrastructure are allocated and distributed.

4.   Relationships & Connections: Quality of connections and communication occurring among actors in the system, especially among those with differing histories and viewpoints.

5.   Power Dynamics: The distribution of decision-making power, authority, and both formal and informal influence among individuals and organizations.

6.   Mental Models: Habits of thought—deeply held beliefs and assumptions and taken-for-granted ways of operating that influence how we think, what we do, and how we talk.¹⁰

These six conditions all have effects from the explicit to the implicit. While explicit changes are the easiest to see, they actually have the smallest impact. The more implicit changes are, the more long-term impact they can have.

The first three conditions—policies, practices, and resource flows—all produce explicit, structural changes. Kania, Kramer, and Senge use the example of the Affordable Care Act as an example of these kinds of explicit system change. The ACA changed policies around healthcare; for example, insurance companies were no longer able to deny coverage based on pre-existing health conditions. It also changed healthcare practices, such as incentivizing preventive care. The ACA also expanded access to insurance, which was a massive change in resource flows for the economy. But while it delivered these tangible benefits, it didn’t really change Americans’ mindset around healthcare as a fundamental human right (at least not initially), and it received strong resistance from conservatives who saw it as government overreach.

Relational changes are semi-explicit, and can produce tangible and intangible results. These are changes in relationships or power dynamics that can lead to explicit changes. The authors reference an antihomelessness initiative in Los Angeles that led to new connections between the city government and county government that had never before worked together, despite each overseeing elements of the system that provides services for individuals without a home. The two governments were able to agree on joint funding of new housing units that would help reduce homelessness—something that wouldn’t have happened without the change in relationships.

The final type of system change condition—mental models—is the most powerful and can lead to true transformational change. But this type of change is also the most implicit, hardest to see, and hardest to achieve. These are the changes to our way of thinking that help us rethink things we have been taught or assumptions we hold that are no longer helpful. Changes to our mental models can have dramatic and lasting impact, even if those changes come over time and it’s hard to draw a connection from one to the next.

Kania, Kramer, and Senge use the example of the Mothers Against Drunk Driving campaign that changed people’s mental model about drunk driving by showing the impact of losing a child to such an accident. This campaign shifted drunk driving from a tolerable and common issue to something inexcusable and immoral, undoubtedly saving thousands of lives. Changes in our perceptions about smoking is another example of a transformative mental model change. Even things like changing perceptions of gender norms or race relations are mental model shifts, and show how powerfully the way we think about the world can influence people’s lives and how we act as a society.

CHANGE YOUR BUSINESS, CHANGE YOUR SYSTEM

What does all this system change stuff mean for your business? It means that no matter the size of your company, you can be a part of large-scale changes to our society. By following the steps outlined in this book, you can help influence all of the six conditions of systems change. Each of the ways you change your business practices—how you make your money, how you spend your money, and how you invest in your people—can change the bigger systems you operate in.

Changing your practices so your product development is carbon neutral will have a direct impact on reducing greenhouse gases and improving our environmental system. Creating new relationships with local businesses to diversify your procurement contracts can help those businesses grow and thrive, reinvesting even more back into the community. Rethinking your hiring practices and where you go to source talent can create a mental model shift in your company about who might be a good employee and why. And, if you work in partnership with other businesses around all of these changes—taking that mindset shift from competition to collaboration—changes within your business can lead other companies to do the same.

As you revisit the Good Business Worksheet and work to implement the recommendations, consider which systems you want to change and how your solutions will influence each of the six conditions of systems change. The environment may be most important to you, or perhaps it’s the criminal justice system. Maybe changing the educational system aligns more with your business model. Ultimately, the Good Business Worksheet and the CapEQ Continuum aren’t just about increasing your capacity as a company, but increasing our ability as a society to use capitalism as a tool to create prosperity for all.

I have decided the system I want to change is how the world does business. It is my life’s goal. It has brought me to all kinds of clients working to do different things. (It also brought me to writing this book.) It is a big goal, and a big system to change, but we can do it if we all work together and leverage the true potential of business. Thank you for joining me on this journey and working to do well BY doing good.

CapEQ QUIZ

Does your company have a mission statement or similar statement that includes a commitment to equitable impact?

1.   No written mission statement

2.   Yes, a mission statement with stated values related to equitable impact (i.e., diversity, inclusion, etc.)

3.   Yes, a mission statement with stated equitable impact areas of focus (i.e., environment, human rights, etc.)

4.   Yes, a mission statement with specific equitable impact goals (i.e., increasing affordable housing, reducing waste, etc.)

Does your company have professional development or other training for staff around concepts related to equitable impact?

1.   No.

2.   No, but staff are interested in the topic and some do independent learning.

3.   Yes, we have one professional development or educational resource for staff around equitable impact.

4.   Yes, we have multiple resources for staff to support their learning around equitable impact.

How many initiatives (internal or external) has your company implemented around equitable impact?

1.   None

2.   1–2

3.   3–5

4.   Everything our business does is connected to equitable impact in some way.

Does your company have staff dedicated to equitable impact?

1.   No dedicated staff

2.   Staff with some portion of their responsibility related to equitable impact

3.   One staff person who is completely dedicated to equitable impact

4.   2+ staff members who are completed dedicated to equitable impact

What are your motivations for pursuing equitable impact through your company (please choose the primary motivator)?

1.   Competitive pressure to focus more on equitable impact, either from customers, staff, or other market elements

2.   A desire to do good for the world

3.   To help develop innovative new products or processes

4.   It is a part of the core business model

Total up all numbers associated with your answer: _________