Capitalism and Responsible Growth

It is imperative to see that globalisation has given much economic power to a group of large companies whose actions and activities are able to change the world

economically, politically and environmentally.The top 1,000 businesses hold 50% of the total market value of the world, out of the more than 60,000 publicly traded

companies. Also the top 83 businesses are responsible for more than a third of the top 1000 businesses revenue.With such huge concentration, responsible growth through

capitalism cannot be fully achieved by measures taken outside the system like funding orphanages, having congregational walks over a common theme, planting trees and

so on.This is just a start by business houses in being socially responsible. It can be said the model should be tweeked as the all these activities bring a sense of responsiblity outside the business.

With such powerful business houses, what we need is a model which brings responsible growth into the system. Only then would it be sustainable in the long run.Every product of the business should have a percentage of responsiblity associated to it.Agreed that it is a costly affair to start with, but the thousands of consumers who use the product should be the real benefactors of the product and not just catalysts to the growth of the business.The capitalism model which is able to incorporate social responsiblity within the very products it serves the customers with, is going to proceed in the longer run.For example a health-drink company just need not just show responsible growth by attempting to use eco-friendly packaging materials, but can also partner with

nutritionists and related organisations to educate rural people the risks of mal-nutrition and affordable methods to get rid of the products.This might improve your

sales in rural areas as well as bring awareness to the public.

This growth is sustainable as it goes hand-in-hand with the very business you are doing and also uses

the research and resources of your core business to provide responsible growth not only to you but to the customers as well.Capitalism initially adapted itself from being only a profit oriented entity to being responsible by handing over or giving out financial capital to charity via charitable organisations and NGOs.Then the next step (which is being currently followed in a lot of business houses) is to hand over their resources, especially human resources to the community to serve the community. Both the above steps followed the model of operating the business separately and doing social activities separately.This created a clear mismatch or conflict in many cases where the strategy they have for business development and the strategy for CSR activities might clash with each other.Hence the very purpose of bringing about a socially responsible growth pattern to the business gets defeated in the long-run and might also leads businesses back to the profit hungry models.So it is high time that businesses have a deep analysis on their organisational capabilities and core competencies along with how they have built the whole value chain.Once this analysis is done, they can start leveraging these capabilities and competencies to direct the value chain towards CSR.

The key-factors in determining the success of this model is how soon and how completely businesses/organisations are able to shift from the revenue growth based capitalism model to a responsible growth based capitalism model.This model along with the existing CSR activities would bring in not only a responsible but sustainable growth to the business and the economy as a whole.