Building a Better Business Trap

The history of warfare has been one of swords and shields. One groups invents swords, the other shields. One invents armor, the other jousts. With walls came catapults, with trench warfare came air campaigns. The battle for the soul of business has been similar.

The early days of industrialization were brutal for workers. But they soon learned to organize and form unions. The primary way for unions to change the abusive behavior of businesses used to be by holding strikes. These strikes would imperil the workers and harm the economy, but they were effective - until businesses organized to take political power and break the power of striking workers. The triumph of unrestrained commerce began in the 70's and has continued in an era of conservatism since.

Unions remained throughout this time, but their tools were sharpened. Activist boycotts eventually came to replace strikes in many instances. They allowed more people to participate, and as they could be waged by from outside of the boycotted industry, they were less dangerous for workers - until the age of marketing and branding in the 80's and 90's made it more difficult to tarnish the reputation of a company.

Now unions, strikes, and boycotts haven't gone away. They are just being used more selectively. And their limitations are recognized. While punishments are great for getting someone to refrain from doing something, they tend to do a rather shoddy job of inspiring deeper transformations.

Thus buycotts were developed. Now any consumer could participate in the transformation of industry by buying products produced by the most socially and environmentally responsible companies. Of course, this had always been going on to some extent, but the efforts had become concerted. In a sense, the whole health food industry emerged through this trend. So has the clean tech industry which now rivals high tech for venture capital. Buycotts can galvanize energies and thrust the most caring entrepreneurs and employees into positions of leadership and power. And they challenge businesses to aspire to higher standards.

The problem with buycotts, like boycotts, has lain in deception. The budding conscious businesses of the early 80's and 90's were drowned out in the green washing of mega-corporations with mega-advertising budgets. But the web is changing this. At first the changes came through information sharing. Activists would e-mail others about this and that abuse of some business. Then we all experienced information overload.

More recently, this information has come to be systematized. Sites like this one are not only blogging or waging campaigns but organizing comprehensive guides to the behavior of business. We are scoring everything from carbon footprints to percentage of charitable contributions to the number of pending lawsuits waged against a corporation. The political power of industry has proved helpless thus far. This is a movement of shoppers after all, acting in an economy with more perfect information than ever before. So in a world of swords and shields, what comes next?

Theo Horesh, host of the Conscious Business Show, www.reframeamerica.com