Multinational corporations are luring millennial workers with empty promises and self-serving slogans.
I still have the red lanyard I wore at the “Business Fights Poverty” conference at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School last summer. The badge asked me to write my name on the front, and, on the back, state the “purpose that drives me” and the “people I need.” The idea, a conference organizer later explained, was that together, the guests—a mix of businesspeople, development workers, and NGO staffers—would “unlock opportunities for social impact.” With its Davos-style platitudes and its TED-inspired evangelism, the conference exemplified the corporate credo that economic inequality can and should be solved by innovative market solutions and compassionate millionaires. Here, inequality is not the outcome of power imbalances, with traceable roots and political structures, but an ahistorical “challenge” just waiting for thought leaders to fix it.
Business Fights Poverty (BFP) is the world’s largest business-led network of companies, non-governmental organizations and aid organizations working together to “embed purpose in business,” as the company puts it. With a team of over a dozen “challenge managers” and “thought leadership directors,” the business of London-based BFP is to amplify a doctrine that some CEOs have been pushing for a while now: that a new and more humane kind of capitalism is underway, in which big business is driven as much by “purpose” as by profits and delivers as many “social returns” as it does financial ones.
Under this “purpose paradigm,” doing what’s right for society is perfectly compatible with what’s right, commercially, for the corporate bottom line. With so many governments failing to protect their people from poverty, exploitation, and climate catastrophe, the logic goes, market solutions—led by ethical, trailblazing CEOs with the support and trust of pragmatic nonprofit partners—are humanity’s best hope to alleviate poverty, inequality and toxic political climates.
The Saïd Business School was a fitting venue for such an endeavor: With its slick lobby, its TV screens at every corner and a glass wall facing the street, it looks more like a management consulting firm than a university. Most panel discussions and presentations that day took place in the Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre, a large hall with a broad podium directly adjacent to the lobby. As I waited for the lecture hall’s doors to open and the conference to kick off, I took a seat on one of the burgundy couches close to the window. Here, my eyes fell on a set of brochures advertising some of the school’s courses. Only one program explicitly promised students commercial success; all the other programs emphasized the positive social impact graduates of the program could make with their degrees.
The school wasn’t pitching profits. It was promising graduates purpose.
The school’s MBA program, for example–a one-year full-time course with a price tag of £57,200 ($75,804)–trains students to apply business skills to complex social problems, restore trust “in institutions and each other,” and prepares them for overall “purposeful careers.” Its executive courses in Impact Investing and Social Finance pledge to equip professionals from workplaces such as USAID, Morgan Stanley, the European Investment Bank, and Oxfam—portrayed as perfectly natural collaborators—with the confidence, leadership skills, and practical tools they need to fight poverty, “make successful deals” and “deliver financial, environmental and social returns” on a global scale. These courses only take five days, but don’t come cheap; participants are expected to pay £6,000 ($7,637) for tuition alone. The price tag is indicative of how profitable poverty can be, if fought the right way.
“Embedding purpose into business is emerging as a powerful paradigm,” explained Holly Branson, the 37-year-old daughter of British business tycoon Richard Branson, later that morning. “When you put purpose at the heart of everything you do you will attract the best talent.” “It’s the ultimate win-win.”
Branson has been promoting the purpose paradigm for some time now. In her recent book Weconomy, You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living and Change the World, Branson argues that “social purpose is the biggest thing to happen to business since [the invention of] the assembly line.” The driving force behind this turn to purpose, says Branson, are millennials. The typical millennial worker wants “to work for a company that has purpose baked into its culture.”
Branson’s book is part of a bulging genre of business media and literature concerned with the question on how to attract millennials to corporate jobs through purpose. This genre now includes TED Talks by finance professors; LinkedIn Studies; business articles on news sites like the BBC and The Telegraph; and leadership columns and recruitment-advice pieces on websites such as Forbes.
According to a blog post published by the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, the “Purpose Zeitgeist”—their term—has now convinced executives around the Western world that “purpose is an idea whose time has come”: not out of altruism but self-preservation. Larry Fink, the CEO of the asset management giant BlackRock, warned fellow managers in a recent letter that without “a sense of purpose,” companies “will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders.”
And the millennial laborer is a “stakeholder”—an intentionally vague term used to obscure power relations between social groups—to be reckoned with. In the United States, millennials made up 35 percent of the workforce in 2017. By 2025, they’re expected to represent three-quarters of the workforce. Globally, one in three workers will be a millennial by 2020, according to the Financial Times.If interested see also Thursday's "Brand purpose” is a lie (PG; SBUX; JNJ; MDLZ)"
A raft of surveys, articles, and polls suggest that the millennial generation, which came of age during the financial crisis, is skeptical of big business and market solutions. It tends to favor a stronger role for governments, disapproves of tax cuts for the rich, likes trade unions more than their parents do, and feels more sympathy for socialism—which it associates with equality and fairness—than for capitalism.
In the UK, the “Maoist Millennial” made headlines in early 2018, after a survey claimed that 24 percent of its respondents—youth between 18 and 24 years old—viewed “big business as the most dangerous force in the world today.” Later that year, in the United States, a survey conducted by the University of Chicago found that most millennials, across race and ethnicity, “believe a strong government rather than a free market approach is needed to address today’s complex economic problems.”
These polls and surveys about millennial anti-capitalist angst are the foundation of the corporate-purpose zeitgeist, which seeks to win the trust of the millennial and channel her radical energies along market friendly lines.
Contrary to its purported aim, the point of purpose isn’t to drive change. It’s to make sure any change stays within the tightly bound comfort zone of the world’s most powerful executives.
In targeting millennial talent, many companies have turned to elite campuses. During my time studying at Cambridge, I’ve seen multiple examples; from posters inviting students to compete in “Capital for Purpose” essay contests to Morgan Stanley recruitment leaflets that boasted about the (presumably positive) impact the firm is making in its “communities.” (Like “stakeholder,” the term “community” is often used to convey a vague sense of solidarity with working people.)During a visit to Columbia University, my alma mater, in New York City last fall, I learned that here too, there was no escaping purpose. Right outside the entrance of Butler library, I encountered a small but colorful company stand by CLIF Company, tempting students to confide our “purpose in life” in exchange for a free protein bar.....MORE
