Starting Small

Yesterday, I read a fascinating piece in the NYTimes Magazine about how investing in women is the solution to global poverty and extremism.  It’s a compelling essay written by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, but if you don’t have time to read it, this video by Girl Effect pretty much sums it up.

I often think of social responsibility from a big-scale, holistic perspective—businesses need to integrate social value into every level of operations, otherwise it’s just not good enough.

I absolutely believe that from an ideological standpoint, but understand it’s not always achievable from a practical one.  Sometimes the big-scale has to wait.

Micro-finance is a perfect example of the benefits of starting small.  Little financial investment leads to growing business leads to personal worth leads to community development leads to a major shift in cultural thinking.  It’s not cheesy, it’s just the documented results of what the most basic social effort can achieve.

Social responsibility is fundamentally about leadership, but starting small is where every business must begin its journey into the creation of social value.  Which supplier can we choose that will provide opportunities for disadvantaged workers?  What employee policies can we tweak to motivate them to make better decisions?  Where can we invest a portion of our profits that will produce dividends beyond the financial kind?

We all have to begin somewhere.  Starting small helps us realize how simple social responsibility can be, lets us track and celebrate our impact, and teaches us the process by which real change occurs: step by step.

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