Business is mission

It's been a long week on the project, with several full days of workshops - there are some difficult decisions to be made which have a high impact on the shape our project will take over the coming years. Without going into details, this is really about the vision that World Vision has for their people as well as for the communities in which World Vision is "invested".

In a typical organisation, this decision is not easy, but there are standard measures that can be used to guide the decision such as financial impact, risk, availability of required inputs such as infrastructure and skills, etc. However, for World Vision there is another aspect to take into account which is that of ministry - does this strategy benefit the people that it impacts directly or indirectly? For example - if we were to build a capability in a remote village which requires us to build infrastructure and train people in that location over the long term, is that preferable over building it in a location where the required skills and infrastructure already exist, leaving more money to help the remote village in other ways? It all comes down to what the vision and mission are, and that is what we have been trying to get clarity on this past week.

Another interesting aspect of working on this project is the element of faith. In coming to some of these difficult decisions, there is a recognition that us mortals will ultimately only succeed if God is with us (I am paraphrasing here, you can substitute God with a higher power or destiny) - meaning that in the end there is no right or wrong decision, just the best decision we can make based on our abilities and that we need faith in God/higher power/destiny to succeed. The concept of business is mission is that faith and money in themselves are not "good" or "evil", they are just different sides of the coin. If your business is to help the poor, and you need money to do so, then being "business minded", i.e. acting like a for-profit organisation is part of your mission because you will be more effective in helping the poor by being effective in making money.

I find this a difficult concept to wrap my head around because in history this has been subject to a lot of abuse. It is impossible to tell the difference between pure good intentions and greed in subscribing to this concept of business is mission as the visible actions arising out of these opposing philosophies may well be identical.

The other highlight of the discussions we've had in the last week is the concept of "the tyranny of or, and the brilliance of and". In all business decisions, there is a trade-off between different options and ultimately there is no perfect solution. However, this has been challenged - if one goes into a decision saying that there will be no compromise or trade-off, that is, we will not sacrifice one benefit for another, what would the solution look like?

Certainly it has been enlightening and I find myself having to consciously keep an open mind in order to prevent my 20 years of university and business experience from rejecting these concepts out of hand!