Balancing Profit and Social Responsibility with Bea Boccalandro

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sikach** (0:18)
Hey Mike, I know we were talking about what our daughters wanted to do. I'll tell you what my daughter's looking to study, it's Forensic Pathology now. And I'm like, this is hardcore.
Anyway, that's it for another show, but welcome everyone to the Bliss Business Podcast. I'm Stephen Sikach here with my co-host, Mike Lusky. Today's conversation tackles an ongoing challenge in business. How to balance profit with social responsibility? Can companies truly thrive while making a positive impact? Or does doing good mean sacrificing financial success? Mike, introduce our guest today.

**Mike Lusky** (0:58)
Oh, man. Thank you, Stephen. I'm super fired to do that. So our guest today is none other than Bea Boccalandro. She's known fondly to others as Bea. She's a leading expert in the purpose-driven business area. She's an author as well as an advisor to Fortune 500 companies on how to integrate social good into their core business strategies, which we know our audience has a great deal of interest in. So Bea as well has worked with brands like IBM, Disney and Toyota to embed purpose into their daily work, making social impact a natural part of business operations rather than something that's sort of like a side initiative. Her book, Do Good at Work, has inspired countless leaders to rethink how they approach purpose in their business. And so Bea, welcome to our show. We are so happy to have you here with us today.

**Bea Boccalandro** (1:56)
I'm happier. Yeah, I love the work you're doing and I love this podcast. So thank you for having me.

**Mike Lusky** (2:05)
Yeah, and thank you for being here with us today. We're going to talk about a lot of good things today. I know I'm sure, but maybe to get us started, why do you believe that social responsibility isn't just like an ethical choice, but really like a smart business strategy?

**Bea Boccalandro** (2:25)
Well, two words, it's time. It's just time. So, imagine that you started a construction company, wherever you are, you know, in San Clemente, California, and you were like, you know what? We're going to go back to the way things were done in the 1930s. So, no hard hats, no worker protection for falls. If a worker slips off a beam, they're just going to splatter 15, you know, 15 floors down, right?
How profitable would this business be?

**Stephen Sikach** (3:08)
Yeah.

**Bea Boccalandro** (3:09)
Good luck finding investors, right? Good luck finding customers, employees. It's not going to work. But you know what? In the 1930s, that was profitable.
And the freaks were the managers like Joseph Strauss, who was the chief engineer for the Golden Gate Bridge, who said, we're going to give workers hard hats. We're going to string a net across the entire construction site, so that workers don't die. And you know what they heard was like, oh, that's like communist. That's not the role of business. What are you thinking? What are you doing? The role of business is not that. So sometime between then and now, the role of business, the responsibility of business has extended beyond that, so that it includes giving workers a hard hat, and it includes safety nets, and it includes, for example, putting labels on whatever food you're trying to sell, so that we know what's in it. And wheelchair ramps, right? So the role of the company, of the modern corporation, the modern incorporated entity, ever since it was established, the first private one was like in 1813 in Boston. The moment it existed, the role has been expanding and expanding and expanding. So it has now expanded to the point where part of the role of a business includes all those staples of corporate social responsibility. It includes mitigating your carbon footprint. It includes making sure that you're not aggravating systemic inequities. So it's just time because even though...
So, you know, it was an expense in the 1930s to give workers hard hats. It's still an expense, but now it is an expense that you can't afford to forgo. And corporate social, like the main parts of corporate social responsibility are now there as well. You cannot, and, you know, large companies know this. Like, you can't find, over 90% of the S&P 500, they have CSR or ESG reports. They know that they need to do this. So I think the short answer is, it's this point in history.

**Mike Lusky** (5:56)
Yeah.

**Stephen Sikach** (5:57)
Yeah.

**Mike Lusky** (5:57)
And I think it's actually good that we're doing this now, considering the involvement of machines and automation and even creating an autonomous vehicle, right? Can you imagine if you weren't socially responsible, but you were going to create an autonomous vehicle, autonomous vehicle? So I totally agree with you. I'm glad that it's happening now and not 10 years from now.