Publications
Publications
- January 4, 2019
- Harvard Business Review (website)
How Companies Can Balance Social Impact and Financial Goals
By: Marya L. Besharov, Wendy K. Smith and Michael Tushman
Abstract
It’s notoriously difficult for a business to manage two separate-but-equal goals—making money and creating social value at the same time, for example, or managing an existing business at the same time that you invent a new one. Most attempts at managing these ”strategic paradoxes” fail because they’re not managed carefully and consistently. (It’s easy to write a great purpose statement or to dream up a new business model but way more difficult to follow through when it’s time to make actual tradeoffs between the goals.) Three organizational mechanisms can help: guardrails that protect the weaker of the two goals, dynamic decision-making that treats high-level goals as sacrosanct but tactical decisions as provisional, and leaders dedicated to “both/and” thinking.
Keywords
Goals and Objectives; Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Profit; Decision Making
Citation
Besharov, Marya L., Wendy K. Smith, and Michael Tushman. "How Companies Can Balance Social Impact and Financial Goals." Harvard Business Review (website) (January 4, 2019).