How Companies Can Balance Social Impact and Financial Goals

Marya L. Besharov; Wendy K. Smith; Michael   Tushman

Article | Harvard Business Review (website) | January 4, 2019

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;

Format: Electronic

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).

Why do incumbent firms frequently reject nonincremental innovations? Beyond technical, structural, or economic factors, we propose an additional factor: the degree of the top management team's (TMT) frame flexibility, i.e., their capability to cognitively expand an innovation's categorical boundaries and to cast the innovation as emotionally resonant with the organization's identity, competencies, and competitive boundaries. We argue that inertial forces generally constrict how TMTs perceive innovations but that frame flexibility can overcome these constraints, increasing the likelihood of adoption and broadening the organization's innovation practices. We advance a theoretical model that relaxes the assumption that cognitive frames are static, showing how they become flexible via categorical positioning, and introduce a role for emotional frames that appeals to organizational members' sentiments and aspirations in innovation adoption.

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How Companies Can Balance Social Impact and Financial Goals

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