Mindy Leow On The B Corp Movement And Impact Driven Enterprise Collaboration

Mindy Leow has been a champion for business for good in Australia for more than a decade. She is currently Director of Growth and Impact at the not-for-profit B Lab Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, the not-for-profit behind B Corp certification, now with close to 8000 companies certified globally.

Mindy is a collaborator, strategist and community builder at heart. She played an instrumental role to grow the B Corp movement in the region and have developed partnerships with corporates and governments.

Having worked directly with hundreds of companies to measure and improve their impact, Mindy is passionate about helping enterprises infuse purpose and reimagine business models to create systemic change.

Mindy discusses how purpose-driven businesses are collaborating to build the movement's momentum and where opportunities exist for capacity building organisations to instigate sustainable change.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your passion for purpose driven organisations?

[Mindy Leow] - I often refer to myself as a corporate refugee. I must confess, I started my career in the U.S advertising industry, which I see was part of the problem through promoting excessive consumption. At some point in my late twenties, I realised the pathway I was on was not aligning. Because of the climate crisis, my values were becoming clear to me. It was Al Gore's first documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which presented to me what was coming about 15 years ago. I decided I needed a new career, and my purpose was to do something about the environmental crisis.

Long story short, due to personal reasons, I came to Australia and enrolled in business school. I saw that businesses had to be part of the solution, so I was here to learn about the world of business. I was already working in business but needed to learn how to affect change from within.

After business school, I went to work for a non-profit called Social Traders in the social enterprise sector which was emerging at the time. The five years I had there taught me immensely about building an organisation and sector from the ground up. There were so many incredible people and learnings about collaboration. Without that experience, I wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing today, but I had this yearning at the time to be in the private sector where I believe change needed to occur. Here I am, having been a part of B Lab in Australia-New Zealand for seven and a half years of its 10-year history. It's been an absolute privilege to be a part of this movement and network that's been around for 17 years. The B Corp movement was started in the U.S. in Philadelphia by three founders. It has been 17 years in the making, and it's been such a privilege to see how the movement has grown in this time.

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Tell us more about the work you're doing at B Lab and how you support organisations and ethical business leaders?

I'll first start by sharing our mission at B Lab, which is to create an inclusive, regenerative, equitable, beneficial economic system for all people and planet. It’s a massive mission and vision, and we see our change being delivered across three levers of change. First is by affecting changes in business behaviour, culture, systems, and structures. The first part around behaviour change in business has been the focus of what we do since the beginning.

We are most known for our B Corp Certification, a rigorous certification built upon a set of global standards encouraging companies to measure and improve their social and environmental impacts across all areas of their business. The five areas we look at are impact to workers, community, the environment, customers, and governance. Companies get verified and must recertify every three years as well. We now have more than 630 companies in Australia and New Zealand, and 8,000 companies globally. Here in Australia and New Zealand, the 630 companies contribute to over $17 billion in the economy.

We have a community of values aligned businesses and people coming together to think about what we can achieve together rather than alone. A good example of that is the B Corp Climate Collective, which has a chapter here in Australia-New Zealand.

There are other industry coalitions forming, another example being the B Corp Beauty Coalition which was started in Europe. We now have representation from an Australian and New Zealand company. It is focused on issues facing that industry, and they've got some ambitious projects, milestones, resources, and solutions they are sharing publicly on their website. It's great to see this community growing together to solve challenges.

This brings me to the second of three levers. Behaviour change in businesses is what we started off with. We have built on that through a tool called the B Impact Assessment. This is used for B Corp Certification, but it's free and available to any business to benchmark themselves in terms of what impacts they're having, which oftentimes they may not even be aware of. That can be a great strategic planning tool around developing an impact roadmap and gathering resources to enhance those impacts. We encourage any business from anywhere in the world, whether you're a sole trader, independent business, or a multinational company manufacturing in any industry to use that. We've had more than 200,000 companies globally access this platform, with close to 20,000 companies in Australia and New Zealand doing so. If you work in business and are curious about how your business is performing in terms of its social and environmental impacts, I highly encourage you to engage with this free platform.

Where do you see opportunities to grow this purpose driven business movement and what do we need to make this mainstream?

I feel like the ESG, or purpose-driven business movement is becoming mainstream. We are seeing massive acceleration towards that. From the 10 years B Lab has been in Australia and New Zealand, I can say we have gone from working with early adopters to the early majority. The question is how do we climb that bell curve? It certainly feels like there's a steep acceleration happening now.

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The silos have until now driven different parts of the economy and systems to a common goal, so how do we accelerate that and work cohesively? Collaboration obviously is the answer here; the way to break down silos and get momentum is through multi stakeholder collaborations and collective action.

I can draw on three examples from the B Corp movement. I mentioned earlier the B Corp Beauty Coalition, which involves 40 B Corps in the beauty industry self-organising to explore what it means to responsibly innovate, share knowledge, and best practices. You can go to their website to download those guides; there's a guide on the logistics of green responsible packaging.

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It’s this idea of collective action and bringing people along the journey, even though they may be your competitors which is game changing.

This industry focus from the collective is global, and we can draw best practices from different regions as well. Another example I'll draw on is from our network, as B Lab is a network of not for profits operating in different regions according to local nuances, issues, and challenges. We have incredibly exciting and inspiring program which came out of Latin America called Cities CAN B. What they do is activate all actors in the city, including intermediaries, civil society organisations, policymakers and most importantly the private sector who wield the resources and know how. They are working together towards a common goal around sustainable development. It's a place-based approach which is interesting and exciting, and we would love to find a local government partner to apply what is a tested, tried, and successful program that has been done overseas. I believe there are a couple of cities involved, and Europe just recently joined as well. There are eight cities in the world who are a part of the Cities CAN B program. It would be interesting to see if we can have a New Zealand and Australian city join this movement too.

What important traits have you seen leaders and entrepreneurs possess to effectively drive impact and create change?

It is the ability to build the capacity of others. That's an important trait; you must build others up to have an impact mindset, become a changemaker or catalyst of change. Secondly, you need the capacity to collaborate deeply. That is what's needed to evolve from having an impact within an area you have control to banding together to influence change in a greater capacity. It's also important to build the capacity of people who are changemakers to be resilient and adaptive. We are so conditioned to the labels and identities we have in society, organisations and personally.

Those boundaries we draw around ourselves, organisations, divisions, departments, and sectors are limiting. How can we transcend and develop our capacity to reorganise ourselves?

Ultimately, the resources, intent, and technology to accelerate change exist.

To meet the challenges of today, we need to create change, but the challenge is around how we organise ourselves. It comes down to how we relate to each other and mobilise as a society and species.

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Where do you see organisations fall short in delivering strong outcomes around impact and change?

From an organisational perspective (and this is something we are still working on within the B Corp movement and community itself), often the driver of impact does not embed purpose and ESG throughout their organisation. That creates this risk of all the good work not having a life of its own, and in our world, we have a term called purpose of stakeholder governance. You must embed this at all levels of an organisation, from the front line to management, boards, and shareholders.

Baking purpose into your strategy and having the systems, structures and processes in place is crucial. It must be lived and breathed throughout the organisation, including processes, practices, and performance incentives.

Having that culture created ultimately for an organisation is important to strive for. We also love a good measurement; this movement is all about measurement and having those indicators to help keep us on track.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a positive social change?

I live in Melbourne, Victoria (Australia), and there is a project here near and dear to my heart. I know many people who are a part of it, it's called Regen Melbourne. It's a place-based initiative like the Cities CAN B program. It brings together place-based actors through deep consultation, listening and collaboration regarding what is needed for our city. Out of those many months and years of consultation, they now are piloting six wildly ambitious projects, including making our river swimmable again. Regen Melbourne is based on Kate Raworth's Donut Economics framework, and I am personally excited about place-based initiatives. It's got support and buy in from so many levels of society locally, and for me, that is something to learn from. You can read about all those different projects on their website; they've done a great job of sharing information and allowing a participatory approach for people to drop in and be a part of that.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our audience?

I must admit, I've only just recently come across Carol Sanford's body of work, and I am drinking from the fire hose now! She has a series of books including The Regenerative Business and The Regenerative Life. Her latest book No More Gold Stars is about building people's capacity to think independently, which I'm loving. We must open our minds to what is needed, approaches we can take, the challenges of our time and how we apply those to our lives and organisations. If you haven't picked up any of her books, I am sure there will be one of interest.