Happy + Capitalist = Hapitalist
By James TS Chua
Capitalism is devoted to making profits for businesses in both short-term and long-term. So when a non-profit organization talks about concentrating on the social impacts of doing business and selling products, you may be forgiven for thinking this is impossible.
Hapitalist is, however, such an organization — ready to make long-term thinking and responsibility integral to the profit motive in businesses. It is dedicated to education about the long-term impacts on the environment, people and countries, as well as making people feel “happy” about capitalism on both the doing and receiving ends.
Ms. Bee Ong, founder of Hapitalist, believes that the timing is just right for the launch of this innovative non-profit organization, just when major world economies are facing the crunch.
“If we had established Hapitalist a year ago, we would have been dismissed as a joke, at best. But now that the world at large is thrashing around for answers, we are almost invariably told that Hapitalist’s goals resonate with the value the world seeks,” says Ms.Ong in an email interview.
One will naturally ask why Hapitalist came about and what goals it is aiming for.
Ms. Ong, a previous magazine editor and agenda-head for a global annual meeting of “senior bankers”, outlined five main factors.
“Over the last 16 or 17 years, I’ve noticed that some of the steadiest successes [chief executives and other leaders of...businesses and industries]… are leaders who place integrity and responsibility high on the agenda,” Ms. Ong explains about Hapitalist’s advisory board members who include Teng Ngiek Lian, CEO of Target Asset Management, and Mohan Murjani, chairman of the Murjani Group among a few others.
Their personal business experience and expertise strongly concur with Hapitalist’s vision of businesses having integrity and responsibility in their corporate dealings to retain the trust of the customers, stakeholders and ultimately shareholders, hence their “guiding” roles in contributing to Hapitalist’s development.
Ms. Ong also observes that “a growing number of us [senior executives at the level of CEO or chairman] agree that a new world…is emerging from the current mess, and we will need commensurately sensitive ways to work, lead, make decisions and evaluate our inputs and outputs and their wider, long-term effects.”
Yet, there are “no answers”, and this is why Ms. Ong set up Hapitalist to “discover the practical, viable answers; and to seek ways to make them a common platform”.
At the same time, many CEOs feel “they truly want to serve their community and benefit society, but their hands are tied.”
“They are judged by their financial performance alone… and are constantly chasing profit and revenue growth from one quarter to the next or from one year to the next,” Ms. Ong notes, adding that one former CEO even had disagreements with his chairman “about the perils of quarterly reporting but no avail,” which led him to remark that it meant “spending most of your[his] time preparing these reports instead of running the business effectively”.
Ms. Ong feels that “CSR in particular is an optional activity that in many cases degenerates into charity of one form or another,” illustrating an example of a company that contributes to river pollution and later presenting a “$1 million cheque to a head of state, photo opportunity included, to install solar panels for…[those] who drink from those same rivers” although “CSR and corporate governance have had limited effectiveness.”
“In the final analysis, it’s not the fault of any single business or individual. It is the system that is wretched. I call it the ‘mismeasure’ of profit — that is, the narrow measurement of profile as financial profit alone, without any regard whatsoever to the larger, longer-term consequences that eventually affect the longevity of a business.”
“We need a new, more powerful way to guide human greed and fear, which cannot be eradicated. The new way needs to be an internal, not external force,” Ms. Ong stresses, elaborating that “the new system needs to include the pluses and minuses of the longer-term, wider implications, in addition to financial gain and loss.”
Finally, Ms. Ong points out that the term “wealth” is now being redefined to “be widening beyond financial accumulation, to include opportunities to do meaningful work, to have satisfying work and personal relationships.”
Referring to Bob Goudzwaard’s book, Beyond Poverty and Affluence, about the “meaning of labor in the product of labour,” Ms. Ong explains that “it will change the way we value and reward human capital, goods and services in the future, which in turn will alter the way business is done.”
These reasons have enabled Hapitalist to have a clear sense of its own agenda. While it does not try to forget the business goal of capitalism, Hapitalist strives to create awareness of doing business with the view of having long-lasting beneficial effects on the people and environment instead of focusing on the material wealth alone.◊
In a sequel article, Ms. Bee Ong will share about Hapitalist’s philosophy, how Hapitalist works and what it takes to be defined as a Hapitalist company.
James TS Chua is a freelance writer and an advocate for those who are living with disabilities.
