Giving and contributing to society is seen by all great religions as a central human desire. Psychologists are beginning to agree. We are genuinely altruistic and we have a need to help others. This is a logical expected characteristic of a social animal but today’s society and business practices are going against it. The greed of  the “as much as I can get” approach may generate profits but it also creates deep feelings of unhappiness for those who endorse it since it goes against a basic human need. Today’s work and business environment forces us to stop feeling so that we can ignore the injuries we cause ourself.

In the corporate and business world, we learn to better produce through specialization and create targeted products and streamlined services that can beat the competition and maximize profits. We learn to take advantage of people in weaker positions ignoring the damage to others and the injuries we are inflicting on ourself in the process. We learn to self-destruct for the sake of greed.

It took me quite a lot of time to recover after I left that world and I have no plan to get back in it. I have been trying to live in an ethical and caring manner and asked myself how to revamp business practices to make a living while staying healthy and away from the sufferings caused by greed and misused power.

I came up with two essential elements. The first is to diversify to improve the reach and quality of our products and services and to better our sense of contributing. The other is to change the way we get paid to increase the number of people served and to forgo greed.

Why diversify? In today’s environment specialization is favored over diversification and we are taught about the benefits of dealing with “professional people.” Those who provide too many services are not to be trusted because focused specialists are much more likely to do a better job. Volvo has long ago shown that this is not true and instead of having workers stay at one station, they now follow the assembly line. Their sense of contributing is vastly improved since now they are building a car instead of the third of a gearbox. Next time you go to a medical establishment, look at the level of stress of doctors and staff and who treats you most as a person. Then ask yourself: “Who will provide better care?” I believe the strongest our sense of contribution, the least our level of stress and the best we are actually contributing.

Favoring overspecialization disregards the fact that we learn by association: the more subjects we know about, the more we can draw upon to create better products or generate better services. Most fields have seen major advances when people from the outside were involved. Although “professional people” may not provide the best service they will provide the most profits, at least in the short-term, because they will deal with most cases as they have dealt with similar cases without having to think. People who diversify, because they have to think and spend more time on each case, will generate fewer profits but are more likely to tailor their effort  to each particular case and provide a better contribution.

“Better contributions” are however no contributions at all if they are tinted by greed. They are also no contribution if they feed into the current system created by greed itself.

As the gap between the haves and the have-nots keeps growing and as the have-nots keep having less, our contribution is decreasing since we are reaching fewer and fewer people. The current business practices of setting a price for a specific “market” keep feeding the divide. Products and services reach specific income levels and are unavailable to others. NGOs serve the poor disconnecting them from the rich and most corporations serve the rich ensuring that they have no clue about the poor. Pricing has become a way to separate humans from other humans. People have started to notice it and some are trying to do something about it. Subbable is trying to make better content accessible to more people,  LexThink is trying to match client expectations with their legal consulting services. To do that they both let the customer decide on the price.

This is not a new idea, it’s just a shift in emphasis. Today most salaries are set by the employer as a function of the perceived monetary contribution of the employee often measured by the perceived replacement cost of the individual. In other words it’s about money. What is proposed here is to switch from profits and monetary contribution to contribution to society, from return on investment (ROI) to social return on investment (SROI), from an unreliable debt and growth based economy influenced by few with a high level of social inequality to a more reliable value based economy influenced by many and a somewhat more equal society.

Generalizing the approach taken by Subbable, LexThink and others, I propose that, when we offer a product or a service, we set a minimum price slightly lower than our average cost, then we let the client or customer decide on the final price based on their perceived value of the product or service and on what they can afford.

By doing so, we remove greed from our offerings and make our services or products available to many more since this pricing method includes an automatic sliding scale. I also believe, based on my own experience, that we will better appreciate how much people care about our products or services:  a poor client paying $30 can be more rewarding than a rich client paying $400 for the same service.

Unfortunately there is no reward without risk. The reward is a better sense of achievement from a higher level of contribution to customers and clients as well as the pleasure of creating a path to a better society. The risk is not getting enough income to support the service or product either because it does not provide enough benefit to society or because clients have not been able to make the cultural shift required to understand their own impact on society.

While the disappearance of a contribution that is not beneficial to society can be viewed as a good thing, the failure of clients to understand their impact must be addressed: One way to mitigate this risk is to educate customers and show them how they can benefit by honoring the trust and the freedom given to them instead of favoring a very short-term gain. This is what they would get:

• They would have access to products and services they could not afford otherwise.
• They would give access to product and services to others who could not afford them otherwise. In doing so, they would promote equality, increasing the number and influence of people with similar interests and the creation of more products and services they could benefit from.
• They would promote, contribute to and benefit from good products and services over less useful ones.
• They would favor contribution to many including themselves against profits to few.

If you think of any more benefits please use the comment section and I will be pleased to add them to this list.

At the end, some clients will understand and some will not and try to take advantage of us. That’s part of the pain pioneers have to endure to make a difference. We may choose to just feel sorry for the cheaters and the suffering they are creating for themselves or we may choose to blacklist them. Meanwhile our lives will become more meaningful and our will to contribute to society will improve our health and well-being.