Launching Branson's B TeamLaunching Branson's B Team

By Zahid Torres-Rahman, Founder, Business Fights Poverty

Today sees the launch of the B Team – a collective of some of the world’s leading figures in business, including Sir Richard Branson and Jochen Zeitz. The B Team believes that global business is at a crossroads – with the need for a new way of doing business – motivated by people, planet and profit (read their declaration, and watch the B Team videos opposite).

The members of the B Team, announced this morning, are:

The B Team will be focusing on a series of Challenges that “accelerate us toward our vision of business motivated by people, planet and profit”:

Of course, this revolution is not entirely new – members of Business Fights Poverty are the pioneers of this emerging movement – combining commercial success with positive social, economic and environmental impact. In fact, for many, employing innovative business models or partnering with established companies offers the opportunity to achieve impact at a level of scale and sustainability that traditional philanthropic and development approaches have not been able to, or ever could. Take a look at the many inspiring member examples that we are featuring across our new set of Knowledge Zones and Regional Hubs.

So for me, the B Team should be as much about harnessing the power and potential of business for social impact, and celebrating the contribution that progressive businesses are already making.

You can watch the video of the launch event live from 9.30 am here, and a recorded version afterwards.

Please share your views here.

Join the conversation Twitter, via the hashtag #planb.

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One Response

  1. I love the the dream expressed by the B-team launch video, but I’m,afraid the way you propose to make it a reality  is likely to fail.
    Emphasizing social and environmental impacts instead of a single-minded focus on poverty has been tried. Its  the basic mantra of the impact investment community, which has had at best mixed results . 
    Transformation in big business doesn’t come from clear concepts of  the future bottom line, or future incentives, or the future of leadership. 
    It comes from revolutionary disruptive innovation, that blows away business as usual by competing effectively with it.  The   revolutions in affordability and miniaturization of Henry Ford, and Jobs and Wosniak and Akio Norita are good examples. 
    My colleagues and I are in the process of creating four frontier multinationals, each designed to transform the lives of at least 100 million $2/day customers, generate at least $10 billion in annual sales, and earn sufficient profit to attract international commercial investors. My new book with Mal Warwick, The Business Solution to Poverty, describes these four frontier multinationals, and the practical steps required to create  them and other like them. Release of this book will be in September 2013
     I think transforming business as usual is likely to come from creating new frontier global businesses that express nothing less than a revolution in how existing businesses design, price, market and distribute their products. The revolution will come, not from  trying to change existing global businesses, but from creating radically different new models of global businesses, that compete effectively with business as usual.
    Paul Polak

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