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Business as a Force for Good
As director of B Lab, the standards organization for certified B corporations, Kim Riether Coupounas (MBA/MPA 1995) encourages companies around the world to be a force for good. By promoting policies that benefit their employees, their communities, and their impact on the environment, she’s helping firms strive toward a more sustainable business model.
In this video, Coupounas explains how her organization pursues its goals:
“HBS was really essential in helping me establish what I really believed in as an entrepreneur, as a business leader, back in the early ‘90s. When I went into the workforce with the skills and that level of understanding, I think that it helped me chart a course that was very aligned with my personal values.
“I love the work that I'm doing now. I work with an organization called B Lab. We're the standards organization behind certified B corporations. They are companies that are around the world; there are over 1,200 of them. They're everything from single-person operations all the way up to $3 billion corporations, like Natura in Brazil.
“What unifies this group of companies is that they're using their business as a force for good. They're high growth. They're profitable. They're great companies from a traditional metrics standpoint, but they're also very concerned about and do a lot to improve their impacts in terms of how they treat their employees, what they give back to the community, and their impact on the environment.
“It's really an honor to be able to help new companies come into that community, to realize that they can do well and do good at the same time, and to show them the path ahead to drive towards a more sustainable business model.”
(Published September 2015)
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