The Richest Success Centers on Community

As Bill McKibben frames it, the richness of community is founded on civic engagement deeply rooted in companionship. He writes:

Increased companionship “yields more happiness in individualistic societies, where it is scarce, than in collectivist societies, where it is abundant.” What this means is: . . . if you live in a suburban American home, buying another coffeemaker adds very little to your quantity of happiness. . . . But since you live two people to an acre, a new friend, a new connection, is a big deal indeed. We have a surplus of individualism and a deficit of companionship, and so the second becomes more valuable.

. . . The math of the various quality-of-life indexes is daunting, but the results are clear: in the rich world, . . . “feelings about people contribute more to subjective well-being than feelings about money, whether spent or saved.”

Few expressions are more trite than “giving back to the community.” Yet in the best of times and the worst of times, most of us want to give ourselves to—and in turn be accepted by—a community: something that transcends place and centers on shared values, resources, goals, and experiences.

Sure, we may desire fast cars or bigger houses, but the most exhaustive research shows that consumption beyond a certain point has no positive impact on one’s quality of life (in rich nations, anyway). I know you may be tempted to say, “Well, let me be the first to disprove that research by trying to pull it off myself!” But sociologists generally agree that one of the biggest contributors to happiness is one’s connection to community.

Mom-and-pop establishments are most often associated not only with small business but with community-based enterprise. But while “community” has a nice ring to it, the word—like “entrepreneurship”—has become an empty vessel that means whatever any of us want it to mean to suit our purposes at the time.

There’s no better example of this, in the wake of the Great Recession and the public antipathy toward big banks, than the lobbyist-created term “community bank,” which is a misleading term of art for virtually every bank in the United States that’s not among the top nineteen largest financial institutions that Americans just happen to hate the most. So-called community banks are just banks that happen to be located in your community. But that doesn’t make them inherently good (or significantly better) than those big banks whose brands are household names. Call them what you will: if a small, local bank treats you as shoddily as the big boys do, who really cares about its size or location? Or as the Southernism goes, “Kittens in the oven don’t make ’em biscuits!”

Just as we must challenge our assumptions about success, it is no less important to do so about the language we use that may affirm faulty reasoning. When we use the term “family owned and operated,” we feel this label conveys a wholesome sensibility. Most of the time this feeling may be warranted. However, some of the most predatory funeral homes are family owned and community based. It is more an indictment of the “deathcare industry” (as it is known by its practitioners and industry insiders and analysts) than it is about individual families. So, “community based” and “community centered” may overlap, but they are certainly not the same thing. As a positive example, Craigslist is both a community-based enterprise (whose community is virtual) and largely community centered. (It is also worth noting that this industry-changing, multimillion-dollar company employs fewer than fifty people.)

Am I suggesting, with all this discussion about community, that you have to “do good” to succeed? No. But if it’s a genuine interest of yours and can be of strategic benefit to the enterprise, then community-centered entrepreneurship—a subset of what I call “commonwealth enterprise” in chapter 6—can be a viable economic path to a kind of success most business schools, economists, and public officials too often dismiss or unduly marginalize.

Community-centered enterprises highly overlap with and are outgrowths of social entrepreneurship, which Jeffrey Robinson defines as “a process that includes: the identification of a specific social problem and a specific solution (or set of solutions) to address it; the evaluation of the social impact, the business model and the sustainability of the venture; and the creation of a social mission-oriented for-profit or a business-oriented nonprofit entity that pursues the double (or triple) bottom line.”

Those more open-minded entrepreneurship boosters have of late been advocating what they call a “triple bottom line,” or the “3 Ps,” by which they mean that all businesses should measure success by how much profit they make, how many people they help, and how their business betters the planet. For example, an ice cream store owner would create a triple bottom line by making money on her ice cream (profit), offering employees a living wage and health benefits (people), and using only organic milk, potato starch spoons, and recyclable cups (planet).

I’m all in favor of businesses that can pull off the triple bottom line, but doing so is not necessarily the same as building commonwealth enterprises whose missions are inherently community centered. Triple-bottom-line businesses are rarely easy to set up and often expensive to operate. They often require entrepreneurs to be highly educated, especially about environmental issues; connected to suppliers who can supply organic and recyclable goods at reasonable prices; skilled at marketing to the small percentage of Americans who are willing to spend more for triple-bottom-line products; and be located or able to relocate in a community of such people. In short, entrepreneurs need a tremendous amount of a very specific type of invisible capital to pull off this kind of business.

An entrepreneur who wants to start an ice cream shop in an inner-city community to serve kids near the local high school may not be able to create a viable business if she tries to make her ice cream “ecologically correct” or tries to pay her employees significantly above the minimum wage. Her product may be too expensive for her intended customers to buy. Yet that ice cream shop owner is creating an immediate, direct benefit for her community. She’s creating jobs for local youth; she’s improving the area with a thriving business; she’s probably creating a safe hangout spot for teens. Her homemade and affordable ice cream has broader impact than the fancy organic ice cream purveyed by the shop with the impressively small eco-footprint that employs people in a more economically stable neighborhood. And the inner-city shop has as its founding stakeholders the local school district, the PTA, the local community development corporation (CDC), and Small Business Development Center (SBDC), all invested in community in concrete ways that not only contribute to that local population, but may very well increase its chances of surviving and thriving.

There is a clear distinction to be made between doing a kind of good that leads to increased business viability and the more popular and no less easy task of doing good while doing well—though these two tasks are not necessarily independent of each other. Indeed, I’m advocating that entrepreneurs define success as building a viable, community-centered business, because being community centered is good for the entrepreneur as well as good for the community. Building a sustainable network within your own community increases your invisible capital while helping your community grow stronger.