Social Enterprise

 Having worked in a global oil business in my previous life, doing my degree in business and then teaching it for the last 6 years, I thought I knew a lot of what there was to know about business, you could even say I was a bit 'stale'. Then I went to the tutor2u conference in June.

Sophi Tranchell CEO of Divine Chocolate turned the way I think and teach business upside down. Never really spent a lot of time studying social business, other than for the CSR section of BUS4, I was intrigued to hear the Divine Story. She opened her session with the statement "When is enough enough?" and with a few surprising facts about society, eg there are more people suffering from obesity in the world than there are from starvation (!!!), she then went into asking why big businesses have to continue to make even more profits year on year, and asked why couldn't they share their profits through their supply chain. She wasn't saying that businesses shouldn't grow, invest or even expand into new territories, because obviously they create jobs and wealth etc, but what she was saying that there must come a point whereby cost-minimisation strategy for greed is not always good.

So how am I going to use this is my lessons, I feel that it is my responsibility to open up the business world for my students and if I am honest I probably have been too focused on the importance of profit and growth, so my summer research is with the aim to integrate more social enterprise within my lessons so that I can ensure that my students get a more rounded view of the business world, from the past, to how it is now, and to how it could be in the future. Watch this space for resources and ideas.

Key lesson learnt : get out of the classroom more.