From the Founder: Conscious Commerce, Save the baby from the bathwater
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Maiya is a values-driven company, not a politics-driven one.
Values are beliefs about how a society should be organized and how it should function. They are a statement about what’s just and what’s important. Politics is a transactional arena whereby values are productized and traded by actors with their own personal interests and incentives.
Sometimes political issues are closely tied to value debates, such as the issue of whether the LGBTQ+ community ought to enjoy the same marriage rights as the cis-het community, by way of example. Other times political issues are more distant from underlying value debates, such as whether a marginal tax rate should be X or Y percent, or more broadly the delegation of powers between state and federal government (apologies to all the progressives who believe marginal tax rate debates are strongly values-driven, and ditto for the libertarians regarding the delegation of powers debate; at the very least these are less primal as far as values debates go than say marriage equality or abortion).
Politicians seek to tie political transactions to value debates because it animates their constituents and donors. This is because people are passionate about their values, but — appropriately — find political minutiae boring. Thus, a marginal tax rate debate becomes about wealth equality versus percentage points and the delegation of powers debate is about freedom and liberty versus which party administers certain programs. Keeping values-driven debates in public political discourse drives fundraising and turnout, which are by far the two most important priorities for an elected officeholder. Incidentally, it also makes political discourse more divisive and polarized. We can see this phenomenon in Pew Research Center data, which shows declining inter-party marriage and increasing self-segregation of neighborhoods along party lines. Whether you think this phenomenon is good, bad or neutral is subjective, but the data is pretty clear.
Given that I opened by saying Maiya is not a politics-driven organization, you might wonder why I spent 300 words pontificating on our political system.
As the underlying values-debates that underpin political transactions are magnified, and polarization increases, people want to know where organizations stand politically.
This serves both as a proxy for, and a check on, how an organization articulates its values. Critics of this phenomenon, who in my experience tend to skew self-identifying conservatives, refer to it pejoratively as “woke culture” or “cancel culture”. Ironically, some of the earliest victims of “cancel culture” I can remember are the anti-Iraq War Dixie Chicks and, more tragically, Bush-era french fries.
There is tautologically a tribal zeal in this mechanism, as the fundamental purpose is to identify whether an organization is part of one’s tribe. Many companies have stumbled through this assessment mechanism and have been resultantly “canceled”. Chick-fil-A managed to get canceled by both tribes, first by progressives for its founder’s anti-LGBT advocacy and subsequently by conservatives for the reduction of said advocacy. I am somewhat glib in pointing this out as Chick-fil-A also achieved double-digit sales growth over the past 5 years, hitting $10.5bn in sales last year. C’est la vie I suppose.
Nonetheless, I believe it is a strong net-positive that consumers are increasingly conscious of companies’ social impact. As I wrote in a previous blog, money is a store of value and exchanging it for a company’s products or services enforces the value of the good or service, and indirectly the company. People withholding their consumer dollars to hold a company accountable to its values and social impact is important: it aligns a company’s social incentive with its financial incentive, and that’s valuable for a society.
Widening wealth disparity and wage stagnation, combined with extreme inflation in healthcare, education and housing in the United States, have collectively given a beating to many Americans’ view of capitalism. This is particularly true among Millennial and Gen Z Americans, who’ve experienced this economic malaise while being too young to remember the ideological battles of the Cold War. Whatever your personal views might be, the data pretty clearly shows that the private sector and capitalism at large have received a vote of no confidence from many citizens. The big question is what happens from here.
I want to re-emphasize that Maiya is a values-driven brand, not a political one. As its founder and CEO, I set the values for the organization and they reflect the personal values I seek to uphold. I also have personal politicalopinions and preferences, but these are meant to stay wholly separate from the brand. Nonetheless, given our values of Authenticity and appropriate levels of transparency, and the timely debate around capitalism which by its nature impacts the brand, I want to outline where I stand so everyone is aware of how I am guiding the organization. I’m pre-empting any potential “cancelation” by addressing this relevant issue head-on and letting people make their judgments accordingly.
As Ray Dalio puts it, we have a problem in our society with how we distribute the economic pie, not how we grow the pie. Thus, I believe in solutions and reforms that solve for more efficient, effective and progressive distributions without impeding our market-driven mechanisms for growth. But that is not enough. As a business owner, I believe the onus is on us to demonstrate how business can be a force for good and create positive social outcomes. We have to earn back the trust of our people and show that we can improve society, and we have a responsibility to do so. Business can move much faster than the government. It can innovate quicker and, most importantly, shape culture. Thus it can effect real change relatively very quickly.
That unique ability to collect and deploy economic resources is incredibly powerful. Unfortunately, there are far too many cases of business owners using that power not just purely for personal enrichment, but to the detriment of broader society. Prominent examples include Volkswagen’s emissions scandal, the sugar lobby’s impact on public health, the Ford Pinto recall scandal and countless more, eroding the public’s trust in the private sector and breeding cynicism in younger generations. It doesn’t have to be that way.
We can have businesses who care about their social impact and aspire to serve their broader stakeholders, not just shareholders. Maiya was founded to address both a market opportunity and a social imperative — neither one is more or less important than the other. The business community has to prove to citizens that it can prioritize more than just maximizing shareholder value.
I am not anti-profit. I am not anti-wealth creation. Given that Maiya is a luxury brand, I am not anti-consumption. I do not believe that what is good for business must also be bad for people. I do believe in practicing a Conscious Commerce. One that considers broader social impact in the decisions it makes. One that understands the opportunity in running a machine that can collect and re-deploy financial resources. This does not mean an obligation to solve every social ill in the world. Maiya does have a particular focus, and its nature is that of a for-profit corporation, not philanthropy. But keeping both our commercial opportunity and social imperative in focus and on equal footing is a responsibility I take seriously. Same for the mission of showing, not telling, citizens and younger generations about the potential for business as a force for social good. Together, through Conscious Commerce, I believe we can save the baby from the bathwater. And I believe we must.