A regenerative entrepreneur, he is co-founder of Nativa, the first Certified B Corp® and Benefit Corporation in Europe, recognised in 2016 as the movement’s global Most Valuable Player for introducing the Società Benefit legal form in Italy.
Voiceover:
Welcome to Voiceover, the podcast series produced by Camst group to share good sustainability practices: an episodic account of professional, life and activist experiences, told in the voices of the people who lived them.
Eric Ezechieli:
Hello, I’m Eric Ezechieli from Nativa. We have always worked exclusively on innovation for sustainability, and since 2012–2013 we have also been the first B Corp and Benefit Corporation in Europe. I believe we are living in an unprecedented moment in history. Over the last year and a half we have all experienced how completely unimaginable, unthinkable things can happen within a few hours. If at the beginning of 2020 we had asked what would happen over the next year and a half, no one could have even remotely imagined what we all went through, with billions of people confined to their homes for weeks or months. Nothing like this has ever happened in human history, and in the same way I would like us to start imagining something unthinkable: a radical and profound change in economic systems and models. The economic systems that have made us prosper so far – let’s say an extractive capitalism essentially based on extracting and concentrating value – have no chance of continuing, of carrying on, of working in the future, for a very simple reason: the conditions in which they developed no longer hold; they have changed. Today the scenario is completely different. We are on a planet that has reached the limits of its capacity environmentally, and its limits socially too. Compared with 50 years ago, when the ideas of capitalism were launched at full power, there are more than twice as many people on the planet. We are 8 billion people, we will reach 10 billion, and it is inconceivable – it is simply impossible according to the laws of physics – that the model that has worked so far could work for ten billion people. So the imperative is a profound change: rethinking our models of production and consumption and our energy models, moving towards circularity and renewable energy sources. Here we already have very clear and strong goals declared by the European Union: complete decarbonisation by 2050. But that is not enough; we need to transform our culture, our way of seeing the world. One of the deepest transformations for businesses is to start seeing the imperative, the need, for companies to become a regenerative force for society and for the planet. And to do this, today there are tools, cases and very strong, very powerful examples to refer to – in particular, I am referring to the global movement of B Corps and Benefit Corporations. This is a movement started by entrepreneurs with no external pressure, entirely of their own free will, who, recognising the great challenges facing humanity both globally and locally, decided some fifteen years ago to develop tools to measure very clearly, completely and rigorously all the value created by a business – not only economic value but also environmental and social value. They realised that most companies do create economic value, but at the expense of value for people and value for the environment, or by destroying value for future generations. Clearly a mechanism like this cannot work over time; it is unsustainable by definition. So B Corps have committed to adopting practices and innovating in order to become regenerative, ensuring that economic value is matched by an equally robust creation of value for people and the planet – reaching a total break-even, so that the company becomes regenerative, producing more value than it takes. This is a first, very profound change of model, of paradigm. But there is another one, just as profound: the invention and adoption of legal and governance models that redefine the purpose for which a company exists. Today, under the Italian Civil Code, the purpose for which a company exists is to distribute dividends to its members, its shareholders. B Corps developed – first introducing Benefit Corporations in the United States in 2010, and then Società Benefit in Italy from 2016 – a model in which companies commit to writing into their articles of association, into their corporate purpose, that is, the reason the company exists, that its business activity is intended to create value both for shareholders and for other stakeholders, operating responsibly, sustainably and transparently. This is a real change of operating system that then enables the company to operate as a regenerative force for society. So on the one hand there are new governance tools, Società Benefit (Benefit Corporations); on the other, impact measurement, which leads the most outstanding companies to become B Corps. Together these two components create a reference model that has now become one of the directions, one of the movements, most inspiring capitalism as a whole, not only in Italy but all over the world. Not a day goes by without these issues being covered by the main national media. B Corps are also guided by the principle of interdependence: how can I prosper while ensuring that those I interact with can prosper too? For the second year they have launched the Unlock the Change campaign – both last year and this year – to promote this new way of doing business and these values. There are 130 Italian companies, which you can find on the unlockthechange.it website, acting in unison to accelerate this essential change. So I invite you to find out more about these topics, and I thank you for your attention.
