The importance of social license in private enterprise

To kick off, when you hear the phrase social licence and political capital, what do these concepts actually mean in practice for private enterprises and family businesses today? Josh, can we start with you?

Sure.

So social license is something that's often underrated and undervalued until it's really missed or needed.

So in short, social license is the informal, ongoing approval or acceptance that business receives from the community to exist and operate.

So it's not a legal concept, of course, but it is a powerful, informal concept that is nonetheless tangible.

It's built on trust, legitimacy and credibility.

So I think of social license as a capital and capitals are assets.

And of course, assets are to be built, protected and deployed strategically.

ESG is a tool to help companies build, protect and deploy that social license.

Thanks, Josh.

And Connor, why does this topic seem to be rising up the agenda now? What's different today compared to 10 or 20 years ago? I

think just 10 or 20 years ago, we just didn't have the transparency that we have today.

So companies could have stumbled into a social license.

They might not really have had a social license, but nobody really knew that they didn't have one because maybe some of their sins or less than perfect behavior hadn't sort of seen the light of day.

But as we know today, if If you think about two key stakeholders in any business, and particularly in a family business, if you think about the employee pool and you think about the customer pool, the range of things that were important to me when I started out in my career more years ago than I care to remember, the range of things that mattered to me was significantly more narrow than the range of things that matter today.

If one doesn't focus on those things, it becomes readily apparent that you don't actually have a social license because you're missing these things that people today value as being important that they didn't 10 or 15 years ago.

And if you think about the consumer population, we didn't have a situation 10 or 15 years ago where consumers would pick which coffee shop they would go to, depending on that particular chain's view on some particular global market.

Conflict.

Like that's the world we live in today.

I have kids in that younger generation and that's kind of how they shop.

That's how they choose to spend their disposable income, which means this becomes increasingly more important.

Thanks, Connor.