Every dollar is a vote you cast for the world you want

Silicon Valley is the home to many of the greatest minds on the planet, it's here that top executives and businesses are adopting a new culture, one that is moving away from the superficiality, greed and short-sightedness that we see in so many businesses around us.

Mark Benioff of Salesforce (the hugely successful cloud-based CRM company) created the "1-1-1 model" where businesses pledge one percent of product, one percent of equity, and one percent of employee hours to the communities they serve globally. Google provides healthy whole-food meals to it’s employees on demand and employee health is treated as paramount to its success. Whole Food Market founder: John Mackey coined a term to describe recent developments like these, it’s called "conscious capitalism", where organisations serve the interests of all major stakeholders—customers, employees, investors, communities, suppliers, and the environment.

Everywhere you look, the leading businesses are increasing their focus on what really matters: the actual impact or "footprint" of their organisations on society. Surveys of younger generations are increasingly showing that they are willing to give up a higher income in the pursuit of meaningful and impactful work.

Contrast this to the archaic business models that are still (unfortunately) ever so present. Profits, profits, profits. Nothing make sense unless it is generating more dollars in these miserable models. Moldy and decrepit offices? Sick and unhappy staff? Suffering in the supply chains? None of this matters as long as profits are maximised. Channels of communication are closed and staff are made to feel like cogs in a wheel.

So we look to the top, we place blame above for the problems, but we all as consumers create the world we want to live in every day with every dollar we spend and every choice we make. How about a $10 piece of clothing to add to our ever-expanding wardrobes, created in a sweatshop using child labour? Meanwhile, more and more Silicon Valley's CEO's eschew fashion; Steve Jobs wore a turtleneck, jeans and sneakers every day and Mark Zuckerberg is always in his plain grey t-shirt with jeans and sneakers. How about some cage eggs? A chicken only had to spend her entire miserable existence in a hellish cage, never to see the light of day. It’s encouraging that companies like Whole Food Markets are leading the way forward on this issue by adopting company wide cage-free policies.

Change comes from the ground up.

A lot of people come to the stockmarket with dollar signs in their eyes, many unconcerned with the ethics of the businesses they lend their hard-earned savings to as long as the returns are attractive. This is how I started out investing too. I was only focused on how quickly I could grow my money. I soon realised that every dollar I invest is on loan to a business and funding it's growth. Every dollar we invest in (or spend with) a business is a vote for that company, for it's operations and the way it does business. Only then did I realise the power of investing, but more powerful than what I could ever do by taking all my money back from fund managers and aligning it better with my core values is to help empower you, not just to understand investing and use it for maximum returns with little regard for other stakeholders, but to see the power in every dollar that you spend, and in every dollar you invest, as votes for the world that you want to live in and that future generations will inherit.

Does this mean that you will sacrifice returns for ethics? I don't believe so. The organisations I mentioned are all providing exceptional returns to all stakeholders, including shareholders. In my many years of investing, I have discovered that it is the truly great businesses, those that provide the most value to all stakeholders in a ‘conscious capitalist’ sense that also deliver the greatest financial returns to investors over the long-term.