In recent months New Angles has been working with a major financial services group to identify their positive impact pioneers – intrapreneurs who challenge the conventional thinking to create unsuspected business opportunities.
We are discovering managers and staff at different places in the organisation who choose to expand their focus to include positive impacts on key stakeholders.
Social and environmental impacts feature in their customer proposals and internal decisions, alongside bottom-line financial targets. And they are getting superior results.
By giving visibility at senior levels to these impact pioneers and their innovative practices, our client is learning that this kind of innovative thinking is feasible within their existing culture, and brings value.
The pioneers can demonstrate how much clients appreciate a financial services offer that helps them improve their impacts on the stakeholders in their own value chain.
This is opening doors to a quantum shift in top management’s mindset, to embrace stakeholder impacts as critical to a successful business model. And it is stimulating a wave of innovation as traditionally conservative and risk-averse product developers and sales managers discover new conversations with each other and with their clients.
The feedback we are getting from younger managers in the firm is equally impressive. They see business based on positive impacts as the way forward for the 21st century. They speak of it as awakening pride and engagement in themselves and their teams.
There is now a growing awareness in this client of the need to evaluate social and environmental impacts, in order to be able to manage priorities, make trade-offs and set objectives. There are clear signs of a transformative effect on the culture of the company.