Every large company runs programmes it believes are good for the country, and most of them find that saying so no longer helps. Trust in institutions had fallen far enough that a claim of community benefit met suspicion regardless of whether it was true, and sometimes met derision. At the same time governments had come to expect corporate good citizenship as a baseline rather than a favour, so the access and goodwill such work used to buy had thinned out.
That is a harder problem than bad communications. The company was not failing to describe its contribution well. It had lost the standing to be the one describing it.
This came out of Anthro, the practice I ran under Marain PTE Ltd. The work was commissioned and it went ahead. What it became is confidential, so this page carries the reasoning and not the outcome.
The triangle
The frame we proposed put three things in relation to each other. Human need. Commercial opportunity. The national good.
A corporation, on its own, is trusted to pursue exactly one of those. It is required to exploit commercial opportunity, and it is believed when it says it is doing so. Its statements about the other two are discounted by default, because the audience assumes the commercial motive is doing the real work.
The interesting position is the intersection. A project that genuinely sits where all three overlap is defensible in a way a corporate social programme is not, because its commercial logic is declared rather than hidden. Nobody has to believe the company is being selfless. They have to believe the project works.
Why a coalition rather than a programme
The move that follows is to stop making the claim alone. What companies here and elsewhere had found was that work attributed to a coalition — one including stakeholders from across the policy ecosystem — does not carry the same credibility discount as the same work attributed to a single company.
So the proposal was an institution rather than a campaign: a business-led coalition incubating profitable, sustainable projects against the four problems that actually constrain the country — energy, food, water and work. Profitable is load-bearing in that sentence. A coalition that incubates charitable projects is a foundation, and it inherits the credibility problem it was built to solve. One that incubates projects which must stand up commercially is making a different claim: that these problems are addressable by ordinary business logic, and here is the evidence.
The structure had a founding member whose chairman would head the organisation, associate members drawn from companies working on the same problems in the same places, and a governing board of thinkers, policy-makers and members. The point of that shape is that the founder takes the risk and the reputational exposure first, and the board makes it something other than one company's vehicle.
The part that makes it an instrument
The coalition would publish a state of the nation every quarter, each on one of the four areas, alongside sustained engagement with the relevant ministries, policy-makers and senior journalists.
That publication is what turns a coalition into an instrument. A body that convenes produces meetings. A body that publishes on a schedule produces a record, and a record gives everyone else a reason to come to it — which is the same argument I have made for measurement in every other context. The company stops asking to be heard on these subjects and becomes the place the numbers come from.
We had a precedent to point at. A business-led coalition built on the same logic already existed and was working, which is why the proposal could describe the construct rather than argue for the idea of it.
What I would do differently
I would have written the first quarterly report before proposing the coalition.
This is the same lesson the rest of my work keeps teaching me and I keep having to relearn: an instrument is easier to sell once it exists in one instance than while it is still a diagram of an instrument. A single published state of the nation on one of the four problems — done at a smaller scale, on public data, with the method stated — would have made the coalition an obvious extension of something already running, rather than a commitment to a body that had yet to do anything.
The construct is on this page because the construct is mine to describe. What the company decided, and what followed, belongs to them. The method is describable. The specifics are not mine to publish.