In an age of polarised politics, companies that stick to their principles and don’t shy away from activism can gain an edge  

The easiest way to find any Lush event is to just follow your nose
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The easiest way to find a Lush event is to follow your nose. As I wandered down to Old Billingsgate market in the heart of the City of London, I was hit by its familiar scent – a melee of hundreds of essential oils wafting from “naked” handmade cosmetics – from solid shampoos and massage oils to fresh face masks and hand-cut soap. I was home.

This “Creative Showcase” was their pièce de résistance, a chance to show off just how far they’ve come since opening their first shop in Poole back in 1995. Their main factory – still based in Dorset – now employs about 1500 people out of a global workforce of around 14,000 – and has nearly 1000 shops in 50 countries.

Lush has come a very long way and grown up a lot in the past 20 years
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It’s safe to say one can no longer dismiss Lush as some sort of whimsical hippy project, yet there’s no sign that they’re reining back their trademark wackiness. Within five minutes of entering the showcase, I spotted a group of dancing ladies wearing nothing but a few transparent plastic bubbles (promoting the idea of “naked” products) walked on a platform full of giant wobbling shower jellies (shower jellies are indeed a real thing) and watched Queen guitarist Brian May going down a slide on his way to inspect machines that were laser-etching soap bars and 3-D printing solid bath melts.

Willy Wonka would eat his heart out, but in spite of appearances, this was all serious business.The reason why Lush is consistently ranked as one of the best places to work in the UK and in 2016 generated pre-tax profits of £43.2m (up 76% from the previous year) is because it sells a lot more than lathers and ointments; It sells an ideology around which both staff and customers can rally.

They have a range of guiding policies around animal welfare, environmental responsibility, profit-sharing and charitable giving that are strictly adhered to, and are involved in broad-ranging activism in causes such as opposition to policies such as fox hunting and badger culling. Which is why it makes sense that Dr. May – a keen campaigner against the cull – would be a kindred spirit to Lush’s Founder Mark Constantine, who posts pictures of badgers on his Facebook, saying he “felt like a kid at Christmas” when they visited his garden.

Willy Wonka would eat his heart out, but this was also serious business
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Constantine has also taken a clear stance against Brexit, speaking up for the essential contribution that European workers make not only to Lush, but to the broader UK economy and adding a belief “that all people should enjoy freedom of movement across the world” to its core mission statement. Like many businesses, Lush simply would not have been able to grow as it did without the graft and dedication of European workers. And I should know, because I was one of them.

The European Union allowed Lush to flourish as a business
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Back in 2003, when Lush was a much younger company but already experiencing very rapid growth, I got an entry-level job at its flagship shop in Carnaby Street. It was flexible enough to allow me to work around my University studies, and in only a few months I got promoted to key holder, then assistant manager. I would stayed and gone further, but I was awarded an Erasmus grant, a scheme that allowed me to do my second year in another EU country without paying hefty tuition fees, but that involved leaving my job and moving to Italy. So it was interesting to hear Lush’s next guest of honour at the creative showcase – Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn – talk about the importance of the Erasmus programme and vow that his party would try its best to keep it, even after the UK leaves the European Union. I do wish him luck in that.

The saddest thing about Brexit is that I wouldn’t have done any of that without the European Union. I wouldn’t have got a job a Lush and been able to work there without any restrictions as an EU citizen, nor would I have received the grant that enabled me to graduate.

Lush sells much more than cosmetics. It's an ideology around which people can rally
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In fact, I would never have chosen to move to England in the first place; a huge part of the attraction was that the UK was not only a country with its own rich culture, but that it was only an hour or so away, through frictionless travel, from so many other rich cultures I could experience. It is sad to think the next generation of Brits will not have that option.

In such polarized political times it is hard to remain neutral, but companies like Lush seem quite happy to embrace this activism and incorporate it into their core business, even creating a “soapbox” space on its own website where “passionate people with strong opinions” can exercise their freedom of speech.

Lush’s Founder might well describe himself as a “wishy-washy liberal,” but the liberal left is getting increasingly angry as they watch progress in areas such as diversity, worker’s rights and environmental protection being eroded by current policy, and companies like his are becoming a beacon through which people feel they can channel some of that anger, even if it’s by purchasing a nice bath bomb.

People can exercise their activism by buying a nice bath bomb
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Lush has taken a stand against Brexit
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Any doubt that Lush are not shy of getting political was dispelled when Jeremy Corbyn was ushered in next. Before joining Constantine on stage for a fireside chat – where he toyed with the the possibility of going vegan and said he’d not hesitate to call Donal Trump and tell him that pulling out of the Paris Accord was a mistake – the Labour leader took off his jacket, put on some gloves, and made his own bath bomb. Needless to say, it proved a big hit with the audience who chanted “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” and laughed indulgently when he said he only had a shower in his house, so wouldn’t be able to use the ballistic he had just made.

“I hear Number 10 has a bath,” quipped Constantine.

 

“Well, that’s probably a good reason to move,” conceded Corbyn.

Like most things at Lush, it’s all good fun, but it doesn’t mean they’re not being serious.

@jeremycorbyn says he’s got no bath to use the bath bomb he’s made at #lushcreativeshowcase. “Number 10 has a bath” replies Mark Constantine pic.twitter.com/XtfdqOvran

— Alice Bonasio (@alicebonasio) September 4, 2017

Because the company has definitely grown up and will continue to evolve and grow as it embraces digital technology and branches out into verticals like luxury spa treatments. But unlike many businesses, Lush realizes that this doesn’t mean abandoning who you are. Most importantly for its loyal community, it also shows how – if you stick to your principles – you don’t actually have to choose between doing well and doing good.

This article was originally featured in the Huffington Post

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Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post How Soapbox Politics is Good Business appeared first on Tech Trends.

As an avid Twitter user, I have been worried to see it struggle to conform to the expectations of its investors and shareholders.

In this Quartz article I set out the case for why those expectations are not only shortsighted but actually dangerous. Twitter is about much more than making a quick advertising buck, and if we – its community – don’t scramble to safeguard it, we could lose it.

Commercial pressure on Twitter may cause its community to lose what has become a vital service
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2016 has been a year of surprises and painful lessons that have taught us we must proactively defend what we value or face losing it in spectacular fashion. In 2017, Twitter’s future might matter more than you might think—and it hinges on keeping it in the hands (or, should we say, thumbs) of the public.

Twitter’s absence from US president-elect Donald Trump Dec 16’s meeting with top tech executives raised quite a few eyebrows. Despite using the social-media platform to regular and devastating effect throughout his campaign, Trump’s choice to not have Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sitting at the table with the tech big kids draws the importance of the company into question. The Trump team defended their decision to exclude them by saying the platform—which claims 317 million monthly active users, though that figure is not entirely clear-cut—was “too small.” (There’s also a rumor Trump froze Twitter out in retribution over rejecting a custom emoji he wanted to run during the campaign.)

Sure enough, judging by criteria such as market cap ($13 billion compared to Amazon’s $363 or Apple’s $618), number of employees (a workforce less than a hundredth of the size of IBM’s), and revenue (they’re still operating at a net loss), Twitter seems to come up short compared to the other tech giants. But it holds some serious soft economic power: Recently, Trump wiped out billions of dollars in Lockheed Martin’s stock value with a single tweet.

Regardless of how much money the company does or doesn’t make, there are still millions of people who use and need Twitter
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Twitter might yet find ways of making money from its substantial user base and the huge amount of content and data it generates. But the network’s true calling arguably resides in giving people a voice who would otherwise have been ignored. In that context, it makes a lot more sense to think of Twitter as a public service rather than a dividends cash cow. Yet the constant pressure it’s under to monetize leaves it vulnerable to a takeover, which could question its future integrity and neutrality.

 It makes a lot more sense to think of Twitter as a public service rather than a dividends cash cow. Twitter’s potential suitors—which include Disney, Salesforce, Alphabet, and Microsoft—continually frame the company in terms of commercial viability (or lack thereof) instead of its reach and influence as a media platform. For example, News Corp has been touted as a potential buyer, although they’ve officially denied it so far. If that did turn out to be true, what are the implications of its founder and executive chairman, Rupert Murdoch, openly endorsing Trump? In fact, there’s nothing to really stop Trump’s own company putting in their own bid, should they wish to.

Twitter is a unique platform in a very unique position
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Regardless of how much money the company does or doesn’t make, there are still millions of people who use and need Twitter. But if not through cash, how do we assign value to a platform through which the Pope (@Pontifex) chooses to ponder the rapidly declining state of our planet, and which allows little girls in Syria to reach JK Rowling? What price should we put on a tool that journalists, both professional and citizen, have come to rely on to source and disseminate news? If Twitter’s neutrality was to be jeopardized by a third-party purchase, we’d lose all that and so much more.

Over the past ten years, Twitter has become an essential service in global society—and as such, its future should be protected. But how?

Twitter might yet find ways of making money from user base and the huge amount of content and data it generates, but its true calling is arguably giving people a voice who would otherwise have been ignored.
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There are interesting precedents for sponsoring media organizations and information platforms through various forms of public ownership, and these solutions could very well be adapted to Twitter. Here are three possible alternatives:

Shareholder cooperatives

What if Twitter’s users were to mobilize and take matters into their own hands? After all, Twitter is a publicly traded company, and since its 2013 IPO, anybody can buy shares. While there is a group of key stakeholders who own large portions of the platform, if enough individuals decided to invest and collectively organize, it could make a big difference to its future direction.

Nathan Schneider from the University of Colorado Boulder set out how that might work in a recent Guardian article, making the case that, much like the Green Bay Packers NFL team, Twitter should be run by (and for) its fans. There is now an (appropriately hashtagged) #wearetwitter campaign and petition urging Twitter to work with users to find a way for them to buy it and turn it into a cooperatively owned platform.

“Another suggestion comes from Tom McDonough,” Schneider writes, “a blogger with a history in capital markets, who proposes that less than 1% of users—no small number, at three million—could each buy $2,300 worth of shares and vote as a bloc for a transition to cooperative ownership. They’d then be paid back through the transition process, partly through a membership fee that could average to $10 each year. Rather than giving the company a blank check to sell your data, would you pay a co-ownership fee?”

Contribution-based model

The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and campaigns for policy change, has managed to finance its operations through an extremely effective contribution-based model where users are asked to make regular donations. It also receives larger gifts like the $1 million contribution made earlier this year by Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark. Twitter could also follow this path.

Katherine Maher, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, explains how this contribution model helps to build trust with the community and ensures the credibility of the information posted on the platform. “Nobody owns Wikipedia, so everybody owns it,” she says. “We’ve got these very strict guidelines and criteria that articles have to meet, but users take a collective responsibility for making sure it all works. Anybody can use, it, anybody can contribute, but it is all done in a very transparent way.”

The most important aspect of what Wikipedia does is not that its information is perfect, but that it is transparent. You can check the provenance of any piece of information by looking at every single edit ever made to a page. Snowden argued that a similar feature should be implemented on Twitter, allowing people to edit their tweets, but making it so that the edits were flagged, visible, and traceable, much like they are on Wikipedia. That transparency then empowers users to make informed decisions about the information they choose to trust, perhaps helping us to avoid the potentially disastrous dissemination of fake news we’ve seen with Facebook.

Since neutrality could not be ensured, there seems little point (and frankly very little hope of success) in governments attempting to start new Twitter-like platforms from scratch
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Public ownership

It might seem counter-intuitive to suggest that some form of state funding might work for Twitter, especially considering that this would make it entangled in a very complex relationship with the next president. There are, however, many examples of publicly funded media platforms, such as NPR in the US and the BBC in the UK, that manage not only to thrive commercially but also to stand up to government forces and maintain their independence.

Some politicians have even argued for the creation of alternative nationalized platforms. For example, in his Digital Democracy Manifesto, the leader of the opposition in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn set out the need for a “Massive Multi-Person On-line Deliberation” platform to organize online meetings for individuals and communities to deliberate about pressing political issues and participate in devising new legislation.

As the New Statesman’s Amelia Tait pointed out, that “is Twitter. It’s just Twitter.”

But as neutrality could not be ensured, there seems little point (and frankly very little hope of success) in governments attempting to start new Twitter-like platforms from scratch. Instead, their financial support conceivably could be managed through 3rd-party collective organizations that transcend borders or the jurisdiction of any one government, much in the way that institutions such as NATO and the UN operate.

Twitter is a unique platform in a very unique position. Like Facebook, it isn’t a media company in the traditional sense, yet events such as Brexit and the US election leave no doubt as to its power and influence. We now need to figure out how to manage that power sustainably for the benefit of its users. That’s because Twitter’s unique problems are also a huge opportunity to bring the broader community into the conversation and give them a chance to have a say in the future of the company.

Twitter is failing as a public company, but there are other ways to keep this bird aloft https://t.co/AtfvWoCorM

— Quartz (@qz) December 21, 2016

Alice Bonasio is a VR Consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. She also regularly writes for Fast Company, Ars Technica, Quartz, Wired and others. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Why Twitter Needs to Go Public. Again appeared first on Tech Trends.