The Flywheel of Shared Success is designed to demonstrate that staying within the boundaries of responsible growth doesn’t mean limiting our ambitions—it means channeling them toward something more sustainable and meaningful. By operating within these constraints, we can still pursue growth and success, while ensuring that the value we create is distributed equitably across all stakeholders in our ecosystem.
This equitable deployment of value—how we allocate what we capture after delivering products and services—strengthens the very ecosystem that supports us. It builds loyalty among customers, fosters more capable and motivated employees, garners greater community and governmental support, and, in turn, creates a more resilient and sustainable society and environment.
The shift from extraction to contribution is at the heart of this model. Instead of viewing businesses as separate entities, competing for their survival in isolation, we must embrace our interdependence with the broader ecosystem. The failure to recognize this interconnectedness, and the relentless pursuit of short-term profit at the expense of long-term health, has led many organizations to their own undoing. Extraction without reinvestment is ultimately unsustainable.
This is why we’ve complemented Michael Porter’s value chain with the impact chain. Instead of focusing on capturing value, we emphasize redeploying it—investing the value we create to nurture the ecosystem that sustains us. This concept aligns with Porter’s vision of shared value: moving beyond short-termism to strategies that create lasting benefits for businesses and society alike.
The evidence supports this approach. The Just 100 companies, which prioritize equitable and responsible practices, are outperforming the Russell 1000 by 13.7%. This is a clear indicator that long-termism isn’t just good for stakeholders—it’s good for shareholders too.
This is the lesson we must learn: to grow responsibly, to invest equitably, and to recognize that our own prosperity is inseparable from the health of the ecosystems we inhabit. By doing so, we can build not only more resilient businesses but also a more sustainable and thriving future for society and nature.
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