Esther Dyson, an independent investor and writer, tells us about her personal values, what she believes is the right for companies to do to be socially responsible and explains why working in innovations is hard.
1. What's more important for you than returning investments?
Oh, well, it's obvious - solving problems. To me, you make money because someone appreciates your solution and then you get more money to solve more problems. So, making a profit is what proves that someone values your solution. Now, I mean, you're maybe providing a solution for someone who has no money and then you can't make a profit, but by in large, making money is simply assigned that your contributions are valued. You know, some of my contributions I know are valued because I make a profit, some are valued because I can see it for myself - women don't die in child birth or whatever.
2. What do you value the most in life?
Beyond those specific things, what I do I value, I value my personal freedom and once I spent six months training to be a cosmonaut in Star City and it's been a long time since I had a boss and nobody tells me how to spend my time. I mean, I'm always busy and I have too much to do but there is no one who says, "This is what you must do and this is what you may not do". I make my own decisions even though sometimes I regret them. And so, I value my autonomy, my ability to say, this is the problem I want to solve, this is a problem - it's a real problem - but it's not my problem, I'm going to focus on this thing and not that. I started my education two years after I left university, because before that I was studying other stuff people gave me and stuff that was already known. Two years after that when I got the first job I loved I was finding out stuff that wasn't known, and that's what I like to do. Find out the good and the bad and then fix the bad part. To me it's that constant discovery. So, what I'm doing mostly now is stuff in health where I think there are huge problems, huge things that aren't understood and big opportunities.
3. What do you think about social responsibility in business? Is business supposed to do something except for creating more jobs and paying taxes?
I mean, according to the law, the business has to serve the interests of its shareholders, but the people in the business have to do what they think is right, personally, and businesses need to obey the law. So, it's a complicated question. You know, I don't particularly want the businesses that I own to be spending my money, my shareholder's money on, you know, doing good works. I don't really want to see them go give money to the Red Cross or something. On the other hand, it can be very good business to give money to the schools that your employees send their children to. It can be good business, actually, to advertise green marketing and sell more products because people think you're green or in the case of text4baby - if you are a vitamin company, to say we support text4baby, buy our vitamins. But I think mostly, what companies should be doing is being good businesses, which means treating their employees right, thinking about the long term, selling good products and being honest. Both because that's the right thing to do and because long term it pays off for the business. And so, as a shareholder, I want for my business to think long term, I don't want it to make short term profits by lying.
4. What about alcohol companies?
There are different questions around alcohol companies. I think alcohol should be legal. I think it certainly should be regulated and so forth and so on. I, personally, would not work for an alcohol company. It causes too much pain to too many people that I don't want to be part of it, but it's a personal decision. I don't think it should be illegal and don't think that everybody who works in an alcohol company are horrible people, it's just not something I personally would take pleasure in doing. And as I said right in the beginning you have to do something you love or you're not happy.
5. When it comes to social responsibility, what do you think is the right thing for companies to do?
The most important thing companies can do is to find interesting problems and solve them and to range you what that is, it's very very large. But mostly they should be socially responsible within their own sphere. That is how they treat employees, where they buy things from, the quality of their products, the support they show to their own employees and, of course, their business practices. But, you know, giving money to a charity I don't think is a very good way of being socially responsible. Letting your employees pick a charity to work for, for 5% of their time, doing something that's one of their work skills, I think that's a great way to be socially responsible because it brings value to both: to the recipients and to the business. And it makes the employees feel more valuable and it makes the employees feel more autonomous. Again, they're doing something they choose to do; they are working with a charity they want to work with.
6. Why it is hard to adopt innovations?
The reason innovation is so hard is what I call "the haircut problem". You know, if a man gets a new haircut - that's great, but if a woman gets a new haircut people say: "oh, you look so good", and instead of thinking, "oh, I have a nice new haircut", she'll think, "oh, I must have looked so horrible before". And people don't like to admit that they weren't that good before. They don't want to admit the old way they did it was bad. And so to adopt an innovation somehow is a rejection of what you were or what you did and that's why it's hard. You'd much rather defend what you've got than reject it and take on something new.
