Melanie Howard- Strategic Advisor and Ambassador
The book that most influenced me in early adulthood was E.F. Schumaker’s ‘Small is Beautiful’ – which opened my eyes to another way of doing things. It is still relevant to my work today, helping small enterprises succeed and working with individuals and groups to create innovative solutions to organisational challenges and opportunities. I still believe that businesses can make a real, worthwhile difference to the wider environment and that big is not necessarily better – being true to your values and having fun are both vitally important to me.
After a few early twists and turns which resulted in forgetting these early insights somewhat, I ended up enjoying a successful first career in marketing with Ogilvy and Mather Direct in the 1980s, when the budgets were big and the lunches long. But once the glamour of agency life began to pall, I started to look for a new, more meaningful direction both in terms of creating a better work-life balance as the mother of small children and in order to reconnect with that search for a better way. My new direction came when I started working for the Henley Centre for Forecasting reconnecting with an early interest in social science and reinventing myself as a social trends forecaster. Whilst much of the work was commercial, the social perspective enabled me to bring big issues to the client’s discussions about the future – principally about the role of business in society and how businesses needed to take responsibility as ‘big citizens’ in order to earn the right to trade. My interest in the possibility of social business was born.
When WPP acquired Henley and decided to turn it into a more mainstream marketing consultancy, I left in 1996 to set up the Future Foundation with fellow director Michael Willmott. Our mission was to demonstrate the demand for businesses to be more open, transparent and socially responsible from the consumer perspective. We felt that the evidence of consumer demand would be the most potent tool to persuade marketing directors and senior decision makers to take corporate social responsibility seriously. Over several years this work on Citizen Brands developed and matured and was influential on many brands and organisations. I also worked with the Co-op Bank during this period researching and predicting the size of the ethical consumer market.
As part of our business strategy we had established an on-line subscription service which proved to be highly successful and we found that Future Foundation had grown into a thriving enterprise with some 30 employees and a turnover approaching £3 million with all the attendant challenges of overcoming ‘founder syndrome’ and the need to let other people get on with running and expanding the business. Eventually we decided that our social mission had been eclipsed by our commercial success and sold the business in order to be free to pursue new interests.
Now, increasingly convinced that social business is the solution to many of the problems we are facing in a globalised, capitalist-dominated economy, I am delighted to be working with Catalyst and socialinvestments.com to help create accessible and valuable services to enable social businesses to flourish – both financially and in solving social issues. My other activities include writing a book about how to bring the future into planning and decision making called The Future Unwrapped, and advising a range of small businesses in a way that I hope is both effective and enjoyable.