Socially generative business

Reflections on entrepreneurship, culture, and what it really means to cultivate your own garden.

I was recently asked to join the Entrepreneurs in Residence team at Anglia Ruskin University — a real privilege, and also a moment for reflection. After nearly twenty years of running a business I co-founded in 2007, what have I actually learned about entrepreneurship? And why do I think it remains one of the most valuable — and most misunderstood — forces in our society?

For a long time, I resisted the label of entrepreneur. My business partner Simon felt the same way. We would often say: we’re not really entrepreneurs — we just started this business because we wanted to do things differently.

What motivated us was never the abstract idea of “starting a company”. It was the belief that there were things we wanted to achieve — forms of impact we wanted to create — that simply could not happen within the structures that already existed. If we wanted that work to exist, we would have to build it ourselves.

What is entrepreneurship?

It has taken me the better part of two decades to understand that this instinct — the desire to create something new in order to solve a problem or produce change — is exactly what entrepreneurship is.

At its core, entrepreneurship is the act of creating something that would not otherwise exist without you: a space, a culture, a service, a set of relationships, a way of working. Understood that way, it is an extraordinarily creative act — though perhaps not in the way we usually imagine creativity.

There is a common impression of what running a business looks like: you decide what you are doing, build your thing, hire people, sell your product. Simple.

The reality is something far messier and far more human. It is thousands upon thousands of micro-decisions, made every day, over years. People sometimes ask what we actually do all day. The honest answer is: we make judgement calls. Constantly. Across an almost absurd range of subjects — from the genuinely minute to the hugely consequential.

Most of those decisions cannot possibly be perfect. But over time, what you are really trying to build is consistency of culture. Every decision becomes a tiny part of a much larger picture. The challenge is not simply making “good” decisions; it is making decisions that align with the kind of organisation you are trying to create.

And I think this is where the creativity of entrepreneurship really lives.

For me, it is not primarily in the original idea, nor in the mythology of the visionary founder, but in the sustained act of judgement. In deciding, over and over again, what matters; how people are treated; what gets prioritised; what compromises are acceptable; what kind of environment you are collectively trying to create.

Over time, those decisions accumulate into something much larger than strategy or process: they become culture.

That process is remarkably similar whether you are building a business designed to maximise shareholder value or one designed to maximise positive social impact. In both cases, the long-term mission lives inside the daily choices. Strategy is not separate from culture; it reveals itself through culture.

What I have come to understand is that entrepreneurship is not any one thing. It is fluid, active, and alive. It exists in the day-to-day. It requires nurturing. It requires perspective, patience, energy, and the ability to listen well. Above all, it requires dialogue.

Entrepreneurship is not, and cannot be, a solitary act.

Simon and I have always led in partnership. People often say how difficult that must be. My experience has been the opposite. I cannot imagine doing this alone — without the shared space, shared memory, shared judgement, and shared responsibility that partnership creates.

Growth and investment

If businesses are ultimately built through human judgement, then they inevitably shape the social world around them. That is why I think conversations about entrepreneurship and growth are often too narrow.

At the moment, we talk constantly about growth. There is broad agreement on the what — we need it. The disagreement lies in the how. And when we talk about growth, we almost always mean economic growth: increasing productivity, revenue, national wealth.

I do not disagree with the importance of that. But I wonder if we spend too little time focusing on what kind of growth we are creating, and where its benefits will ultimately flow.

If growth simply concentrates wealth within an increasingly small group of people, it risks becoming extractive. That is a pattern many of us will recognise from the last two decades.

At PPL, we donate at least 50% of our profits every year, partnering with voluntary sector colleagues. People are sometimes surprised by this. But for us, it is not really an act of generosity, it is pragmatism.

We recognise that the impact created by investing money collectively is significantly greater than the impact it would create if distributed solely among individuals.

If we want to live in a stable, healthy society — if we want future generations to enter adulthood well-educated, mentally resilient, and hopeful about their futures — then we have to invest in the conditions that make that possible.

That responsibility cannot sit only with governments, nor only with individuals. It also sits with organisations.

And not only through money, but through culture.

Through creating workplaces that genuinely sustain people. Places that invest in younger staff, that connect quality of work to the value it creates in the world rather than purely the revenue it generates. Places that foster agency, possibility, dignity, and hope.

What is socially generative business?

No organisation can solve all of society’s problems. But in the words of one of my favourite thinkers, Voltaire: “We must cultivate our own garden.”

To me, socially generative business is exactly that. It is the decision to tend carefully to what is within your reach; to create forms of value that extend beyond the purely financial, not out of charity or idealism, but out of a clear-eyed understanding that the health of the world around us is inseparable from the health of the organisations within it.

In that sense, entrepreneurship lies at the heart of the opportunity to make a new and positive contribution to the world in which we all live, in whatever way excites us; to create something that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. And that is why I have come to be proud to describe myself as an entrepreneur.

Claire Kennedy, Entrepreneur in Residence