[Release Date: July 5, 2022] We’re used to the idea of organizations that try to do good as non-profits, but what about for-profit companies – like the great majority of game companies? Some for-profit companies are choosing to play a positive role in the world and to do so as a certified B-Corporation. One of these is ustwo games’, best known for their fantastic Monument Valley games. We chat with ustwo’s Justin Michaels about what it’s like to be a game company dedicated to doing good as a B-corp.
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
hello everybody we’re here today with justin michaels uh ceo of us two games um us two games in case you don’t know
is an independent mobile game development studio based in the uk um i’m a big fan of the monument valley
games uh that they make if you’ve never played them you should really try them out um
and uh justin leads uh the operations finance and commercials teams that helped shape the strategy and planning
for the years ahead for us two games uh prior to working in the game industry justin has held similar operational
roles uh in a mobile ticketing company called dice led the startup investment arm of us too uh done a stint as a
management consultant and earnest mba from uh instead uh justin justin welcome to the show
thank you yeah appreciate it all right so
we’re here to talk about something that i think virtually uh
god i was i want to say virtually no fans of games know about and this is our opportunity to
not just know fans of games but virtually no one working in the gaming industry i’m assuming is aware of b corp
so um you guys i think took the really uh or are taking uh what is
really kind of an extraordinary uh positive step here uh and we want to
essentially um explore what this means uh what it means to be a b corp for a game company um and
uh what other companies might uh think about if they’re uh thinking about uh being um uh b corps so all right uh
we’re here to chat about what it’s like uh for to be a game company that’s also a b corp uh obviously that doesn’t make
any sense unless we understand what a b corp is so justin what is a big corp sure um so
a b corp can be lots of different things but at its simplest it is a company
that has achieved a certification that certification is
a set of standards set by a non-profit organization that’s based out of the united states called
b lab and b lab started gosh i think over a decade ago building this you know what’s this what
good looks like in terms of how you balance purpose and people and planet in
terms of your for profit business model i think that’s the important thing about a b corp is it’s it is a for-profit
uh company yeah it’s not a charity to be a b corp you’re finding a way to to find
that balance between purpose and profit um but any company in theory can become
a b corp if they can pass the certification and that certification focuses on
social and environmental performance transparency around how you operate and
things like data and then you you eventually do need to make a legal commitment which is
in certain companies and their articles of association or whatever the relevant legal document is in your in various
countries that says you as directors and shareholders will
put employees the environment and other social causes on the same level as
financial considerations so it is a real legal commitment as well as a
certification right um so let me uh dig into that a little bit
before we we get into the practical stuff i don’t know maybe maybe it’s all practical maybe more maybe it’s all
aspirational but um what you’re talking about essentially sounds like uh what
people sometimes call the triple bottom line right of uh people uh planet uh profits right um
does to be a b corp so right the idea is right you’re a for-profit company and
again i think justin made it very clear that right this is the idea this is not a non-profit kind of thing this is a
for-profit company that’s committing to doing good beyond uh beyond the profit um so
is it more than just let’s say committing to doing good beyond the beyond uh
uh profit do you really need to get those three things your environmental uh
commitments your commitments to your employee your customers your communities uh on the same level as profits
so this is i think i’m going to explain it how i was told about this when we were going through
the certification process so i’m not trying to represent uh b lab’s current characterization of this
what matters is that those other factors so profit and then finances and then those other things are at least
discussed and considered at the same time and that they aren’t
automatically less important so b b lab and what’s wrapped up in the
certification is not insisting that companies make an even
set of decisions between profit and purpose for just to sum up all those
other things um but that they are considered so b corps absolutely still have the
freedom to make financially driven decisions if that’s what’s right for the company at that point in time what
is important and what the legal contract does through the articles of association or again whatever the relevant document
is in your specific country is it says that the directors at least have
to think about these other factors and bring that into their decision-making process um
in a transparent way in a transparent way you know through things like having
board meetings and um and having independent directors right
there’s a whole sort of set of governance best policies and frameworks that b corps um
are always trying to improve upon so this is a b corp isn’t a replacement
for an escort or a c corp or any any of these other legal entities it’s it’s a
separate thing sort of layered on top right in most countries that is still the case there are a few countries that
have legislated a benefit corporation in which case you can evolve into that
structure uh that’s not the case in the uk where i’m where else two games is based so i don’t know much about how
that works but in general the assumption is that it’s a layer on top of whatever your existing structure is are we
familiar with uh any uh b corps there are some b corps that we might know outside of the video
game sphere yeah of course um they’re i mean the biggest ones that always get named first i’m going to carry on with
that tradition uh pat patagonia um ben and jerry’s more recently i suppose all birds um
and there are loads more right i mean there are over i think three or four
thousand b corps in the in the world now um all of those ones i just mentioned
are of course consumer product facing right and and i think that has a lot to
do with where b corp and b lab started and it was looking at how they can
impact the planet in a better way these are companies with supply chains and inevitably you know when they’re
delivering their products they have waste and it’s trying to think from end to end about how
not just we treat each other as employees but also what the impact is we’re having on the
earth in delivering our products and services what’s been really interesting and
certainly a benefit to us two games is i think a lot of the demand for
companies that aren’t in that traditional consumer product space are saying well
we want to do good too we’ve got purpose and we want to have a triple bottom line how do we qualify ourselves as a as a b corp and
so every year b lab goes in through their very comprehensive
certification questionnaire which is about 200 questions and they’re evolving it and they’re
making it more accessible to companies that are you know from different industries um you see a lot of
consultancies able to now qualify so companies that are more service oriented
um you even have venture funds that are qualifying as b corps you’ve got um
oh yeah it’s it’s gotten a much wider range from what traditionally um was
focused on which i think so so so can you give us an example of what this might let’s say specifically mean for a
company like patagonia or uh ben jerry’s yeah so so for all b corps not
regardless of where you’re um coming from industry was the the five categories that the the questionnaire
focuses on are governance workers community
environment and customers so what that means for a company like patagonia which has a huge
supply chain element and is that they’re going to be very interested in making sure their
environmental policies and practices are really good and if i contrast that to us two games
we don’t really have a big environmental footprint we’ve got a lot more work to do around
you know what our scope 3 carbon emissions look like because we we use things like
i don’t know amazon servers and all of our players have devices and those have carbon footprints associated with them
so it’s not it’s not that we can’t do anything there but it’s obviously not the same as having an end-to-end
manufacturing global supply chain right right um what what um
the other sort of distinction is is if if you have a really impactful business
model meaning you’re explicitly targeting things like education
health outcomes financial inclusion that’s what all
falls into the customer category of the b corp certification and if you’re a company that’s purposefully focused on
some of those topics then you’ll get more points basically within the certification and
you can go further now again us two games we we aren’t right yeah we we think
we’re creating art and and it’s really important and it has a huge emotional impact on our um on our players and we
love that about the games we make but that’s not going to earn us credit in the b corp context of consumer impact
which means we’ve got to be really strong in all the other four categories um and and i think this is what b corp’s
done really well in terms of evolving the certification so that if your business isn’t focused on impact
it can still just be operationally really strong and progressive and still become a b
corp one way to kind of look at these things are the kind of uh i don’t know organic outcomes of the way
you do business right um the way uh your business uh impacts the employees
uh you know uh the way it impacts the community in which you’re in uh just kind of organically by by the
way you normally operate but then it’s also possible to do what some companies do which is let’s say to
you know donate a part of their profits to some sort which i think is what uh part of what ben and jerry’s does
um right uh the only one for the planet is sort of a common pledge that is this
another way of kind of measuring community output so you’re that you’re still helping the community in a much
more kind of explicit way that’s right that you’ve got the right of those five categories that’s where that one that
sort of um policy would would fit um what’s what’s sort of really hard to
get your head around about b corp as i mentioned it’s it’s roughly 200 questions in this
in this questionnaire in this certification they’re kind of roughly divided by
40 points per section okay um the customers one’s a little complicated so i’m gonna leave that one
to the side you know if you do if you contributed one percent of your profits to charity
and that was a policy that you had there is a question in the certification to get points for that it’s probably only
one or two like one point because there’s so many different topics to cover in the certification
and um and what’s really nice about the framework is that okay let’s say
you’re getting one point right now for one percent it tells you if you took that to two
percent or five percent what sort of improvement you could make in your overall score
and to qualify as or to certify as a b corp you have to have 80 points total that’s the floor
and every three years you’re reassessed and you have to you have to go through the full certification process again
thankfully you know a lot more about it so it’s not as daunting but you have to answer all those
questions again and if you don’t improve on your last score beelab wants to have a chat with
you about why not you might you might lose your your baby that’s right you might lose your status
so um 80 is just they’ve made a game yeah you’re right they’ve made a game of fighting for
companies to play in order to get this achievement that’s it and keep it that’s the hard
part so it gets yeah so it gets harder to keep it and once you get buy-in um
cool can i ask you could i ask you what what parts of it were the hardest for you or
what what things come up regularly and go oh
the hardest one for us has been getting making headway on on carbon emissions
and really understanding accurately as possible because it is a lot of estimation work
what our carbon footprint is and b corpse again the framework is always sort of
pushing you up the ladder of of um progressiveness right in terms of
being very forward thinking but the starting place for carbon emissions is do you track it
and we haven’t been able to say yes to that one yet the next one is have you set a target to improve upon and then
have you beat that target and then have you offset whatever your emission levels
are and and have you offset them fully have you offset them partially or and increasingly are you carbon negative
because you’ve done sort of you know more than just offsetting um yeah and so those are all laid out in
the the framework and we’ve we’ve just struggled to find um a reliable cost-effective way
to to capture what we you know what we would estimate our carbon footprint to be but we have right has coveted made
that harder i can imagine like having people spread out and working on other homes makes it
really oh my god much harder to figure out even how much electricity is your company using i gather it’s kicked off a
bit of an industry around carbon estimation right and and really that’s ultimately what you have to rely upon is
other service providers who are expert in crafting assumptions based on your
your corporate setup whether that’s office based or remote working or multi-jurisdictions whatever
um and i think b lab is looking for you to work with partners that are certified themselves in that special
specialization whatever i don’t know the names of all those um standards and certifications but they’re looking for
you to validate your offsetting for example with
verified partners right and that’s sort of interesting too because that also suggests that that bee
labs the companies that are b corpse uh
also there is a network of b corps who can work together there are yeah the big big
part of the kind of getting on the other side of that first certification is there’s a community
um tends to be localized more local chapters so country level or in the context of the united states it’ll
probably be more city focused um and they do a pretty good job of trying to
bring b corp leaders together share best practices and things like that that’s super interesting are you
guys the first uh video game company that’s trying to be a big corp do you know of other video game companies that
uh that are b corps i’m not prepared to say we’re the first i when we did this a
while ago as part of the us two group um there were a few
educational games companies and i unfortunately just can’t remember their names i apologize if you’re
listening um but you uh blazed this trail i think before we did and i think this gets back to
that bit i mentioned about customers where if your if your focus is on certain themes and education is one of
those things and you’re trying to drive educational outcomes through your business model
then um that helps you a long way right in terms of delivering on the purpose
along with your profit and um and so i do think there have been a couple of companies that that are in the
education game space that have done it since we just talked about uh games and environmentalism and uh your
game alba uh came up uh would that count so right can you tell us a little bit about the
game alba and i’m just kind of curious if if that would count as something like that something that has a benefit yeah
the technical answer is no it’s not contributing to our how we would qualify
or or earn points in the certification i’ll explain that in a second um but i think
the more intrinsic answer is is yes because we
aren’t thinking about how we activate what it means to to play alba and for
instance the program that we’ve had where for every download of alba we’re planting a tree um and working with a partner that’s
helping us do that you we aren’t thinking about how we activate tree planting if we aren’t
if we haven’t fully processed what it means to be a b corp in our company culture
and i think when we are looking at the next game that we’re about to announce um completely different area of focus in
terms of the the themes but still one that we believe is about impacting people in the right way and we
have some ideas around how we are going to try and activate that in the real world as we have done with alba and the
trees and so um i think what b corp really really helps you do is the more you’re exposed to it
and the more you’re around it the more ingrained it just becomes in your thought process and you look for
opportunities to do good things as opposed to um you know just make the game
uh awesome so trying to figure out your carbon footprint is is one thing but what what
what are some of these things like what are opportunities that you have you know you’re you’re in a meeting you’re talking about i don’t know some element
of the game design or maybe it’s an operations uh uh
meeting and you’re talking about oh we need to buy another set of computers can you
give us an example of how this is sort of how this is sort of manifested itself and in like this sort of like weekly
day-to-day kind of this is this is now how we do things right because because this is a change of mindset
it is it is you know and and so speaking on our behalf but also trying to open this up to how
um leaders income game companies that might be listening can think about it and their context is
it really the team right is where there’s so much that can be done here
and that starts with hiring and thinking about hiring from diverse backgrounds um
so this fits in the community section of the b court framework even though it’s
about employees but they’re looking at things like what’s the socioeconomic background and
diversity within the team what are the age age ranges you know
is there ageism do you are you hiring young people in are you also retaining people that are further along in their
careers that aren’t just you know the boss um and there are
other opportunities where it’s talking about internships and work experience and things like this
that are are giving people opportunities that they might not otherwise have so for example for us a couple things one we
are a member of the london living wage association so that’s helping us ensure
that we always are paying above what the london living wage is in our in our more junior roles and we clear that hurdle
comfortably but it’s still a really important step to make that commitment in a in a public way
um but also working with our local what we would call in the uk our local council
so it could be your local town or city and working with programs there that will help bring in youth that might not
have opportunities to access industries in the creative arts and things like this
so we do that on a on a recurring basis and these are all parts of how we think about hiring once you have the team in
there are lots and lots of things you can do around just being progressive with your
workplace policies so this can range from flexible working which i think nowadays has lots of
different meanings it’s not just you know remote working or not it’s also when do you do you have flexibility
around when you start and stop work um do you have really strong parental leave
policies that go above and beyond what whatever the government mandates might be
in your given country there there’s just so much you can do to think about um
about that bonuses do you pay bonuses what percent of your profits are you paying out in bonuses
what are the differences between the lowest paid person and the highest paid person in the organization obviously the
smaller that range is the the more equitable it’s feeling um do employees
have opportunity to earn shares or options in the business and this is all pushing towards a more
you know equitable balance between ownership and employees
and and i think there’s just lots and lots that companies can do here that bcorp helps you spell the way forward
all of these things sound like things that cost money i’m going to be the i’m going to be the ceo investor guy down
and go doesn’t it isn’t this costing you a lot of money to do this yes it it does um two two ways that i
think to think about that one is what blab is doing to accommodate that so when you start the certification you
have to select what industry you’re in what size company you are and then in this magic black box the um
the the questions change a little bit and the weightings the weightings that you get for
in terms of the points for each answer change a little bit and what that’s trying to reflect is if you’re a small
company let’s say 20 people and you have a parental leave policy that says you’re paid six months leave
in the united states you’re going to get more points for that than if you’re a giant company of 2000 people
with the same policy so they are trying to sort of help smaller companies where
it’s more expensive to put some of those plans in place to certify more easily by focusing on being
strong in a smaller set of policies as opposed to good and lots of different policies and then i suppose yeah the
more generic counter to your question is how much you’re prepared to invest in retaining your team yeah and we’re just
talking about team policies right now but um yeah yeah i think in the video game industry everyone’s pretty clear
that talent is of the utmost importance and retaining them um
is expensive to do it well and so you’re probably going to be making that cost any investment anyway into your team
b corp just does a really nice job of giving you ways to think about it and giving you some answers to how could we
do better here um and that’s great right and also pointing at something outside
where you can say you know hey we’re trying to achieve we’re trying to achieve and or maintain
this status that’s right and we’re all we’ve all decided on on this this is all
uh this is sort of a a group a group achievement a group unlock
uh i like that you keep getting fighting game fighting the sandy uh well it’s totally gamified i mean this
uh though it is really interesting this idea that uh one of the things that cause it’s interesting i i didn’t expect
your example to be so focused on employees but it was great i mean you gave us it’s
such a very different way of thinking about employees that uh
you know so than the way so many companies uh go about it and that was just the employees and then to add to
that the employees get to share in pride uh that their company is uh essentially
working a cares about them and cares about their well-being and is
working to make the world a better place in in some way um yeah and that’s i think that’s again when we look because
the cost of this and we don’t know what the costs exactly are and all that let’s talk benefits and in fact before we talk
benefits i i just want to say so you guys um the original decision to become a b corp
as as you told us was um done by us to us to group before you guys were us two
games right so us to the us to group became certified as b corp in 2019 and then us two games
begin its own company did you guys decide to uh file for a b corp because
by that point your culture just uh changed and you liked uh the idea of
being a b corp what what did you guys you guys had your own you guys had the b corp experience and then you had your
choice about whether to keep that and go through what seems like a pretty
complex process right or just do what everybody else is doing um it is complex and uh you know it’s
not for the faint of heart and you really do need a commitment to getting to the certification and and sort of
resilience as well if you don’t get through it the first time right a commitment to say well okay well now we
know where we stand and we’re going to keep improving till we get it um us to as a company and just for listeners that
um us two is a you know historic first and foremost us two was founded as a digital
product agency so providing clients services uh creating digital products for them
and us two games um really originated as a as a project as an internal project
within us two’s studio um and and from that uh there were some games
before monument valley but of course monument valley was sort of the breakout hit that put us two games on the map and
let it stand up as its own entity within us too and it’s only been very recently that us
two games has been made made separate from us to agency and i’ll spare everyone reasons
around that but um you know i led the group certification in 2019 and
one of the ways that if you’re registering as a as a multinational or as a group of subsidiaries
um b lab basically says well you can only click the policy
that applies to 80 or more of your head count regardless of where they are or
what com what subsidiary they are part of um which is just a way of enforcing high
standards everywhere so you can’t load up 20 of people in a progressive country and then put everyone everyone
else in a in a jurisdiction they might have lower legal requirements etcetera
and so us two games was actually already usually well above the average in the us
two’s set of policies so recertifying as our as our own entity
has not meant we needed to do a lot of new stuff which is great um
my own familiarity with the certification also helps right so i led a much bigger certification and now i’ve
led a smaller one and um and so that that made it accessible but to answer your question shalom i mean it
really was we did not hesitate about re-certifying it was okay if the group
structure’s changing and we would technically lose our status as far as b-lab is concerned we will
recertify because we want to carry on being a b chord so clearly it mattered to you guys uh what he sees the benefits
now yeah um you know i mentioned earlier this is sort of eventually it seeps into the thought processes across
lots of different decisions to get made and and so then once you start thinking about
it’s okay to not only think about our profit
some really important and powerful things can happen and it’s hard to pinpoint them i’ve used
the alba tree planting example is certainly one of the ones we’re really proud of in the last
year and a half there is certainly a talent benefit around just having that
logo on your website and being able to talk about what being a b court means to prospective
hires um it’s right it’s not something that a lot of people still know about so there’s a some educating to do there
but the people who learn about it or already know about it it’s sort of like an instant seal of
approval right this is this must be a company that at least is aware of the world we live in and cares about
the people that work for it and and i think that’s really important and we’ve we’ve seen it’s given some of our team
members the motivation to go and do things outside of their day-to-day jobs so thinking of my colleague jennifer
esteris who is really involved in playing for the planet and does a lot of work outside of
her specific role which is a game director of of the next installment of
the monument valley franchise um and that’s great and we’re super thrilled that she’s out there and
committed and passionate about these different topics that are affecting the industry but also the world
and and i think b corps give being certified as a b corp gives you permission to embrace that and encourage
it and employees to feel like they’re supported for those sorts of actions i think there’s also value in that network
too right the network of other other b corps and you’re now you’re now in this sort of
rather exclusive club yeah hopefully at least decreasingly exclusive and um it is fun
when you see little packages you know with the b corp logo there’s a sense of camaraderie there and and again and i
think that’s one of the benefits if you’re in a consumer product company you see that package with the b corp logo and you
know okay this company’s thought through its packaging decisions for example and hopefully in
as and when more gaming companies think about this as an option for themselves and they can start
branding some of their games as from a b court maybe that’ll start to mean something as well for for players uh you
you know it’s really interesting this idea of uh what you mentioned earlier uh in terms of attracting talent
uh given that so many companies uh especially big game companies
uh in recent years have had scandals the kind that would make you you know
i mean you know never mind dealing with things like you know like crunch and how much you would be demanding of your
developers uh it would be the kind of thing that could really counteract that wait here’s
a game company that seems to really have uh ethical priorities in the way uh it
engages both with its players but uh also here especially with it’s with its
employees with its uh talent with the people that make it what it is i’d love to know how this affects your
your scheduling you’re actually yeah you know production scheduling and that doesn’t factor in so
long before being a b corp you know we had a no or very very limited crunch policy established in us two games and
um you know for instance our upcoming title which um announces very shortly and will be um
available from sort of september october time frame and we we’re almost two years into that and haven’t had any crunch on
it and we’re looking good that we won’t heading into the final quarter um so
that is just our normal way of operating and i think that’s just part of the contract
we have with our team and we are prepared to accept employee satisfaction and quality
of life over demanding timetables um we also make games that i appreciate are are
different than a lot you know what you might see in the industry and we we often aren’t on
really rigorous post launch or um release updates right so that probably
is in our favor but as you guys were posing this question i did make me think i don’t recall any part of the b corp
certification that’s about overtime and i and i guess maybe b corp sort of
picking this sort of thing up in employee retention and engagement surveys right so they do ask about your
head count growth from year to year and obviously if that’s going backwards um
that probably or or is sort of still right because you have a lot of churn that probably says something about your
culture and then they ask about your engagement surveys so do you do an engagement
survey and then if you do what kind of scores are you getting and you need to clear i think something like 70 percent
engaged in order to start what what’s an engagement survey so yeah good question that is a bit of a vague term and it can
be different for different companies i suppose at its most fundamental level a recurring survey of your whole team
that’s asking questions around their general satisfaction and b corp
stipulates certain questions that need to be asked we use a tool called culture app to facilitate our engagement survey
and it is asking questions not just do you like working here and are you proud to work here but also
things like do you see yourself working here in two years time or i feel the
leadership of my company can describe a compelling vision for our
future things that are taking a much wider assessment of of what the employee experience is let’s
imagine now uh the entire game development world every game studio
is now a b corp right um what would be different speculate here yeah i’ll speculate in my crystal
ball i you know i think you mentioned some scandals that have come through the industry and i would like to think first and foremost people
that are you know in the gaming industry find themselves working for better employers you know if if only people
focused on more progressive and inclusive hiring policies and and worker
policies i think that would be a huge step forward for the industry and make it an even more
compelling and place to to build a career if you go a little bit wider
you know i think you could start to see more attention to things like the carbon
footprint of the gaming industry and i’ve admitted that we struggled to to to think end-to-end about this but if there
was more um onus on the on companies to think about you know what it means to
store huge amounts of data in the cloud unnecessarily or
you know things like hardware release cycles thinking of some of our hardware producers in the industry
these sorts of things would all hopefully be done with a bit more thought and consideration
and then data privacy and and safeguarding i think would would start to fall in that customer section right
so even though it’s not part of the business model necessarily there are questions around the customers
of are you protecting your data are you um safeguarding if you’re working with uh
you know if your customers are under 18 there are safeguarding questions and i think you’d find hopefully more
thoughtful approaches to that and then maybe lastly if people started making games that were
a little more like alba and you know some of those green nudges to to have
people think about what they can do in their own lives outside of their the time they spend gaming
um you might find behaviors you know approve when you’re not at work um and for all
the people that we make games for um that’s the that’s the big big dream i suppose the long-term
impact that could happen all right yeah that’s great so um so just a while back and andy uh if you
remember this remember when we had uh we did an episode just being you uh where we looked at uh four different ideas of
corporate social responsibility and how they would apply to game companies so these were four competing models and the
most uh they feel very looking back on it it feels very naive now uh i don’t know i haven’t talked about this without
all this information about all the stuff that we’ve we’ve learned since then i don’t think so at all uh yeah yeah i
think you you still need kind of basic ideas about what the responsibilities of of of companies especially of
corporations are um before you build on top of that the complexities uh of you
know of the practical complexities but uh yeah so we did this a while back and this is like episode 16 or something
yeah early on yeah we’re like at 46. right um but one of those uh so some
people believe that uh an essential part of corporate social responsibility is really the to be doing something good
for the world right as an essential aim of every company and to me the one
marker of this that you’re doing good for the world uh is the b corp marker
even though they’re not really exactly the same thing right uh this is called the the integrated model this idea that
the only way that a company can really be a moral company is to include um
some sort of moral mission some sort of idea of doing good as a part of the uh very aim of the
company itself would you agree that this is uh that this is what the actual
responsibilities of companies should be to have within their fundamental mission
apart dedicated to doing good i suppose if asked pointedly i would disagree i
think that is reflected in my experience of b corp which is as i said we we don’t
get many points for our customer stuff right because i think someone could look sit
back and say well video games aren’t inherently good for the world they’re not they may take a view that they’re
not evil um but you might say well what’s the good being done there um
i don’t feel that way by the way i’m just being i’m just p putting us we could all list the good right i mean
we i’m assuming we all believe video games actually do lots of good for the world i absolutely do but i’m just
asserting someone could say that’s not good in the sense that charities are good or um you know healing sick people
is good um and what be the way b corp accounts for this is said look if you score a zero in the customer section
there’s four more sections where you can go and get enough to
certify right if you’re well-governed uh which means operating with transparency having appropriate board
structures and um releasing your financial accounts and things like this
if you take care of your employees if you engage with your community locally whether that’s through
diverse practicing hires excuse me diverse hiring practices or making charitable
contributions or having volunteer days and then finally are you looking after your your impact on the planet and so
you could you know you can go and be a insurance company or something like that and do all of those other things and be
a b corp um one of the things kind of go back to the heritage of us too a little bit is is the the agency works with some
really big famous companies that you might say aren’t doing their best to save the planet
and i’ve heard of one of our our owners talk about that and our founders and he says look if we can help i’ll just say
car company x improve its products and services by
0.5 that is such a big company that we’re going to have an impact on a positive impact right and so
yeah i think that’s the other way to think about that which is even big companies that are in
industries that aren’t obviously helpful to these things can
make improvements that in the long run are all making contributions to how we look after ourselves and the planet okay
final question justin uh what do you want to live our listeners with uh what do you want him to take away from this
that it is possible for any company to begin their b corp journey even if
it’s not uh immediately is in terms of being certified i really really rate the
certification framework as thought-provoking and a road map to how
you can get better from where you currently are and certification does not have to be the immediate goal so if
you’re sitting there listening and thinking you know what can we do in our company
to improve how we operate in any of those five spaces create an account at b corp and log into the assessment and
look at what those questions are and look at those prompts and you’ll have literally hundreds of ideas of things
that you can do to to make a difference all right justin michaels uh ceo of us two games thank you so much for coming
in the show [Music] all right uh gp great podcast guys
play nice everybody you can subscribe and listen to all of our episodes wherever you listen to podcasts
