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Does a Social Mission Help Business Growth?

In the social world, there’s this mythical idea that every business must have some separate mission or value that has nothing to do with the company’s actual metrics — its growth, profit, asset value, or even its existence as an opportunity for professional development. Over the past few decades, this topic has been endlessly discussed and promoted as an essential concept, suggesting that to grow as an entrepreneur, a businessman, a strong leader, or to grow your company, you need to carry, feel, and think about some separate idea (I’ll call it mythical), which is not connected to the main metrics.

People ask questions that lead to entire discussions: "How do I find this mission? How do I define it? What should I actually do?" They reach certain profit levels, and then someone comes along and says, “To keep growing, you must come up with this goal.”

Often, words and expressions like “charity,” “having social significance” are used, defining some percentage. For example, someone might say, “We’ll donate 3% of revenue to charity.” There’s often an internal system of manipulation from HR or business owners who say, “For the team to be great, it’s very important for the company to have a mission.”

What Is Real Charity?

Let’s break this down in detail, look at causes and effects, to see what true charity really is, what a real mission and social goal are for a company. Is this important for your 10x or 100x growth over decades, or is it not related to business metrics, business results at all?

Does having charity turn you into a strong personality, a massive individual, a true professional, or does it lead to full-on degradation? When you’re 50 years old, will you reap the fruits of this and suffer intensely inside, feeling emptiness, disappointment, tragedy, and the loss of different meanings? Will you lose your personal strength?

Does charity in a company, this mission, help you grow as a person, not just as a strong entrepreneur, manager, or professional working in the company, but also as a friend, a good relative, husband or wife, father, son, daughter? Or does it degrade you and lead to you having bad sleep no matter what time you go to bed?

Let’s look at the key points of support. This topic is incredibly important because a huge number of people live in a big illusion: first in expectation mode, and then disappointment sets in — this can lead to a major tragedy. It’s so important for a person to know and truly understand what’s really happening.

So, can a business owner come up with a mission and some big social goal, focus on it, while still being a person who doesn’t align with this goal at all?

For example, remaining someone who cheats everyone in everyday life, someone who acts purely in their own interest, for personal gain, who in a problematic situation will always choose money, who does business truly only for themselves? Or says, “First, I’ll make things good for me, and then I’ll give back.” But at the same time, to grow quickly, you need to give back. Which side will a person choose in a problematic situation: profit or helping other people?

And the opposite situation: if a person is in a constant state of helping others, truly wants to help them, not pushing their own opinion, expectations, but really helping, hearing these people, understanding what they truly want, transmitting honesty, truth, love… If the person is honest with everyone, does their business really need to invent some huge social goal? Should it be turned into something that has to be written on the wall, on the website, in special books, communicated to all employees? Or will this happen naturally for this person anyway? Why tell anyone about it? Do you really need to share it?

Why Pretend That Business Isn't Just About Money?

Here are two big poles, and here lies the main mechanism within: why do you want to define this mission? Why do you want to describe that the business isn’t just about money? Why do you want to have a goal beyond business metrics?

Someone says, “You can’t grow and make more money because you don’t have a social mission.” So, does that mean you want to bring good to the world because you’re trying to grow your own wealth and profit? Then why deceive everyone? Just tell everyone honestly that you want to grow in money and profit—and grow peacefully. There’s nothing wrong with it: I mean, there’s nothing wrong with doing business for money.

It’s probably one of the main goals for an entrepreneur, just like for an employee who comes to work: for the most part, people work to make money; there are people who want professional growth; there are people who start a business because they truly want to help others, but then the business has a different goal. They even have a different label: they’re called nonprofit organizations or charities, but they’re not limited liability companies; they’re not corporations, they’re simply called, “A company engaged in nonprofit activities,” and their goal is written in. The goal of a limited liability company is to make a profit. The goal of a nonprofit organization is to do something: not necessarily to help others, but something not related to commerce as a whole, something about development. That’s why they have no profit.

Why is it important to know and understand this? So that when someone catches you in a state of fear, for example, when you're facing challenges in business growth, or someone tells you that you can’t grow because you don’t have this kind of goal—you don’t fall into an illusion. I in no way want to discourage or convince you that you shouldn’t run a business that helps others. I’m not saying that making a profit is important, and it doesn’t matter what happens to your clients.

It’s important that if you’re an honest person toward others, you simply won’t run a business that deceives them. What does it matter what kind of business it is? People say things like, “You should get into education—that brings good, but selling cement doesn’t, so I won’t do it”—that’s really strange, because cement also brings good. It allows us to build roads, houses, and so much more, impacting people’s lives and destinies… Cement. And education can cause huge losses. I think if you ask 20 acquaintances whether education had only a positive effect on them, or more positive or negative, you’ll get a lot of answers with the last option. It doesn’t matter if it’s primary, secondary, higher, or any other kind of education. These days, sure, there are some small programs where people seem to only get benefits. The question is: did they spend that time wisely or not?

Real-Life Example Just the other day I had an interesting situation. My eight-year-old son went to a trial chess lesson. He knows how to play, and I’m currently looking for him a coach. After chess, they asked me: “Alexander, did he enjoy it?” I said he did. “Does he want to keep going?” – “Yes” – “That’s great. Do you have any questions?” – “My son won’t be continuing with this coach” – “Why?”

…I think this coach will teach him how to play chess, but there’s a good chance he’ll also bring something into my son’s life that I wouldn’t want. I don’t want my son to develop certain skills or mindsets, and he’s inevitably going to get them from this coach: when you’re in an open learning state with a teacher, you absorb not just the subject but also the person’s mindset, their approaches, their worldview, and their perception. And I don’t want my son to absorb this person’s approaches. It’s surprising how often we might not notice what brings good and what brings harm.

The school claims it brings benefits. What kind of benefits? Chess is supposedly needed by almost every child to get good development. I agree that chess has a pretty good, positive influence on a child's development, on a number of factors. But there are also the teachers themselves, who bring certain things. And what are they going to bring? Will they, besides the benefits of chess, if the child keeps doing it, bring something else that could cause much greater loss and much bigger problems for my child? Notice how the mission immediately falls apart, the whole illusion crumbles. Even though the teacher, the salesperson, the company itself, and the owners are very much aligned with this mission. But it falls apart because it only broadcasts a piece, not the full spectrum, which can be realized in this case with certain teachers. It’s impossible to do otherwise. Could you explain to this teacher what I’m trying to say now? I think it’s almost impossible.

When I gave feedback to the school, I said: “Sorry, I probably won’t be able to tell you more, give you more information. It’s very hard to do. I can’t describe why I feel this way about the teacher. Moreover, it’s your right to choose the teachers, but he doesn’t work for me.”

Marketing, Sales, and Social Mission, Using Apple and Yandex as Examples

One of the main areas in business that immediately conflicts with any mission of this kind is going to the marketing department, especially in companies where marketing and sales are very developed, systematic, and large. As soon as there’s such huge marketing that eats up a lot of leads, and sales that call everyone in huge volumes, concepts of social significance and mission instantly collapse. Capturing this mission in this case becomes almost impossible—I'm speaking from the perspective of marketing and sales. Some companies manage to do it, but how?

How much does a company that claims to broadcast help and benefit to human development actually help?

Take Apple. They probably do a pretty good job with the meanings they broadcast internally. I really like this company, but at the same time, there are things about Apple that might seem controversial to me: and they will be controversial to a huge number of people in the world in terms of certain values. They’ll just be controversial and raise questions for people, thus lacking internal alignment. Any disputes and conflicts in this case, because of the mission, will irritate people.

Take a company from the search engine space that broadcasts a mission or goal, like “You’ll find everything.” It's a well-known search engine in the Russian-speaking space, but is everything really found there? Or are there things blocked in the search because a certain law was passed? Or are they blocked due to certain social values and norms? Is everything really searchable? By what algorithm? Is it really easy to search to help people, or difficult to make money on contextual advertising, like many other search engines do? What's the core focus when you're doing business?

The companies I mention don’t necessarily broadcast something bad. Moreover, many missions and values appear in companies when they become very large and public.

And it turns out that when you’re developing a small business, or want to start one, or work in a company, people come to you and start imposing the idea of mandatory external value and charity.

The only thing you can do right here, right now, is start with yourself: how do I act toward other people, not necessarily clients? Toward those I interact with in my team, at work every day? Or am I the kind of leader who loves clients, but is ready to squeeze everything out of employees to achieve the final result? Am I, in pursuit of growth, performance, certain capitalization, and parameters needed by investors or the market, ready to do things that contradict my internal feelings and understanding of another person’s freedom or not?

Charity as an Example

Charity will pop up everywhere in your life—whether you’re in business, an employee, or just living. It comes up when you need to help a school, a friend, a stranger on the street, in a store, in any country or organization. What’s your true inner motive, what are you doing? Are you sending money out of spite, to get back at other people? Are you sending money because it boosts your social rating? Are you sending money to handle taxes correctly? Are you doing it to sincerely help those who need it? Or are you sending money because you feel like you should?

There’s no right answer, and you can do whatever you want. The most important thing you can do is not lie to yourself at that moment, to tell yourself the real truth about why you're doing it.

Only through such actions is true scaling of yourself as a person possible. That’s what it’s about: developing your personal structure, your spiritual being. True scaling as a professional works through a genuine understanding of cause and effect—even in cases where you're acting for personal gain. When you endlessly act this way, you won’t get strong development: in the future, you’ll be drowning in endless illusions and face more and more tangled obstacles. But at least you’ll stand professionally firm because you'll honestly understand the causes and effects. You won’t deceive yourself like those people who cite certain numbers in business but have never actually counted them.

Take Telegram, for example. It’s clear when they say they have 900 million users, but in reality, the maximum monthly number of users in India is 100 million, in Russia—30-something million, in America—30 million, in Brazil—26 million, and somewhere else—25 million. Then the numbers sharply drop. That means there's not even 900 million, not even 500 million. But there are bots, multiple registrations. If there are bots, then these aren’t users—I can generate 500 billion bots. There was even a time when you could register there without a phone number. There were probably a lot of bots created back then. Or there are farms that create bots. There was a very interesting discussion on this topic. When Elon Musk was buying Twitter, now X, he said that they exaggerated certain metrics to inflate the price, and the number of Twitter users wasn’t real. He suggested evaluating the real number of users: take a random 100 accounts and see how many are real and how many are bots.

About Self-Deception for Profit

We live in a world where false numbers are constantly being thrown around. When you broadcast false, unchecked information, you degrade as a professional. You can probably get some benefit: it’s done not just like that but to increase your value, your importance. But you degrade as a professional, as a person. Even if you’re carrying negative things in your company—don’t lie to yourself, don’t build an illusion on this. Because a business built on illusion will give you a false model, a false unit economy, and you’ll just lose it. And you’ll lose those employees to whom you broadcast illusion and false goals because those people will live in their own illusion—like the chess teacher I talked about. He has his sense of where he works, where he’s at, and what he’s doing. It’s unlikely anyone can change that feeling. Especially if you’ve written your mission on a piece of paper, or on a website, on a poster, on a billboard, and started attending special coaching sessions focusing on the importance of external goals for business.