15 May, 2026

After the hangover of the millennium, we began to see a shift in attitudes. Good Business had been founded, four years earlier, in 1996, but after the initial excitement for our concept, enthusiasm was starting to wane. In the wider world, privatisation was losing its lustre, anti-capitalism was growing, and people were losing belief in the idea that companies had a purpose beyond simply making profit.

We felt we needed to restate our case: responsible business is not about being charitable or forfeiting potential profits, it is the best way to deliver success for the business in the long term. We thought a book would give us the space to set out the rationale and, by showing real examples, prove that it was not only possible, but happening all around us.

And so Good Business: Your World Needs You was born. The book fleshed out our core concept and made the case that business can deliver transformational change in society. It also built out a model for how to go about it in a way that delivers benefits to business and society.

The book sold 10,000 copies in hardbacks when it was published in 2002. But more importantly it gave us the platform to engage with interested businesses around the world, and helped place Good Business near the centre of the nascent sustainable business sector.

Soon after publication we got an email from the CEO of TNT, the courier business. He had picked up a copy in the airport bookshop and had liked it so much he bought 120 copies, one for each of his top managers. As a direct consequence, he told me, they developed a programme with the UN that used their logistics to rapidly get food to emergency famine areas across the globe.

The managers loved it, their corporate customers got involved, and TNT got more positive press than they could have ever imagined. And that press wasn’t just about the company doing a good thing, it was directly showcasing their core capability — moving goods quickly across the world.

That’s Good Business in action.

By Giles Gibbons