B Lab Company

B Lab is building and steering a global movement for economic systems change. Our strategies aim to upend the doctrine, incentives and culture of shareholder primacy; and replace it with policies, market behavior, and culture that focus business on meeting human needs, reducing inequality, and responsibly stewarding natural resources for a shared and durable prosperity.

Changing the purpose of business to require the private sector to act on the interests of all stakeholders would shift the culture of companies and investors to measure their impact with the same care and rigor as their profits.

1. Scale Collective Action and Narrative Change to Accelerate Culture Shift:
Systems, policies, and practices are upheld by the narratives and cultural logics that underlie the dominant status quo. To change norms and narratives about the purpose of business in society, we will mobilize millions of people to participate in shifting culture -- through their identities as entrepreneurs, workers, consumers, investors, and voters. This work will use sophisticated brand activation campaigns such as Vote Every Day (what you buy, how you invest, where you work), #Let’sGetToWork (on ending shareholder primacy), public relations support to elevate exemplary leaders building more inclusive economies using business strategies to address recidivism and inclusion for immigrants and refugees, and communications work that amplifys collective action.

2. Scale Behavior Change: while increasing bandwidth to accelerate B Corp certification, we will also launch new initiatives and programs designed to mainstream the B economy movement. We will leverage the most credible industry standards (the B Impact Assessment) to build tools and platforms that enable millions — including large multinational corporations — to measure, manage, and improve their social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.

3. Scale Structural change via an Expanded Public Policy​ Strategy: Starting in the US and expanding to global partners, steer both populist momentum and cross-partisan hunger for solutions to our economic challenges by developing a public policy strategy to upend shareholder primacy and replace it with policies that ensure corporations and capital markets create value for all stakeholders.

4. Drive Impact with Integrity via Investments in the Global Network and Rising Markets: Invest in and empower our global partner network to nurture this movement on every continent. With an emphasis on markets that serve as critical supply chains, and where the social and environmental effects of neoliberal capitalism can be felt most powerfully, we are expanding impact with integrity and equity.

5. Amplify power through collaboration: Through coalition building and collective action platforms, we will facilitate and enable the collective voice and action of leaders working towards both both culture shift and policy change initiatives.

B Lab, headquartered in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, employees over 100 full-time staff located in six offices across the U.S. Canada, Latin America, Australia and Europe. The skillsets of our diverse staff range from technologists to engineers, standards analysts to sociologists, organizers and campaigners to communications and marketing professionals, and public policy professionals to business strategists.

Our network of global partners has regional hubs in Latin America, North America, East Africa, Australia/New Zealand, and Europe - B Local chapters, and Certified B Corporations that are helping to drive action on the ground.

B Lab was founded in 2007 with a mission to drive structural, behavioral, and cultural change through tools and programs in order to help businesses positively impact their stakeholders. Over the past 13 years, we have created upstream interventions that have allowed us to reach a point of scale.

B Lab created the B Impact Assessment - the most comprehensive and rigorous set of standards for businesses to measure and manage their social and environmental performance, legal accountability, and transparency. There are currently 87,000 users in 72 countries across 151 industries.

B Corp Certification has gained global credibility, becoming a north star for companies that want to showcase their impact. It doesn’t just prove where companies excel now—it commits them to consider stakeholder impact for the long term by building it into their legal structure. To become certified, a company must reach at least 80 points on the B Impact Assessment and recertify every three years. There are over 3,300 companies around the world, with 650+ certified in 2019, making it the top certifying year on record.

B Lab introduced a new legal corporate structure - the benefit corporation - with legislation passed in 37 jurisdictions, including Colombia, Italy, and British Columbia. It protects a company’s mission through capital raises and leadership changes, creates more flexibility when evaluating potential sale and liquidity options, and prepares businesses to lead a mission-driven life post-IPO.

In 2020, B Lab looks forward to powering collective action on climate and inequality, enabling large multinationals to manage their social and environmental impact, and developing public policies to make business and investors accountable to all stakeholders. In January, B Lab, in partnership with the UN Global Compact, will launch the SDG Action Manager, the first-of-its-kind web-based solution to enable businesses to take meaningful action on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) over the next decade.