Business Doing Good

Outlines six principles and best practices for hiring and retaining women with challenging backgrounds

Recently, business leaders have shifted their focus from a profit-only mindset to considering the impact of their businesses on all stakeholders. At the same time, the United Nations set aggressive Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) to improve our world by 2030. These SDGs address all major needs facing our world today, such as: eradication of poverty and hunger, access to clean water, gender equality, and decent work and economic growth. These are significant problems facing the world that have in the past largely been left to nonprofit organizations and governments to solve.
Investors and customers have higher expectations for companies to make a positive social and environmental impact. They want to know business can do good. Following suit, today’s business leaders are starting to recognize we will never fill the gap between where we are and where we want to be if businesses do not also do their part to contribute sustainable solutions to these enormous social problems. This book provides a guide for businesses to make a significant positive impact while also benefiting their businesses.
Business Doing Good outlines six principles business leaders can implement to effectively hire women who have experienced incarceration, poverty, addiction, and/or engagement in the sex trade. While making a difference to both these women and communities, businesses benefit from the women’s resourcefulness, resilience, ability to motivate, and other unique skills and perspectives only available to someone who has overcome difficulties. Investments in women, in general, are exponential as they are more likely to return that investment to future generations. The impact is endless. If we are going to end poverty and create economic development, women who have overcome challenging pasts cannot be excluded.

Shannon Deer, PhD, CPA, is an award-winning professor who prepares undergraduates as well as experienced professionals in business at Texas A&M University. She teaches in the college’s MBA programs and conducts executive develop training for leading companies. Shannon’s work emphasizes the importance of corporate social responsibility and the intersection of business and solutions to social challenges. Specifically, she explores ways businesses can leverage human resource development tools to invest in women in order to positively impact the business, community, and individual families. She lives in College Station, Texas, with her husband, dogs, sometimes chickens, and the screened in porch where she writes.
Cheryl Miller owns Quantum Circles Consulting and Training. She provides training on topics that increase opportunities for transformation in three areas: economic development for the marginalized, effective communication focusing on the facilitation of conflict, and restorative justice. Cheryl has been a volunteer mediator for twenty years and has over a thousand hours of experience of mediation with victims of violent crimes and their offenders. Cheryl was the Executive Director of a housing program in South Texas for eighteen years. Cheryl lives in Victoria, Texas with her husband and chickens and travels as often as possible to see her grown children and grandchildren.
Shannon and Cheryl are both small business owners who put into practice the principles in this book every day.