“Make something important before you die!”

by Philipp Jonatzke

 

Although or especially because Gardeneers is a non-profit organization we got lots of interesting and inspiring insights on business, organizational culture and leadership during our excursion.

As the title already mentioned Adam Zmick, executive director and co-founder of Gardeneers, does not only work for money or fun but because he really loves what he is doing, because he is convinced of his idea and especially because he aims at leaving the world a little bit better than it was when he entered it. Maybe he is not able to improve the whole world, but I am convinced that this project can influence the situation of the people in the cities or neighborhoods respectively where Gardeneers is active positively.

This passion is also demonstrated by the time Adam spends for Gardeneers: Usually he works more than ten hours per day saying “I spend my life doing this!”.

              

To me, this confirms my conviction that business should not only be about making as much profit or earning as much money as possible. It is much more important to find a work making you happy, inspiring yourself and other people and generating profits for yourself and other people in different forms than money. That is why I believe companies should contribute to social justice by helping others or alleviating poverty. This can be done with a business model that aims at supporting social deprived either directly or indirectly. In my opinion, it is much more meaningful to help people to help themselves than just provide monetary help because the first approach is much more long-term oriented than the second one.

It is obviously that our business project, a hotel with themed rooms and individually put together tours in Berlin, needs to be profitable in terms of money to be able to pay the bills, salaries and other costs especially like expenditures for financing services. Otherwise it would not exist for long period of time and there would be no opportunity to contribute to social aspects.

Nevertheless, I believe that we should not only look at the numbers and how we can improve them down to the last because considering corporate social responsibility is more important when a stable and sufficiently high income level is reached. Adapting this concept to our business could be done in different ways: We could offer long-term contracts and an employee relief fund to our staff, trustful and long-term orientated relationships with suppliers and tour providers or cultural activities like readings for which we do not charge admission but donation for a specific project.

This could be one way how we as entrepreneurs could improve the world a little bit as Adam is already doing with the focus on the three aspects nutrition, community and environment.

              

 

Another aspect from Gardeneers that I would like to implement to the organizational culture of our project “The LIB” is the hiring philosophy: Due to the increased requirements to candidates and the skills shortage it becomes more and more difficult to recruit suitable applicants, maybe especially for a non-profit organization like Gardeneers being not able to pay high salaries. That is why Adam hires only people having the skills that cannot be taught like a proper handling of children. If these candidates do not have the knowledge about plants and gardening their candidacy will not be rejected because this knowledge can be taught quite easily and fast.

Applying this policy to our hotel would mean to hire employees that fit to the team personally and have already the matching social and personal skills like a friendly and courteous dealing with costumers, although they might not have a lot of knowledge in and experience with working in the hospitality.

All in all, Adam as well as the vision and mission of Gardeneers have impressed me a lot. I am happy and grateful that there a people like him that do not only care about their own profits but also about people that are not able to help themselves. Especially the work with children seems to me very meaningful because they do not know better and are relying on outside help. In order to implement social justice and corporate social responsibility to our business concept “The LIB”, but also the business world it is important to not only consider the own profits and benefits. Companies have indeed no deeper influence on rule, distributive and income justice due to the fact that this is more the task of politics. Nevertheless, they can engage socially by supporting kindergartens and school classes, contributing to youth development or providing scholarship programs. There are many more possibilities in the field of equal opportunities, especially at the local level. If every firm would bring about these local changes the whole world could be fairer.