Student number: 13632345
Prices are not neutral, and good business is not about bargaining for the best price. It’s about creating positive impact. There is no better place to learn this than in Impact Institute. This consulting company is driven by a mission to create the Impact Economy, an economy where business creates positive societal and environmental value.
Although it is commonplace for companies have a mission and to display their values, I do not believe many other companies are as driven by their mission in everything they do. The passion and motivation displayed by Impact Institute’s senior employees is truly admirable, they never get detached from their higher goal of contributing to positive change. As I am slowly nearing the end of my internship and am evaluating my experiences in Impact Institute, I remember one moment as especially interesting.
About a month into the internship, I participated in two onboarding days together with the other new employees. The onboarding consisted of many knowledge sessions and exercises, including a game about True Pricing, a presentation about Integrated Profit and Loss, a personality test, and a teambuilding inscape room (a surprisingly challenging and fun virtual COVID-friendly escape room created by one of the employees). All onboarding activities were informative, interesting, and innovative, but the one that resonated with me most was a simple talk by the co-founder and CFO Michel Scholte.
Michel had no slides or games. Still in his coat and backpack, he flew into the room, assumed a position near the table us newbies were seated at, and started talking. He told us about his past experiences, about his volunteering and political endeavors, and about the long search for a way to improve the world. His speech was spontaneous and unscripted, full of side notes, jokes, and associations, but everything he said tied to his overall message perfectly. Michel needed no script and didn’t have to worry about getting side-tracked, because everything he said and everything he had done was about realizing the Impact Economy. I was so engaged by his talk that I forgot all about the people sitting next to me, my unfinished university tasks, and my worries about the internship. I am a hopeless ambitious idealist, but my ambitions and ideals faded in comparison to Michel’s. At the same time, I became dead certain that an ambitious idealist might just succeed in changing the world.
I remembered how during the course Corporate Communication it was very difficult for me to differentiate between corporate mission and vision, and to understand the point of them. That was because I hadn’t come across a true and sincere corporate mission before coming into Impact Institute. Now that I have, it is clear as day. About halfway through Michel’s monologue, I took out my phone and wrote down one main takeaway: “Prices are not neutral and good business is not about bargaining for the best price”. It’s about creating positive impact.