Roddick’s motivation? ‘I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community,’ she later explained. ‘If I can’t do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?’47 Such a values-driven mission is what the analyst Marjorie Kelly calls a company’s living purpose – turning on its head the neoliberal script that the business of business is simply business. Roddick proved that business can be far more than that, by embedding benevolent values and a regenerative intent at the company’s birth.
