Want to Achieve More? Do Less

Day 1 of the Conscious Capitalism tour of the UK, in which a group of MBA students, myself and Fiona Wilson, a business school academic, visit socially responsible businesses.  One of our first stops was at Divine chocolate, a farmer-owned, fair trade company run by Sophie Tranchell. Every time I’ve met Sophie, she’s been handing out Divine chocolate - a generous and shrewd impulse that has built a powerful brand and a business with immense impact.

Many smart moves characterize the company’s success. It has had superb investors and partners, like theBody Shop. Tranchell herself is an outstanding marketer and collaborator. Early enthusiasm in the United Kingdom for social enterprises meant major celebrity endorsements and media partnerships early on. And it doesn’t hurt at all that the chocolate - made from cocoa produced by a Ghanaian cooperative that owns 45% of the business - is delicious



Focus, Focus, Focus

So if you asked Tranchell what’s the single smartest thing the company has done that accounts for its success, there would be a lot of competition for the answer. But for my money, it’s something she said early on in our meeting: “If you care about everything, you can’t do anything.”


Divine has been 100 percent focused on improving the lives and opportunities of small scale cocoa farmers by establishing a fairtrade chocolate marketing company that gets farmers higher up the value chain. That has meant they make mainstream chocolate products - not funky luxury goods - because to improve lives you have to operate on a big scale. It has meant hugely raising the profile of fair trade - which now has 80% recognition in the U.K., achieved by all fair trade producers pulling in the same direction. And it has meant not getting distracted by other campaigns - the organic movement for one.

“Chocolate is a hugely processed food,” Tranchell explains. “There’s the pod and then an inner layer and then a bean - which gets roasted and the hulk is shed. Then it gets ground and turned into butter or powder. And then it gets turned into chocolate. We check it regularly - we know there’s no residue.”

“But it isn’t just the product,” she says, warming to her theme. “People buy fair trade because it’s good for the producers. In an economic downturn, consumers may see organics as a luxury - but they still want to be fair.”

Know What You Stand For

This laser-like focus hasn’t narrowed the impact Divine chocolate makes; in fact, I’d argue it has made that impact deeper. Over 1300 cocoa farmers sell their chocolate to Divine, receiving an above-market price and, this year, a dividend. The cocoa cooperative - Kuapa Kokoo - has a gender empowerment program which means that each local business has both a male and a female representative and, last summer appointed its first female president. Three out of every seven of the cooperative’s executives have to be female. The dividend and the price lift both go to fund schools, water wells and overall community improvement. But all of that happens because of Divine’s focus on getting these farmers up the value chain.

Focus too has led to the expansion of Divine not just throughout the U.K. but across Europe (Divine makes all of the Starbucks-branded chocolate in Europe) and now in the United States. From the outset, Divine was determined to be a mainstream not niche product. The more mainstream the product, the bigger the markets markets - which means greater profits leading to wider, deeper impact.

I know so many entrepreneurs that are admirably ambitious, energetic and wildly over-committed. They want to do everything at once, to boil the ocean with a match. What’s inspiring about Divine is seeing the way that doing less achieves more.

Do you know other leaders who accomplish great things by doing less?

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