Monica Bradley On Growth Without Compromise And The Future Of Inclusive Business

Monica Bradley is a non-executive director and investor with sustainability, technology and investment experience.

The cornerstone of Monica’s executive career was her ability to deliver revenue growth, new business formation and digital transformation in challenging and uncertain environments.

Monica held leadership, sales, operations, and strategy roles in New York, Abu Dhabi, Sydney, Perth, Canberra, and Brisbane. She managed P&L to 200m, sales budgets to 500m and program budgets up to 300m. She has deep experience in technology, machinery of government, investment funds and global food sourcing, trading & logistics.

From the boardroom to the start up space Monica is at the forefront of advocating and designing the transition to the low carbon, inclusive, impactful and innovative new economy.

Monica discusses advocating for, working within & co-designing the transition to a low carbon impact economy and why ‘growth without compromise’ is so important for our collective future.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to where you are now?

[Monica Bradley] - It starts with my DNA. My mum was a social entrepreneur; she was the lady in the outer suburbs of Brisbane in the seventies and eighties where if someone had a problem, they went to her and she fixed it. Sometimes she fixed it by giving them somewhere to live, by helping them get a job, or by talking to someone influential to help that person. In my everyday life, with seven brothers in our house, we always had extras. My dad was an environmentalist, so his job was to show us how food grew in our backyard and how the circular economy worked so we never wasted anything. He took us on adventure rides through nature and gave us a love and affection for the natural environment. I guess at my core I'm a product of those two things; I've just had a fortunate life.

I'm someone that takes opportunities when they come. I've got that unusual skillset of being both commercial and curious, so I’m able to pull things together. That led to my twenties, where I was in New York City working on behalf of Australian agricultural companies selling their products into big US consortiums. I was redesigning how those systems worked, so they were fairer for farmers, lower carbon, and created better-quality products. But it also taught me how the world works. I sat at the corner of commerce from age 24 until 32, and I really absorbed all the best of that American entrepreneurial spirit. I then chose to come back to Brisbane (which is my hometown) and say, "we're ready." But Brisbane wasn't quite ready; to be fair, Australia and the world weren't quite ready in the late nineties. I spent some time going to university learning how to code. I learnt more about the best of entrepreneurship and business practices, which I'd learned in New York but codified through my education at QUT. Then I went into the wild world and did a whole bunch of work around government reform. Again, I was curious and commercial. I did a project inside of the federal government around welfare reform, and that taught me how poorly the machinery of government serves the people in our society that need the most support. That sat with me. I had a lot of commercial experience, then I got the government and firsthand experience of dealing with people on welfare.

My husband who was a pilot lost his job after 9/11, so we moved to Dubai, and I spent nine years then working in and around sovereign wealth funds. I was deeply understanding their investment in both social and commercial ventures. We spent a lot of time in technology but also in sustainability, because they were building a lot of greenfield sites and those investments were getting the best sustainability people from around the world to help. I had a masterclass in that and I also saw what they were doing through social and charitable investments in sovereign wealth funds. That was a great experience with institutional finance, and then I decided to come back yet again to Brisbane. In 2012 I came home, and this time I knew I was unemployable, so I made a portfolio of things I felt like I am good at, that I can help with, and things I think our society needed. Now I spend my time in the transition space.

The next 10 years are the most critical time ever in our history as humans and environmentalists. We have so much transitioning to do, but there is such an opportunity.

That's my theory about the power of 'and' business models, but also growth without compromise. I exclusively choose to work with and support organisations changing the world through decarbonisation and social inclusion, but who are also delivering economic return. That is not impossible, right? There is economic value in everything that all our social enterprises do, it's just in the current economic system it's often not measured and valued. I'm enjoying working with people and companies like Impact Boom, to bring that to reality through proper companies.

As a proponent of a ‘growth without compromise’ philosophy, can you tell us more about this perspective?

I'm a bit of a theorist. I study history because I like to learn what we did well that we can take forward and what maybe hasn't served us well. I used to sit overseas and listen to successions of Australian governments preach about 28 years of uninterrupted economic growth. Then at the same time I would read about record levels of suicide and degradation to our environment. What really distilled in my mind was that's not my form of success.

If I'm bragging to the world about how we're the best people because we're economically great, but we're leaving people and the environment behind, that's not success.

We're creating problems that need solving. Something in the economics is not adding up with the other investments. Then, I started to work more deeply with social enterprises. With impact investment I got a lot of exposure in my early days to the B Corporation movement, the idea of business to be a social change agent. When you go and study history, you realise business was originally created to deliver social good, but it's been corrupted by the industrial age that assumed the factory model of mechanisation was a universal uplifter of our entire society. The industrial age has given us many great things, but it assumes that every piece of our society is mechanistic. As we now know, natural systems are cause and effect, not mechanistic. Our social systems are full of humans, so education and health are human systems, not factories. A hospital is not a factory, a school is not a factory, so we must find new and different ways to engage. That's what I found in the B Corp movement, my impact investing cohorts, and with Impact Boom and other social enterprises. I've naturally gravitated to that. Growth without compromise to me is not an anti-growth agenda. It's the idea we need to grow and change as societies, but we need better business models with which to do that.

These business models are what I call the 'and' business model. 'And' business models use design deliberately and thoughtfully to ensure the problem they're solving is well defined. In these business models, social inclusion is uncompromising, environmentally they are decarbonising, and they have an economic dividend that pays back in the process.

Many people say that's impossible. It's not impossible, and even philanthropy models are based on this as well. We are bringing whole new forms of capital. To me, growth without compromise are the business models of the future. Industrial age models are what I call the 'or' models; make money or do good and look after people. Investors saw any contribution to economic, environmental or people issues to be a discount on their return. I truly am at the centre saying the best models for society are models that include the 'and'. That's growth without compromise. We will have our needs met, people and systems will flourish. Ironically, in this important year of voice, truth telling and the pathway to acknowledgement of the Traditional Owners of the land we meet on (which for us is the Jaggera and Turrbul in Brisbane or Meanjin), it's the 'and' model and growth of that compromise which aligns to traditional practices and the systems that they used in their lore but also their natural systems. A lot of my time is now dedicated to discovering how we can bring that wisdom of 60,000 years of uninterrupted survival in the harsh country of Australia by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to help businesses? That wisdom can be intertwined into our new business models.

As a female leader in social impact and regenerative world models, what the challenges and opportunities are you seeing?

If we look at the statistics, less than 5% of capital across all sources, whether that be grants all the way through to venture capital gets to women today. That's a universal problem all over the world.

I watched this for the last 10 years being on investment panel. I thought maybe the solution was to get more women onto panels. It certainly helps, but it's working at a glacial speed, so it's never going to fix the problem. The reason I want more money to come to more diverse people (and in the first instance women would be the first layer of diversity), is because women are solving problems which are invisible to many men, so they're important problems. The second thing is women are masters of transition. In the average life of a woman, we transition 10 or 20 times more than our male counterparts who have the luxury of going to work usually uninterrupted for somewhere between 30 and 40 years. They do a technical craft where they build wealth but also build expertise over time. The nature of the natural cycle of women is we come and go from the workforce, because we're often supporting our family commitments and other things within our area. We are the nurturers; that's not universal, but it's often the case. That doesn't mean always childbearing, it can sometimes be elder care or caring for other siblings. It's often this caring role we adopt, which again in our economy is poorly measured. When women come and go from those roles, we have less capital at the end of our retirement and earn less during our time because we come and go. But the expertise we've created ironically is the very expertise we need specifically for the next 10 to 20 years to help us transition. The transition women make every day of, "I'm a Mum, now I'm a sales executive, now I'm a change maker helping my softball team or my neighbour next door, and then I'm a frontline worker in the health sector,” is crucial. Those transitions we make just part of our DNA. That's the same transition we've got to make thoughtfully to help the environment.

Sustainable and Inclusive Business Monica Bradley

But how do we procure? How do we build communities that are different? How do we build companies that are different?

That transition to an inclusive low carbon but economically prosperous and thriving community is really in the skillset of women. These women are starting businesses at record rates, they're solving problems (largely problems ignored by other segments that are well-funded), and they're using their natural abilities like our Indigenous people do to problem solve with inclusive triple bottom-line thinking.

The natural thought process for me is, "the system is broken, not the women, so how do I change the system?" I brought some global models here; we started with the SheEO [which is now called Coralus] Model. This was where we raised a debt fund amongst a bunch of women, and then we identified women aligned to the Sustainable Development Goals and invested interest free capital to those women over a five-year window. Those women then repaid the money. Over time we're aiming to build a global $1 billion fund that is in perpetuity. This is so long after I've gone (like how Traditional Owners think seven generations forward), this investment or value will keep creating more value, because we'll hand on the legacy of a circular regenerative capital source. That's one thing we've tried, we also then looked at the aid industry, where Australia is the largest investor in what we call 'orange bonds'. Orange bonds are bonds listed on the New York Stock Exchange. They were designed by a very thoughtful social entrepreneur in Singapore and were funded and designed by a New Zealand Bank. Australia bought $180 million of Orange Bonds; I wonder what they invested those bonds in? Those bonds are invested in women entrepreneurs in developing countries. When you ask them about their theory of change and why that's a great idea for the Australian government, they said, "oh, because women entrepreneurs deliver 10 times the return than a male entrepreneur in developing countries." Why is that? They have a better management of risk, they are very focused on the return and they're much better with debt. They repay their debt and are solving real problems that uplift not just their business, but their entire community as they solve this problem. Then they employ local people, which adds a multiplier to their impact. I went to the Treasurer of Queensland and said, "could we raise some Orange Bonds for female entrepreneurs in Queensland?" The same theory of change that applies to the international bond market also applies to the Australian market. We're in a discussion about how we might have an instrument that looks like an Orange Bond that might free up some capital.

Women are not looking for a handout, we are looking for financial instruments and systems that work for us.

The third element is from all that great expertise, we last year held a Women's Investment Summit. 150 women from all these different sectors who are entrepreneurs, investors, economists, with banks and superannuation funds came together, and we talked about the economics of women. We worked out where the system needed to change and what we could do together as 51% of the population to start to move the systems change needle. Out of that has come some remarkable networks of national and international women. We've identified hundreds of organisations supporting women in small and large ways to support them to change and grow businesses. They want to grow social enterprises, charities and not-for-profits.

We've stopped thinking about transactional boxes. What we need is a lovely, clear path. We need relational capital that works across the whole dimension, and we call that blended capital so we can help women in whatever they describe their business or activity is to find the right support at the right time.

Then they find partners on the journey through these well-funded but small organisations. We're not trying to build a big organisation, we're trying to build the connective tissue and advocacy so the economists, government people and businesses understand the economics of women, which is powerful. Out of that is coming some great projects and initiatives. We're now measuring the economic opportunity of women getting equity and funding into their businesses of all sizes, and that's an important episode. When they did that economic measure in Canada five years ago, they came up with $150 billion of economic opportunity by purely getting equal funding into women that men were getting in their instruments. On the back of that, the Canadian government set out to, over the next 10 years, invest $7 billion in helping fix the system, stimulate and catalyse systems change to bring capital to women. We're on a journey to do the same thing for Australia through our Women's Investment Network'; we'll bring many exciting things over the coming months that will help us empower many of the listeners of your podcast.

If anyone wants to help on that journey, I encourage them to reach out. It's a collaborative and collective model, it's all about mutuals. The underlying assets will all be either not-for-profits or social enterprises on a mission to change the world. This is not about exploitation, it's about regeneration.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

I read a great book called Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? It's written by a beautiful French-Canadian woman named Katrine Marçal. For people studying economics, go and look up Adam Smith. He wrote a book called Wealth of Nations back in the beginning of the Industrial Age, and believe it or not, many economic measures like GDP we today hold up as the global measures were designed by Adam Smith. It turns out his mother cooked his dinner, and she was never paid for that! The very man that designed our economic measures used the invisible and unpaid labour of his mother to survive so he could design those measures, and that is a good example of how there are large trenches of invisible economic things happening we need to change.

I love Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics and Stephanie Gelman's work on Modern Monetary Theory. We're looking for a flow of money as opposed to rich people earning money and storing it in immobile things like bonds, houses and real estate assets. They're immovable, so the whole economy is running on about 5-10% of the world's wealth, because most wealth is stored and doesn't keep moving to create energy. We believe growth without compromise models will get capital to flow, so that capital in all its forms (whether it's grants or philanthropy), instead of being a destination to be invested in and then stored creates more economic flows than it starts. Mariana Mazzucato’s The Value of Everything is great, as well anything by the Professor Leonardo Risi from Melbourne University or anything from the ANU Julia Gillard Centre for Women (Global Institute for Women’s Leadership).

They're doing great work on the economics of women. Watch out for a conference we're going to hold in Queensland called the Economics of Women, because we're starting to measure women as an asset class and as participants in society. We need to start valuing things not paid for which are invisible today, like childcare, healthcare, education, transport, and the logistics of households in a community sense. If we start to measure those, we're going to see the productivity of Australian women is remarkable. It's just the paid productivity we are measuring is too narrow. People like Jim Chalmers are starting to write about this. As a Treasurer, I'm super excited about that work and I'm sure it will lead to systems change.

Just stay active, go and visit my website at monicabradley.com.au. Have a look at what I'm talking about there and keep watching this space. Let's be optimistic together, and let's use that optimum to fuel this transition we are going through. Find your tribe, there are many more of us now than there was a decade ago. There's more capital; Gen Zs and millennials are coming on board, and they understand these models. We're starting to influence politicians, many of the more progressive parties are understanding this. Don't read any of the Murdoch newspapers. That would be my first 'don't', because they're not really talking about the real world. They're still peddling a very 'or' model. They're all about exploitative capital, which is what they are reporting on. That's who their base is, and that's fine. They're not bad people, they're just people who haven't been enlightened like you and I have! Remember, it's a team sport. We're delivering all this connectivity, so give what you can and ask for what you need.