Ten years ago, advocates of so-called corporate social responsibility (CSR) coined an expression: You do well by doing good. They were wrong.

At the time, it was possible for organizations to do well by behaving badly — for example, by having terrible labor practices, employing “creative accounting”, being a monopoly, externalizing their costs onto society, having shady environmental behaviors, having lousy products, abandoning customers, and so on.

But increasingly, because of the new, open world driven by mass online collaboration, that expression for CSR is finally becoming true.