The Naked Future of "ME"

Integration. Systems. Collaboration. Synergy. Specialization. Jack of all trades is fired. Gone! Welcome global village. You can’t eat alone. The world is in my house- wirelessly. Real-time news SMSed from Africa. A riot on a Kenyan street is captured live on a street-side vendor’s Nokia and SMSed into BBC’s newsroom in 23.5 seconds. The rain is moving towards the next village and a neighbor sends text to warn farmers. No gas at station 14- all traffic please redirect. A Facebook group against Mugabe spreads faster than measles- not that both are the same- or are they? Quit holding onto ideas- or ideologies. Sharing is the new personal property rights. Byebye intellectual property rights. Welcome creative commons and open source. I am having lunch at Pizza Antica in Tiburon, CA- check my twitter. I am leaving quite a trail. Invasion of privacy? What are you talking about? Talk exposing your own privacy. I saw that skeleton in your closet on Myspace. But I don’t care. Skeletons are out for sell. Will you buy mine? That’s the naked future of “ME”.

Social Entrepreneurship vs. Social Innovation - Social Innovators

When did you first hear about social entrepreneurship or social enterprise? Not long ago. Now, according to Stanford’s Social Innovation Review, social entrepreneurship is old talk. What really matters today is social innovation. This really leaves me wondering if we are just playing around with words. But Stanford being Stanford, they almost got me convinced. If you have been following, I covered a discussion about social entrepreneurship with some definitions from trusted sources. I wrote that a social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. At my time of writing, which was about three days ago, I was trying to understand the mechanics of social entrepreneurship when someone dropped the bomb saying social entrepreneurship is old business. And that’s when I went hunting for the real difference between innovation and entrepreneurship, which brings me to this discussion.

Let’s indulge ourselves in the definition of innovation. Innovation-: the act or process of inventing or introducing something new: new idea or method: a new invention or way of doing something.

Looking back at the definition of entrepreneurship, it is so apparent that social entrepreneurship cleans after social innovation by organizing whatever it is that has been proposed as the way forward of solving a social problem. Truth is both innovators and entrepreneurs are needed. But it seems entrepreneurs act on the propositions of innovators. Innovators first. Entrepreneurs next.

Social Innovators

Social Innovators

Enrich the Poor by Impoverishing the Rich?

“The poor will always be with you”, a friend of mine quoted Jesus in my face when I told him I was turning down a lucrative job offer to work with the poor. His understanding is that the poor are necessary for the economies of the world to make sense. My friend is not alone. His opinion is shared by economist Thomas A. Garrett (see publication at http://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/re/default.html). Garrett believes that an individual’s ability to largely determine his level of economic well-being encourages innovation and entrepreneurship. He ads that economic studies have documented a positive correlation between entrepreneurship/innovation and overall economic growth. Garrett’s analysis suggests that a redistribution of wealth would increase the cost of entrepreneurship and innovation -- the result being lower overall economic growth for everyone, regardless of income.

The truth is that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Income statistics show that the real income of the wealthiest five percent of households in America rose by 14 percent between 1996 and 2006, and the poorest 20 percent rose by 6 percent. This curve is bound to continue for a long time. And the big question is: should
Governments put in place political policies to even out the amount of income individuals are permitted to earn? In other words, should money be redistributed to benefit the poorer members of society, and should the rich be obliged to assist the poor? Is financial egalitarianism the ideal for human existence, or is income inequality a necessary evil? Did the rich become rich by exploiting the poor or gaining unfair benefits? Are redistributive practices justified?

What do you think?

One Penny Per Tear

A picture of a malnourished child in southern Sudan flashes across your fourteen inch screen. A soft voice in the background tells the story. A few more pictures, a couple of video clips, a tear here and there. We are done. That’s all. Our program is efficient, effective and necessary to change the world.

Humans are emotional and caring beings. A picture of a suffering child somewhere in southern Sudan will definitely raise emotions, cause a tear here and there, and open wallets. What emotion can’t do however is demand accountability. There are so many problems in the world that we can throw our money at. But in the end, it may be just that; throwing money. Recently I talked with a non profit leader about goals and strategic planning for his non profit. He told me he can’t really do goals because the change he is making cannot be measured in terms of goals and plans. “Wonderful”, I said. “But what about efficiency? How do you measure efficiency if you don’t have goals?

A lot of non profit leaders run away from setting goals because they think that this kind of stuff is for the big guys in for-profit businesses. A friend of mine remarked that passion does not always come with ability. That for sure is true. But we have to remember that we can’t change the world by blowing wind. If we are to change the world, then our non profits, social entrepreneurs, and philanthropists of this world must learn to plan. One man once said that if you are failing to plan then you are planning to fail. I believe that the structural design of any successful nonprofit is no different than a for-profit company. In both cases, management needs to identify goals and mission, develop a focused strategy, and build efficient organizational structures. This is the only way we can measure the change our money is making in the world. Helping orphans in southern Sudan is a noble cause but results can be very difficult to measure unless we have a definite plan. I believe that its high time donors demanded amore strict accountability system within their recipient organizations. Donors must be looked at as shareholders in their nonprofit of choice. And as such, they must demand that their funds be allocated efficiently and effectively.

As we tighten accountability measures in nonprofit organizations, I believe we will achieve so much more than we would by tossing a coin here and there in response to our emotions.

Old Wolves in New Sheep Skin

Corporate Social Responsibility Vs Social Entrepreneurship

I find it hard to justify the idea that social entrepreneurship should include for-profit businesses. I actually have a problem starting with the very definition of social entrepreneurship. Like it or not, Wiki is here to stay so I will borrow their definition of social entrepreneurship. “Social entrepreneurship is the work of a social entrepreneur. A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. Whereas a business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit and return, a social entrepreneur assesses success in terms of the impact s/he has on society”. And here is my problem. If a social entrepreneur measures performance based on social change, then we do have a conflict of interest here. In order for a business to survive it must turn a profit. But social entrepreneurs are not about profit. Their gig is social change. As someone who has worked in the non-profit sector for 15 years, I find this concept of marrying philanthropy with pure business quite amusing. One of the hardest things to do in a non-profit is to put profit above social change. And these two tend to be in conflict with one another. Now if you are talking profit and social change in the same sentence you must be an expert at oxymora.

My take is that unless social entrepreneurship is entirely non-profit, there is no big difference between this buzz and the old boy called corporate social responsibility (CSR). I will borrow Wiki’s definition of CSR to support my point. “Corporate social responsibility (CSR, also called corporate responsibility, corporate citizenship, responsible business and corporate social opportunity) is a concept whereby organizations consider the interests of society by taking responsibility for the impact of their activities on customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, communities and other stakeholders, as well as the environment.” This obligation is seen to extend beyond the statutory obligation to comply with legislation and sees organizations voluntarily taking further steps to improve the quality of life for employees and their families as well as for the local community and society at large.” Wiki continues to say that “the practice of CSR is subject to much debate and criticism. Proponents argue that there is a strong business case for CSR, in that corporations benefit in multiple ways by operating with a perspective broader and longer than their own immediate, short-term profits.” Now this last part is what really interests me. If corporate social responsibility is good for business, then the so-called social entrepreneurship is really the same old CSR wolf in sheep skin. In my opinion, we must separate wolves from sheep otherwise we will find ourselves feeding wolves with lamb milk. I am okay with social entrepreneurs who plow back profits into their social businesses. But a social entrepreneur who pockets the difference is no different than the old boys. Just in case you can’t read between lines, what I am saying is that all social entrepreneurships should be non-profits. Period.

$154 Billion. Free Money for You, Come December 25

One hundred and fifty four billion dollars can be yours to spend on the charity of your choice, come December 25. By sacrificing one day in a year, we could put enough money in the hands of all non profits in America to operate for six months without raising a penny. That includes all non profits that help orphans and widows, do disaster intervention, save dogs, cats and gorillas, protect the environment, and many others. If all Americans decided to skip Christmas and use the money to save the world, we could have enough money to run 22 countries in Africa debt free for a full year.

If all Americans gave one Christmas away, we could have enough money to pay off all the debt for the whole continent of Africa.

In two months from today, on December 25th, Americans will spend money equal to what it would take to feed four million orphans three meals a day for ten years.

Merry Christmas everybody!

How to Catch a Runaway Dog

We had a very wayward dog when I was growing up. Twelve hours out of twenty four we had her tied up on a rope so she couldn’t bite people during the day. We let her loose at night. But once in a while she got off the hook during the day. Very hard to catch her when she did. But my mother knew how; get a bone, dry or not, and wave it in her (the dog’s) face.

This is true not only for dogs. Marketing uses the same concept. Research and development use the same concept. What do people want? How do they behave? How can we reach them? New might be good but not interesting. People resist the new. A good salesman will sell the new using the old language. “You will love this”, he says to an 84-year old woman; “my grandma loves it so much”.

This lands me on the page where I wanted to be. Social entrepreneurs. Change agents. Non profits. A very meaningful non profit had mercy on us when we were growing up in a refugee camp. Someone from far away working with an international non profit came to our refugee camp and found us playing a soccer ball made out of banana fibers. He was so moved that he went home, collected money and sent 100 soccer balls to us. I was 10. But the new soccer balls had one problem. They bounced a lot and we played on dry gravel, sand and soil. We didn’t find bouncing balls very useful in our game. So we decided to make some changes. We started by reducing the air inside. But that too did not work because the thing could not get off the ground. So we did what we knew how to do best. We sold the balls and bought plastic bags. We had always dreamed of making balls out of plastic bags. Plastic bags were way cooler than banana fibers. But we never had money to buy plastic bags. So we upgraded using the money we made from our new imported soccer balls. I think we sold the balls for a 10th of what it actually cost our friend to buy them. But who cared. We saw the balls as an opportunity to get what we had always needed, not what someone else thought we needed. I wish our friend had asked. He would have changed our lives for way less than he paid