The social entrepreneurship crew generally likes to poo poo traditional development.
And why not? It is an easy target given the widely held belief that aid doesn’t work and evidence showing the wholesale ineffectiveness of many development projects. We are increasingly convinced that aid donors – institutional and individual – have dumped incalculable sums down [...]
45% of people in the United States like their jobs. That’s the depressing conclusion of a recent Conference Board survey on job satisfaction.
Of course, the percentage would surely be much higher if the Conference Board was only measuring employees of non-profits or social enterprises, right? There, the sense of purpose and mission drives people [...]
It’s often said that 1+1=3…or 11, or 100. Or some other number greater than 2. But can 1+1=1.5, or even -1?
Android’s Awkward Ecosystem
In case you’ve missed it, there is a lot of buzz building around Google’s (and HTC’s) coming release of an optimized Google Phone called Nexus One.
Of course, there are already lots of [...]
Yesterday I looked at reasons to be skeptical of metrics, which carry inherent dangers. However, that is not to say that metrics should be thrown out. Measures of your organization and its performance provide hugely valuable information when done well. Here are four tips for making the most of your metrics.
Let [...]
Are metrics imperfect? Can they do as much harm as good? Are they easily influenced by ideology and dogma?
The answer to all of these questions, of course, is “of course.” A recent New York Times piece by Anand Giridharadas does a nice job of pointing this out. There is an inherent danger in handing [...]
This is essentially the question raised by Theo Vermaelen, professor of finance at INSEAD, in a recent post arguing that MBAs should NOT sign the MBA Oath.
The MBA Oath, started at Harvard Business School, aspires to apply to business management a formal oath and code of ethics, similar to the Hippocratic Oath taken by [...]
In a Human Ventures post yesterday I sarcastically put forward a quick “how to” use private property to kill innovation.
This is a further riff on that topic. However, it explores something much nearer and dearer to your heart. YOU!
Let’s start with two trends in the realm of employment contracts:
Inclusion of Intellectual Property [...]
December 5, 2009 | Posted in
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Open your wallet and, if you still carry cash, take out a dollar bill. Across the top you should see written, “In God We Trust.”
The slogan is more than a bit inaccurate. Using money requires no trust in any god. That is, unless you think of Ben Bernanke as a deity. Use [...]
It’s true that many social entrepreneurs enter the space, often from the non-profit sector, with the intention of doing good, first and foremost. Making a profit is a secondary concern, if that, and the idea of focusing on profitability can even make some social entrepreneurs quite uncomfortable. However, if social entrepreneurs want to be [...]
November 6, 2009 | Posted in
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Music has an uncanny ability to engage our emotions in ways that impact our behavior. Its influence is often subtle and sub-conscious; it can make us happy, excited, anxious, relaxed, somber, and sad, all without us fully realizing it. In fact, we can all probably think of a song whose melody and lyrics have [...]
One of the most useful concepts that I learned while studying sociology was that of the “social construction of reality.” Coined by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in their 1965 book by the same title, here is the Wikipedia definition:
“The central concept of The Social Construction of Reality is that persons and groups interacting [...]
