One has to be careful to conclude that the only way to excel is for someone to have a duplicate background to oneself. Having said that, I do believe that being "formed" professionally in the for-profit world better prepares one to set goals and measurements and learn to be accountable to both. In short, it helps you make a "profit" because that's the way you think. Too often and too many non-profits are complacent and on the verge of insolvency because they believe a donor or a foundation will provide the necessary funds. This does nothing to foster independence and only leads to a dependency based organization. In short, learn how to fish and stop asking for someone to give you fish - that lesson comes from the for-profit and non-profit world - but someone the non-profit world has not taken head.

I used to be a firm believer that in order to grow a nonprofit, the employees (at least the execs) should come from the for profit. I don't totally agree with my initial believe now, but not fault it either. I think there is a dance going on between the world and the social enterprise is the bundle of joy.

You do build certain skills in one sector more than in the other. and you don't need to do one before the other, as many proofed how they can handle both, then whenever their time comes move to one direction over the other, without cutting all the links in between.

so I can work in a corporate world and run an organization, and I also can be an employee or volunteer of a nonprofit and open my business. I will learn two sets of skills at the same time, but this style requires an ability to switch personality - if we may say - in order to excel at each position.

or, I might be wrong again :)

Randah

Hello Seth and Fellow Bloggers,

"Their stories suggest that one of the best ways to make a difference is to spend at least some time in the private sector, understanding an industry and building a skill set and then leveraging those skills to change the world."

My comment may be slightly off target but the above point made by Seth really got me thinking about skill-based volunteering and the simple fact that one does not have to ever leave the business sector to start changing the world. One can work in the business sector their entire life and still make an enormous contribution to the nonprofit sector and the communities it serves. And no, I am not talking about philanthropy here. As I hint above, what I really mean here is a situation where business volunteers give their time and skills to a nonprofit within the context or as part of their jobs, or even on their own time but using skills gained through their workplace. In fact, many businesses in US and abroad actively encourage their employees not only to volunteer but also specifically offer their skills as part of their volunteer activities. Some let their employees volunteer during work hours through so called release time policies and even sabbaticals for extended work assignments at nonprofits where they have the opportunity to apply skills gained at work to the nonprofit they volunteer with. The best part is that not only the nonprofit wins, the business volunteer and the business they work for also wins. While volunteering with a nonprofit, they can acquire valuable skills later applicable in their work setting. Most recently Points of Light & Hands On Network published a great white paper on the current state of knowledge on skill-based volunteering. I’d encourage everyone to download it from: www.pointsoflight.org/networks/business (see right hand column). Also, organizations such as the Taproot Foundation, founded by a social entrepreneur and Ashoka Fellow Aaron Hurst, are quite active in promoting the concept of skill-based volunteering.

I agree entirely with this point that skill-based volunteering is the key to making a difference. And from my very brief experiences in the private sector what I've been most impressed by is the amount of time and resources the best businesses are able to invest in developing the skills of their employees. Because there's a direct connection between an employee's skills and the businesses bottom line, good businesses can afford and indeed benefit from excellent training and mentoring programs. I also think the skills you develop in the private sector are slightly different and complimentary to the NGO community and so you can bring more skills eventually to the table to make social change happen.

In the consumer packaged goods sector, we see trends that highlight the consumer demand for goods that are produced responsibly and are environmentally sustainable. Ironically, we have Wal-Mart to thank for some of that given how the retail giant has challenged its suppliers to innovate by designing products for the environment that help them reduce fleet shipping and transporation costs, for example.

I personally look forward to seeing more graduating MBAs create opportunities that bridge corporate profits with social good and environmental wellness. As I look forward to a new career in brand management, I will proactively seek opportunities to market products that are better for our society and the environment. My responsibility will always be first to shareholders, which in my mind only breeds innovation. A mentor once told me that he felt more empowered inside the for-profit sector than as a Greenpeace protestor on the outside. His words have inspired me to be an agent of change in this same way, and that requires a delicate balance.

Honestly, I'm unimpressed. I'd argue that the social sector has heaped undue adulation upon what are, if you believe the folks behind events like the Innovators in Social Responsibility Awards Gala, fantastically skilled transplants from the private sector for whose mere presence we should all be grateful beyond measure. I'm skeptical that the skill differential between the private and the social sectors is large enough to be noticeable, if it exists at all, but even if it does, the issue of importance is whether or not there is a differential in innovation, not in what fraction of the population can use Excel. (Of course, one has to consider the uses of the skills in question; like intelligence, one cannot really say definitively and meaningfully that person [or population] P is more skilled than person Q without first articulating exactly which skills we are interested in measuring, and how.)

I'd argue that most meaningful innovation comes from people who are either doing something they love or doing something because they feel they must (in the way that, for example, somebody who meets a farmer with no access to credit might feel compelled to start a microfinance organization), not people with stock options and Christmas bonuses dangled in front of their noses.

Finally, I'd argue that a great deal of the work of the social sector is done to rectify damage inflicted by the excesses of the private sector (or, more recently, to demonstrate the viability of markets that business has ineptly overlooked). If more college graduates would stand firmly on their ethical convictions in light of what everyone learns in Economics 101—namely, that markets fail, the powerless are exploited and suffer, and the powerful and self-interested profit—and refused to be involved with corporations that did not actively do their level best not only to control the damage they inflict on non-shareholders but also to ameliorate conditions for the powerless, I think we'd all be better off.

I like Seth, and I have nothing but respect for him as a changemaker, a leader, a thinker, and a human being. But he's playing to his donors (or his new employers) here, and he's short-changing the creativity, talent, and dedication of people in the social sector. It's critical for people in the social sector to foster productive relationships with people in business—but as human beings, not just as skill packages or potential donors. The argument that people in the private sector on average are more skilled than people in the social sector seems necessarily to rest on the assumption that people in business somehow develop their skills better than those in nonprofits. This is turn seems to rely on an assumption that people will develop their skills better in service of self-interest than in service to the well-being of others. Although hardly unpopular, this seems to me a rather unimaginative and ethically impoverished assumption. If it is correct, we may in any case have bigger problems than any putative skill differential.

I think Six's points above are excellent and they have led me to rethink my position. Re-reading my introductory post, I would agree that I overstated the case for the private sector and underestimated the social sector. I also agree that innovation is primarily about passion and creativity and these are not easily learned in the private or social sector. But just to clarify one point I made, I certainly do not think people in the private sector have more skills than those in the public sector. Instead, I think the institutions in the private sector are better set up to harness and enhance skill sets because skill set development is more directly connected with the bottom line. From my time in the non-profit world, I sadly do not think that fundraising is highly correlated to the actual product an organization delivers. From my time in the private sector, I do think the product and the fundraising are entirely connected. When I worked at an I-Bank for a summer, they did an excellent job training me in excel because they knew if I messed up valuations, it would reduce their revenues. The result was they pumped in a lot of resources and I learned a tremendous amount about the field very quickly. The three summers I spent working at non-profits during college, I had far less training because it's not clear even if I did my job wonderfully it would have mattered to the organization's revenues. The result was they could not afford to invest very much in my development. I personally still loved my time working for these non-profits and gained valuably from the experience but the training and experiences were very different and much more creative learning than structured learning. I don't think one form of learning is better than the other

but I do think that what I ended up with thanks to the mix of these experiences was greater than any one set of experiences alone.

Cheers to Six Silverman for really getting the conversation going! Sadly, the initial question posed by Seth Green reflects an overwhelming, and myopic bias, spreading across the nonprofit sector.

I am here to say - an MBA, and a few months on the ground "in the field" does not qualify you with supernatural powers and insight to solve long-standing and intractable social issues. Neither does 20 or 30 years experience working in the corporate arena or consulting to Fortune 500s with the latest strategy frameworks. Same goes with spending a few years building and flipping a start-up into multi-million dollar gold.

Granted, there are countless effective leaders who have transitioned from these private sector arenas to make a meaningful contribution to the nonprofit sector. Time in the business world offers invaluable learning in how the world works and how transactions of value often are structured. You also tend to learn better and faster some of the basics of management planning, operations, decision-making, governance, etc...and as echoed by previous posts - a "sense of management discipline" which the market/bottom line demands.

But anyone who has really spent time in the trenches working on social issues, including applying social entrepreneurial solutions knows that the real barriers to impact aren't simply "a lack of business acumen" or access to capital. At the end of the day, the real intractable challenges are social, cultural, political

and deeply systemic. Pedigree doesn't get you really far.

I believe business skills are deeply important - and can lead to better management execution. But business skills are just poker ante (the price of admission), and not the holy-grail that many would have you to believe. In my experience, I've witnessed countless world-changing ideas fail - not for a lack of money or access, but because of cultural disconnects. Because of egos, assumptions, and biases between stakeholders that no one knows how to effectively manage.

In the end, you must judge individuals as individuals - and assess the full depth of their skills, passion, and inter-personal abilities - and how they might complement the rest of your team. Consider emotional intelligence, empathy, humility - all three are equally essential for true sustainable success in the nonprofit sector. Yet these fundamental relational skills are most often lacking, and not valued enough on a professional development level - in either the business and nonprofit sectors.

In fairness to the business arena, the nonprofit sector suffers from a terrible case of "poverty mentality" and self-satisfaction, even when the long-term impact of one's work is amorphous at best. "We're doing the best we can" is not a justifiable excuse. Which hopefully means things will continue to change in response to our evolving world and collective climate.

In the end, we need a range of talented people to contribute their multi-faceted skills to addressing social issues. That's hopefully something we can all agree on.

Michael Founder, THIRSTY-FISH.com

Does non-profit experience help you become succesful at business?

It's not something many business people would value and that says a lot.

But then again, people who work only in business can suffer from limited vision and can get stuck forcing targets that can eventually destroy a business by over-reaching, over-borrowing, etc.

You learn to work within your resources at a non-profit and, in a good non-profit, you are accountable to donors and/or beneficiaries in such a raw way that necessitates maturity or failure.

In the UK today, we have an entire legislative chamber - the House of Lords - designed for people with experience outside of politics to come in and play a role in political decision making. It's an incredible addition to our constitution and they actively look for former/current heads of different businesses and also different non-profits.

Just throwing out some food for thought :-)

I definitely think that business experience helps, but maybe it works both ways...

Just wanted to echo Jake's point and say that I think the private sector can learn a tremendous amount from non-profit experience. Some of the largest and most successful businesses today are being driven by former non-profit leaders. Indeed, check out this recent post on the Wall Street Journal's blog about the former Sierra Club president who will be heading to advise Walmart on its strategy for going green:

"An Environmentalist at Wal-Mart: Selling Out, or Progress?" August 16, 2007, WSJ Blog — Robin Moroney

Can an environmentalist do good working for Wal-Mart Stores Inc.? Adam Werbach, the former head of the Sierra Club, thinks so, but he has yet to convince many former friends and colleagues, reports Danielle Sacks in Fast Company’s September issue (no link available yet).

Adam Werbach rose to prominence in 1996 by becoming the youngest president of the Sierra Club at the age of 23. But eventually, Mr. Werbach grew frustrated with what he felt was the environmental movement’s failure to connect with Americans outside the urban coastal elite. In 2004, by which point he had left the Sierra Club to run his own consulting firm, Mr. Werbach shocked colleagues and associates with a speech decrying environmentalism’s outreach problems. That declaration prompted one environmental group to drop him from the group’s board, while friends phoned him to tell him he had lost his way. Mr. Werbach wondered whether they were right when Wal-Mart, which he had once called “a new breed of toxin,” asked him to work for its sustainability program.

Mr. Werbach changed his mind about Wal-Mart after convincing himself that the retailer took environmentalist goals seriously... See the full article at http://blogs.wsj.com/informedreader/2007/08/16/being-green-at-wal-mart/

Extremely valuable points in a very relevant discussion. As the SE field rises in prominence, more and more people will be asking themselves the same question. It was a key talking point in the hallways of many b-school conferences I went to last year... maybe its time to be brought inside. However, I dont think the issue being debated is as black and white as you should or you shouldn't start in the for-profit sector.

I work in a social investment bank based in India, on incubation projects. Managing this project proves that to run social enterprises you need professionals at all different business levels. I’m currently looking for those with experience in direct marketing with HNWI’s/branding and somebody with a tech background as CTO as well as an army of administrators and SME consultants (just in case anybody’s interested). To make the point clear, I am looking for skill and professional experience in areas that are important to my business.

Although I understand the need to be committed, we have heard how many people are despite being locked in to mainstream business (I have posted another valuable story to document this below). Taking advantage of this motivation may not only be a value-add because of their skill base (mentioned above), but because their involvement brings a breath of fresh air and their insight produces a more rigorous business. Innovation can only be produced if you get people from all different walks of life, not only an army of people with the same background.

But I also need smart people. This is a sore point because our cost structure limits us. But it is imperative that the brightest minds join these businesses to make the management/thought improvements necessary to gain efficiency and other advantages. Because this is the most important aspect of my business I don’t mind if I get them early or late, as long as they are smart and committed (to touch on an earlier point, I presume that if they are smart they will also be committed to market-based approaches because of the industries overwhelming logic :)

This leads me to another point. We are talking about an industry here! I first realised this working in the fully fledged non-profit world. In that case it led to a rather negative impression, so I am hesitant to build on this point. Xigi makes the networking part of SE efforts clear, and I don’t need to elaborate on the benefits of connecting with this network. As with every industry, there are also particular skills that might be required to be successful. One may be the ability to communicate at grassroots. Any others?

Lastly I want to point out that getting people from the mainstream might actually have its drawbacks. As corporations grow in size, their management structures allot ever-smaller parts of the work-pie to people, making their tasks more and more specialised. This evolution is fantasy-scary, but real. The value of people who have been taught to think inside a small field is questionable to entrepreneurial enterprises.

That’s about all I can think of. You can see I’m torn, but I don’t really see it that way. Our hallway-debates showed that many people were going to do many things in pursuit of one common goal. As long as everybody holds on to that goal and works/learns as hard as they can in the meantime, I don’t see there to be a question of which track has the greater value. Interesting debate though, as I said we should think about taking into the lecture theatres.

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Extract from a Spiegel Article “THE BILLIONAIRE SAMARITANS”. Available at http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,496715,00.html

"The climate debate changed everything," Hölz says. And that has impacted the bank's up-and-coming managers as well. Many studies have already honed in on the changed view of the world held by today's business administration students, graduates of the elite training grounds at St. Gallen near Zurich, the London School of Economics or the Harvard Business School. Graduates of these universities don't want to turn into soulless printing presses of money for their employers. They want to create added social value

and corporations and banks that fail to get involved or that are stamped as asocial won't stand much of a chance of luring the best graduates each year. Silvia Kreibiehl, 30, is among the Deutsche Bank's elite young employees. In a team with 20 colleagues, she handles IPOs and recapitalization. She swings into action once "the volume of shares being sold hits €100 million." She helped the Praktiker do-it-yourself chain of warehouse stores find a home on the stock exchange. That business alone was worth €500 million. She's advised Wincor, Nixdorf and Infineon. Her business partners are the big and small bosses of the business world. But last year she was ready to scrap it all. "I'm not your typical investment banker," she says. "After high school, I wanted to study tropical agriculture." By that, she means she wanted to be a development worker. "Today, everybody wants to do that at one point in their lives," she says. But when she was 18, she took another route and completed a banking apprenticeship in the German city of Ludwigshafen am Rhein. She had already earned a coaching license for children's gymnastics. In the evenings, she took correspondence courses to earn a degree in business administration. She was talented and determined. By 22, she had already caught people's eye, and soon she was sitting in the Deutsche Bank's skyscrapers, juggling millions of euros, advising major corporations on how to navigate global markets. The big deals are "a whole lot of fun," she says. But after working years of days that can last 14 to 16 hours, "after faithfully keeping the Blackberry on the table and the cell phone primed, you start to wonder if perhaps, there just might be something else out there." Last year, the doubts grew so strong that she headed off to Bonn for a chat with the German Development Service. The service had a job vacancy in Fort Portal, Uganda. The task was to assist a microcredit project, a true humanitarian temptation. She went to Bonn, this woman with the six-figure salary, and applied for a position that paid €950 a month. To the employees of the German Development Service, she was one jaw-dropper of an applicant. They probably were just dumbfounded by it all. Back at Deutsche Bank, colleagues asked her: "But is there just the choice between the two: investment banking or developmental aid?" In the end, she stayed at the bank. It wasn't because of the money, she says. The real reason was that her supervisors made her an offer. They suggested she give developmental aid a try, with the bank's support. And she did. She spent the first five months of the year in Uganda, joined the project that nearly hired her and pitched in. She worked tirelessly and had a "super-intensive" time, she says, no less demanding than the clock-breaking schedule in the bank. She enjoyed it, living in a small house with the locals, with only a bed, a table and a chair. It didn't bother her at all that electricity was available only four days a week, that there was no hot water and that there was no kitchen. She came face to face with people. She could provide direct support. She felt good about herself. And she learned a lot, particularly that she was "not yet" made for this work, she says. "I was very alone there. It was hard. I wouldn't have made it, at this point, long term." Still, she plans to stick with it, part time, so to speak. She wants to help the Ugandans and the local relief workers. "I'm used to project work, even three, four projects running at the same time. I can make Uganda fit into the schedule," she says. Here, you have to take a break and contemplate for a moment just how the times have changed and reflect on what today's new citizenry of the world looks like: It looks like a woman who spends one day dealing with €200 million or heading off on global road shows with company executives and then spends another day or her evenings organizing the delivery of solar lamps to Ugandan villagers. The world is moving. It's not standing still. And it is women like Silvia Kreibiehl who provide a real feel for this change. This new citizenry of the world no longer asks how and whether the whole planet can be saved. It asks what it can do at its location, from its position and with its means. Many, many more Silvia Kreibiehls will be needed. That's because there is more at stake than the environment. Humanity is or feels threatened by hunger and poverty, by drought and water shortages, by HIV, poison and garbage. The tasks are overwhelming -- so huge, in fact, that they take your breath away. And there's hardly anyone who can give a better lecture on the subject than Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute, the custodian of the United Nations' "Millennium Development Goals."

There is something powerful that comes from young people being immerced in a values-based and non-consumption driven envrionment while gaining skills and testing abilities. I have worked my entire career in NGO's, I don't see this as the only path at all and I was grounded in what I believe, how much is enough, history of social movements, also highly important skills. I had to pick up skills from the private sector and somehow I think picking up skills is always easier than picking up values.

Both sectors matter, and marrying the best of both worlds is critically important and we need to be doing more to help young people learn about best practices globally, history of change, and leading from values.

Donna Morton Ashoka fellow Co-Founder Centre for Integral Economics

I believe that experience in the private sector can be a double-edged sword.

If private enterprise addressed all of the concerns and challenges faced by the nonprofit / public sector, there would theoretically be no need for NGOs (as private entrepreneurs would have perfected the vision and skills necessary to fulfill the missions NGOs advocate).

Having experience in a corporate or entrepreneurial environment can definitely be an asset. As leaders in the nonprofit arena, it is a significant advantage to understand certain business processes, but moreso to understand business culture and ideology. The perspective from which a CEO or CFO manages is much different from that of a typical nonprofit executive director; understanding that difference can be a big advantage. Corporate exposure can be very beneficial in developing effective processes in the nonprofit sector, especially in general management, HR, and marketing.

On the other hand, that type of exposure can also blunt the very instincts that make social entreprises effective, by limiting creativity (in favor of tried-and-true experience) and emphasizing quantitative measures of progress. There has been an unfortunate trend in the public sector towards imposing metrics on their programs that are not always an accurate gauge of progress or effectiveness. While the goal of social entrepreneurs is to be sustainable and produce return on investment, overanalysis and overreliance upon statistics can undermine the mission.

Just as easily as positive habits and experience can be acquired from career experience, negative habits and counterproductive ideas can also be transferred.

So, I would venture that the usefulness of career experience depends upon the leadership qualities of the entrepreneur; an effective leader will derive valuable lessons from their experience and use them to advance his/her social mission.

And here's my "new" "youthful" "innovative" insight into this discussion: not too much has changed from when you went to college and now that I'm going to college.

As far as I can tell, there are those of my peers who are going straight into business for business sake. The large salary, the improved lifestyle, and yes, the skillsets they are going to learn that can take them to their desired MBA program or career path. There are others who are value-driven as well, looking to enact their learned skills and knowledge from college to enact change through education, NGOs, etc. Yet most that I talk to all recognize the tension between "making a living" out of college and "making a difference" by following through with their "activist" roots. Many have put the brakes on the latter in favor of securing themselves out of the gates.

The social sector can't or isn't offering the same "self-interest" benefits of a college graduate that the private sector is. So to me, the trend has been business and self first, passion and others later, and hopefully that later does return once you've taken care of yourself. Unless there is a new incentive (perhaps through the bridging between corporate and social change communities) the trend will continue, regardless or even increased by the need for business skillsets prior to social work. If more and more businesses do adapt to more social solutions as suggested - skill-based volunteering, 3BL, etc. - I'd think that only a greater influx of grads would be seen moving towards the private sector. Until then, the social sector is going to have to figure out what they need to do to (if they want to do it even) to keep "youthful" grads at their doors. I think the only answer as of now is to keep bridging the two communities together, or have more for-profit ventures built from the bottom up to address social change.

Heck, I'd like to know where to best put myself once I graduate so as to capitalize on my potential to enact positive change. Keep the discussion going :)

First distinguish between the “operator” needs of the nonprofit as opposed to the “manager” needs.

The former focus on service delivery, as in feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, etc., while the latter focus is on handling all of the internal structural detail that make for organizational sustainability.

People who are managers need to understand many of the so-called ”business models” that will not necessarily obtain to the operators; hence, some wetting down and learning experience in the private sector can be extremely helpful to the managers, but perhaps not to the operators.

I disagree that the for-profit and non-profit worlds are very different in the skills they require. In both, what you need is a good idea and an effective growth strategy. Take a look at McDonald's and the Grameen Bank and they have a lot in common. Both satisfied an existing interest among a certain segment of the public. And both had innovative leaders who created franchise-based growth strategies to take their good idea and scale it. I certainly think the impact of the Grameen Bank is more inspiring and I think Yunus' innovation came from his passion to make a difference, but I'm not convinced there's a huge difference here in skill-set between Ray Kroc and Muhammad Yunus. Business too can be very service oriented and the non-profit world has plenty of need for smart, innovative managers.

I've worked in both non-profit and for-profit worlds, and the experiences of each informed the other. I certainly wish I'd had more for-profit experience when I was starting GreenNet and Association for Progressive Communications. In particular I think people who have been effective in for-profits, who then move to non-profit contexts tend to have a more productive approach to valuing their own time, and less of a tolerance for time-wasting.

But .... anyone with a social conscience will need to be selective about where to gain their non-profit skills, and pick a company that has a quadruple bottom line (community, environment, profit, and ethics), otherwise you won't last! There are lots of companies there which are either committed to their ethics, or indeed have a mission to achieve a social/environment result while making money. For example I'm working with Beyond Building who have a mission to make Green Building affordable.

= Mitra Ardron www.mitra.biz/blog

In our increasingly interconnected world with the internet, travel, global warming and media people are becoming more interconnected to each other and the issues we as a human world society face. This is a fact that many nonprofits have long known about and business have soon come to be cognizant about. What amazes me will be the continued interconnectedness of businesses and nonprofits when both types of organizations realize that for example, to tackle global warming or to reduce the environmental footprint, there needs to be a collaborative strategy between both non profits and business.

Given this trend, I believe there will be more leaders and business now who seek to bridge the gap between social change—and most impressively, that businesses today will need to address a TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE EFFECT: the revenues, the social and environmental effect, and their PR.

This trend means that nonprofits and businesses are getting linked either by cause or consumer demand and the bottom line is now a triple bottom line that must be addressed. While the NGO community may or may not likely embrace a corporate style for measuring impact, it is true that “what you can not measure, can not be managed.” For this reason, if NGO “E” is to reduce the environmental impact by planting trees, then NGO “E” should embrace a method to account for how many trees have been planted where, at what cost, and how many trees actually grew. On the same token, businesses today have realized the importance of the triple line effect and several of the firms I’ve studies or have worked with (through my non profit, Borderless Educations (www.careerprepadvantage.org, that seeks to work with socially and environmentally businesses by advertising them and non profits alike to students who take online voluntary lessons, that then earn points redeemable for grants, scholarships, green products, or career advancement at those SER businesses or nonprofits), realize that it is just as critical to be SER as it is to get an ROI. Take Starbucks and their green initiatives for example.

Personally, I feel that the foundation to changing the world is a good heart empowered by an education, and people either at the business or nonprofit level that can listen, believe, and understand your passion to help change the world. In light of this, one of my favorite quotes is ““Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean” by Ryunosuke Satoro.

So now that we are the next generation empowered with the internet and skills to share and put to use—what’s next on the agenda for us to tackle? A whole lot…!

I think that different people would respond differently to this question, based on their own experiences.

In my case I came to Chicago in 1973 after college, and a 3 year stint in the Army. I joined a large corporation (Montgomery Ward) as an advertising copywriter. I rose rapidly over the next 7 years because a) I had previous learning experience, in the Army; b) I had a parallel growth as a leader of a volunteer-based program hosted by the company.

Shortly after joining Wards I was recruited to be a volunteer tutor/mentor in an employee led program that had began in 1965. In 1975 I was recruited to be the leader in that program. For the next 15 years, I had two jobs - one in various stages of ad development and promotional planning and the second as leader of a volunteer-based program that had 100 pairs of kids/volunteers in 1975 and grew to 300 pairs by 1990.

I found that I was constantly taking what I learned from my work experience and using it in my non profit experience, and I was also taking what I learned in my non profit experience and using it in my work. For instance, in 1980 the company began to downsize and we were given more responsibilities with fewer people. A few of us began experiementing with Apple Lisa computers to see if it would help us create ad diagrams, which were constantly being changed by merchandise managers. In the evenings, I began to use the same computer to manage my volunteer attendance lists, which were constantly changing because of the turnover of kids and volunteers.

On a more fundamental level, I found that the strategies Wards used to communicate to 20 million people each week with printed ads, were almost identical to the way I communicated to our large group of kids and volunteers. Thus, what I learned in my advertising, I was applying in my volunteer leadership. I also found that the network of people I was meeting in my volunteer work was putting me on a first name basis with different top level executives, and with managers in support departments that I did not normally work with. However, knowing these people personally made it much easier to solve problems on my job when I needed help from these other departments. I could by-pass the secretaries and go directly to the people I new because I'd met them in my volunteer work.

By 1990 Wards had completely automated its advertising planning/development because of some of the work we piloted in the early 1980s. However, my volunteer-based organization was being written up in national studies for our innovations in the use of computers.

I left the company in 1990 and converted the volunteer-organization to a non profit. Now I'm using the same advertising and merchandising concepts that big companies use to put stores and products where there are potential customers, and to provide daily advertising to draw shoppers to these stores. In my case, the stores are volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs, and the customers are not just kids, but volunteers, donors, media.

I feel that without my work experience, I would not be doing what I'm doing the way I'm doing it. However, without transfering my non profit experience into my work, I would never have had as much growth on the job as I did.

Others may have a different set of personal experiences. Mine have grown over 30 years of involvement of a social benefit organization, with 17 years of parallel involvement in a for profit business.

This is really a wonderful discussion and one that I have often had buzz in my mind over the past 10 years as I worked in the nonprofit sector/community development field. I have to begin by acknowledging that we sit here, fortunate enough to even have the choice to decide, contemplate how we want to be leaders in corporate and social change communities, when much of the world does not even have the choice..so just a moment to pause and be grateful. Now with that said, where am I now, I now sit at a desk working at a small start up company where over the past two years I have gained skills that I was completely unaware of and detested 2 years ago, things like accounting, quickbooks, profit and loss statements, and now working with marketing and sales. The skill set I am developing I see as a spring board to becoming my own entrepreneur with social development at my core, and I feel more confident in doing so. I see now, having had this experience how it can be done. Environmentally speaking...I have to say as a fishy fish, I feel each day the reality that I am a fish out of water...although in another sense I do recognize how I bring to the "corporate community" a new perspective on what it means to deliver an idea with passion, how to foster a "community" approach to creating and generating ideas and not just focusing on the bottom-line, sort of the idea of working from within the structure to mold and develop it's form. Fortunately, I work for someone whose social level of consciousness is already well developed and representative in his approach to employee practices. In executing his employee practices, specifically around cultivating diverse representation, view points, the idea of learning and supporting employees with training and knowledge-based skills that are of interest to them, cooperative and collaborative decision-making instead of top down approach to management, the company, though corporate, extends itself to the likes of which I have known and loved from the nonprofit world. There are systematic functions of a non-profit organization that completely mirror the corporate sector, especially when it comes to managing finances and creating budgets, finding marketing opportunities. These components are essential to sustain the livelihood of an organization and can often be the downfall of many well loved and run organizations, as I had to experience. I am not saying that the only way to learn or cultivate these skills is to enter the corporate world. What I am saying is that it is important that whatever you bring your passions to that it be supported with as many skill sets as possible that can be learned through a variety of organized and basic life living avenues, cultural experiences and conversations. Above all else, there is the undeniable aspect of what is a community, and learning about what it is to be a part of a community on both sides of the fence, because whether we like it or not corporate sector and non-profit community are essentially all part of what is OUR COMMMUNITY in one way or another, we gotta find some way to co-habitat. No answers, just questions and doodles of ideas... peace and respect.

I’d like to contribute a perspective on the for-profit-nonprofit dualism. It’s an illusion typical of Westernized, dualistic thinking, but it’s an instructive illusion for idealists and social activists on our way to holistic thinking, an illusion by which we finally learn to have a realistic opportunity to make the difference in the world our hearts desire to make. We need to pass through the illusion of dualism experientially, see its artificiality for what it is, and move on our way to acquiring integrated, holistic thinking. If we are learning at all as we go, we learn by experience and evolve to higher consciousness, implementing Einstein’s observation that a problem can be solved only from a level of mind higher than the one at which the problem was created.

Our aim is higher consciousness and we are attaining it. We are gaining the integrated thinking and decision-making skills needed to achieve our hearts’ desires as men and women of integrity. We are daring to be more open-minded and generously oriented leaders than our society may have promoted in the recent past (and yet secretly wished that someone would dare to be in order to sort out this mess and reconcile the accounts without blowing us all to smithereens). Let’s celebrate our passion for being compassionate and just over being merely acquisitive and elitist as meaningless symbols of illusory social power!

We want to remain idealistic and yet also not be accused of being fruitlessly out of touch with reality. We yearn to be pragmatic idealists who can point to the fruitfulness of our endeavors and also rest in peace each night, even before our bodies expire. As we tack our sailboat-minds through shallower waters into deeper waters and head out to open sea – guided by the North pole of values towards which our compass points – we learn, we develop, our minds evolve. We are in the learning mode and our learning is motivated by the ethical pinnacle of doing the greatest good for the greatest number, namely, the “best for us all.” “No child left behind” and other idealisms are not merely slogans to us. Lip service does not satisfy us nor give us peace of mind or joy of heart. Total, unqualified inclusivity in a good life (howsoever ethically defined), meaningful liberty and the pursuit of truly healthy happiness matters to us.

We learn best through experience. We accumulate experiences and build upon previous lessons, if we are learning. As responsible, idealistic members of the for-profit world, we see things and make decisions from the perspective of what is valued in that world, depending upon the businesses we experience and their strengths and weaknesses. As members of the nonprofit world, we see and make decisions from a different perspective colored by different value-ladened emphases. We weave our experiences, our perspectives and our learnings together into a new system of thinking and carry that new system with us into the next set of experiences. Where one starts does not matter as much as where one dares to venture in gaining perspective. Is our pilgrimage narrowly constricted or broadly ranging in our search for deeper, more promising answers to questions it takes both wisdom and courage even to ask?

Each of us are on a sacred journey, a vision quest by which we are changed, for good or ill, perhaps at first one way and then later the other, and who knows, perhaps again and again. Eventually, it all works together for good because we are all in this boat together. That “together in one boat” perspective is more clearly in the consciousness of adults of any age whose lives have been enriched and fortified by experiences crossing artificial social borders and barriers on the Internet, on diversified pre-college and college campuses, in ac