What the Community Sector can Teach the Corporate World

Charles, I think this is an extremely important idea to start pushing forward: that the non-profit sector has had its own "lessons learned," and that these can be conveyed into the for-profit sector.

From my point of view, every organization has a mission, possibly several. The non-profit sector typically has to achieve it without being able to depend on a predictable revenue stream. This has made many people very knowledgeable in how to build social capital and find and then leverage (on behalf of the mission) those people with specific knowledge and skills. Also, there's no burn-and-churn in a community, and this has made community leaders very adept and nurture and development. So the ability to find, recruit, leverage, and develop non-financial assets has been the most important factor in the success of the majority of non-profits.

Where this becomes a bit difficult for teaching the for-profit sector is in the mechanisms for communicating these skills and predispositions to for-profits in a way that can be understood; I believe we need people who are cross-overs and have been in both milieus to help translate. And most importantly, we need entities that are pursuing financial asset growth as their main mission to understand the relevance of those other skills.

To that point, I believe what we call social entrepreneurship is an inevitability. Even for entities with a mission to build financial assets, the inability to measure morale, physical health, knowledge, and other "raw materials" that are precursors to a productive enterprise makes the entire financial market unstable. Conversely, for those enterprises who become adept at those skills, they will have a strategic advantage.

Overall, social entrepreneurship isn't a whim, this is a natural evolution in economics. We had a first approximation system, made when people used slide rules to calculate things. The entire concept of an externality was a simplification to make things manageable. If we can have a global climatological model, it makes no sense at all that we wouldn't pursue a global economic model that is actor centric. Why would we differentiate between work done in a business or a home? If some child is sick, then doesn't that affect the parents' productivity?

We now have the technology to support research in this area, the will in the financial community to investigate non-financial assets as critical to their financial success, and the missing piece, as you point out, is to have the non-profit agencies able to transfer their learning to the for-profit entities.

Hi Jessica:

You make a number of good points, but one in particular struck me:

QUOTE: Even for entities with a mission to build financial assets, the inability to measure morale, physical health, knowledge, and other "raw materials" that are precursors to a productive enterprise makes the entire financial market unstable. :END QUOTE

< rant >

It seems to me that both tacit knowledge and morale are fundamentally different from most materials, products, profits, etc in that they are evaluated subjectively and thus in ways that are (strictly) non-quantifiable. And it seems to me that very much of social enterprise is in fact founded on the unquantifiables - on empathy, insight, passion, wisdom, and maybe even health - none of which are easily translated into numbers.

I'd like to see a great deal of thought put into the distinction between quality and quantity, and its implications

for the economic crisis, for the ways we do business, for human integrity, for social entrepreneurs, businesses and non-profits alike... yet the only book I can think of off-hand that digs into it is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - which I read almost centuries ago, and have mostly forgotten.

Do you - does anyone - know of anything more recent, and hopefully more succinct, which deals with the whose issue of quantity and quality, the quantifiable and the unquantifiable? And how to access the value of quality in a quantity-dominated world?

*

< /rant >

A Happy New Year to all...

Often, the frustration encountered by those for-profit professionals who enter into the community or social sector is how slow things move. Those of us familiar, know that it is because it takes a minimum of Board buy-in to move any major effort in a NPO. That equals a dozen or so personalities and opinions who have to be sold and buy in to an idea. However, the relationship building that it takes to build that consensus and momentum behind and idea, is pure art. And, when inclusive to a broad base of stakeholders, has the most enduring prospect for vision for mission. We (social sector) give up rapid turn-around-time in return for community relativity and stakeholder engagement. This is indeed something to be valued and learned.

What both Stacey and Jessica say above resonates for me now looking back at the corporate world. A new form of economics is what my founder wanted to get across and made the US President his first target to seed an "idea virus" about business which served a community and social purpose.

A dialogue with a somewhat disillusioned CSR advocate on Linkedin illustrated the main issue for me, which is the disconnect between CSR and social enterprise. She admitted that CSR being about branding a product, wasn't in any way concerned about the social objectives of suppliers.

Some businesses endorse social enterprise as a discrete action, but that's where it ends. Here for example, British Telecom endorsing our founder.

http://www.btbetterworld.com/pg/giving_young_people_a_voice/seen_and_heard_awards/casestudies/Speak_out.ikml

It doesn't mean they offer us work nor a feature on their Tradespace business directory. In fact it cost us 100 dollars to buy a fax machine to send the authorisation to publish.

Corporate business, those do we serve as suppliers is generally clueless about social enterprise. I picked up recently on a discussion between Muhammad Yunus and a representative from the Guardian newspaper, who write about and participate in conferences about social enterprise. He concludes they're a social business, which they may well be but that hasn't hurried one of their company group in paying our invoice which would fund our founder's efforts above.

I've written in fact, describing his work to them to be totally disregarded.

If we could dispense with branding and just get on doing business for good, seeking suppliers who practice likewise, there's just a chance of addressing some of the great inequity. The transfer from a "me first" to "my brand first" just isn't going to cut it.

Hi Stacy:

I just waned to note in passing that your comment:

QUOTE: the relationship building that it takes to build that consensus and momentum behind and idea, is pure art. :UNQUOTE

relates very nicely to the point Daniel Bassill makes in his post below - it's an example of the sort of training he mentions when he says

QUOTE: The company did not have to pay for this training. It came because of my own efforts through my volunteer work. Yet, the value of this knowledge is beyond any investment a business might make. :UNQUOTE

To put it in a nutshell, those who work in the non-profit and social entrepreneurial sectors learn a great deal from necessity... priceless!

I wish we could correct our typos here. The header of my last post was meant to read, "Re: [Stacy}" not "[tacy]"!

My apologies!

Often, the frustration encountered by those for-profit professionals who enter into the community or social sector is how slow things move. Those of us familiar, know that it is because it takes a minimum of Board buy-in to move any major effort in a NPO. That equals a dozen or so personalities and opinions who have to be sold and buy in to an idea. However, the relationship building that it takes to build that consensus and momentum behind and idea, is pure art. And, when inclusive to a broad base of stakeholders, has the most enduring prospect for vision for mission. We (social sector) give up rapid turn-around-time in return for community relativity and stakeholder engagement. This is indeed something to be valued and learned.

Jessica, Stacy, Jeff:

I've been on the return trip from seeing my boys over the holidays most of today, and just wanted to say I'm glad to see you posting - and hope to respond properly tomorrow.

In the natural evolution in economics "merging of the two often opposing forces, the profit motive and the moral imperative" could require as a first step, the raising of social consciousness within corporations. People naturally want to volunteer their time and skills to others if they have the encouragement to do so. CSR is a good starting point. In evolving the economic role of businesses, a re-branding of core valves probably is another good way to start raising awareness. When businesses adopt measures beyond the financial ones, society at large benefits. So the idea of corporations contributing to the living economy while still being able to sustain a competitive edge would be a great way to build a better world.

Hi Charles. Happy New Year.

I'm not one to boast that social sector organizations have the moral high ground, or that we have lessons that can be learned by the business world. I agree with you that we both can learn from each other.

However, I would say that we offer paths of learning that many corporations and their employees might benefit from. When I worked at the headquarters of a major corporation (1973-199) I was one of more than 4,000 employees in the corporate office, and of more than 80,000 around the country. I was a small cog in a very big machine. This limited my learning to what I learned on my job and from a limited network of co-workers and people in the merchandise departments that I worked with. It was what I call a narrow, vertical network.

However, when I became a volunteer (1973) in a company sponsored program, my network expanded to reach people in many other parts of the country. Because volunteer programs are always short of manpower, they offer many opportunities to use talents that are not used on the job, thus, as I took on more roles with the volunteer group, I began to expand my skills, or the way I used skills that I was applying on the job. As I became a leader in the volunteer program my interaction with other volunteers grew, and I built leadership skills that I might not have learned on my job. I also built strong relationships with people in many different divisions. As we socialized we "talked business" and thus I learned more about the company. This gave me an intuitive understanding and an ability to interpret direction and goals that were not always communicated clearly by my managers. Thus, I advanced more rapidly in the company than I might have without these skills.

As our volunteer program expanded to include people from other companies, both competitors, and non-related, my network of volunteers and knowledge of their companies and their areas of interest also grew. This enabled me to draw from a wider range of information and ideas in seeking solutions to the problems of my day job.

The company did not have to pay for this training. It came because of my own efforts through my volunteer work. Yet, the value of this knowledge is beyond any investment a business might make.

Making good decisions is the most important thing a person in any business setting can do. If you grow up in a corporate environment, and don't expand your knowledge through meeting and networking with other people beyond the functional role of your job, you are limited when it comes to making decisions.

I think the social sector provides these learning and networking opportunities and that companies who encourage employee involvement in volunteer service and gaining a tremendous return on investment by doing so. On the T/MC web site I host links to articles that show values to businesses who encourage volunteerism. The link is http://www.tutormentorconnection.org/LinksLearningNetwork/LinksLibrary/tabid/560/rrcid/8/rrscid/130/rrpid/1/rrepp/20/Default.aspx

Once again, Daniel has cut to the heart of things with the proffer of tools he has worked with, that can help others when taken across into their organizations and fields...

QUOTE: On the T/MC web site I host links to articles that show values to businesses who encourage volunteerism. The link is http://www.tutormentorconnection.org/LinksLearningNetwork/LinksLibrary/tabid/560/rrcid/8/rrscid/130/rrpid/1/rrepp/20/Default.aspx UNQUOTE

What's more, that sort of generous sharing of tools - the beginnings of a "pattern language" for online social entrepreneurship - is to be the topic of an upcoming SocialEdge event.

Keep your eyes peeled...

Charles, One of my most astonishing and fairly recent discoveries has been ATCA Open and the Philanthropia Trinity. I have networked briefly with the founder DK Matai who has brought together an alliance of philanthrocapitalist organisations, to which the following description is given.

"Adhering to the doctrine of non-violence, ATCA addresses asymmetric threats and social opportunities arising from climate chaos and the environment; radical poverty and microfinance; geo-politics and energy; organised crime & extremism; advanced technologies

bio, info, nano, robo & AI; demographic skews and resource shortages; pandemics; financial systems and systemic risk; as well as transhumanism and ethics."

This comes as almost perfect comgruence with P-CED's work sourcing microfinance and social enterprise in Eastern Europe and the paradigm for more inclusive capitalism delivered to Clinton's re-election committee.

We have not instructed them, nor are they aware of us, but by making these things happen we have set an example of what can be done. Likewise, our advocacy for digital inclusion through national broadband deployment, access to microfinance and social enterprise leading to the strategy paper delivered to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is the essence of what Bill Gates describes as Creative Capitalism at Davos last year.

That these concepts came from someone who was homeless 5 years ago, fasting for economic and social rights in the US, blows my socks off. Here's the perspective on social enterprise.

http://www.p-ced.com/info/se/

The following remarks on what the Social Media sector has to teach the Corporate Media sector was one of the initial blog postings for the American University Center for Social Media Blog back in 2006, but is still relevant today. ----- Today's first annual Digital IP Summit was held at the BEAUTIFUL new Cable Center at DU, with high-ups from HBO, Turner, Time Warner, Cox, and others in attendance. As the E.D. of a small community media organization, I was ready to be enlightened. The audience was likewise full of old-school industry folks, and it didn’t take long for me to realize that the main focus of the attendees (and many of the panelists) was how to resist the wave.

The few academics who spoke about approaches for “riding the wave” were dismissed in large part, because most of the audience wasn’t there to learn how to “share” or how to find revenue-models that accommodated the digital revolution, they were simply looking for tech tools to make the changing world fit into their old paradigms of market control and protecting Intellectual Property.

Its somewhat refreshing to realize that big-industry is spending millions on fighting the market tendencies. They continue to hold tight to outdated mantras, meanwhile ignoring what the people want, and open the door for little guys like us to step in. Some huge competitive advantages that came to mind in these discussions:

1. They don’t want to share, and we do. Denver, MNN, Cambridge and others are looking for ways to expand the level of sharing between Public Access stations and other noncommercial and user-generated media outlets. Free Speech TV is making their content more accessible, and our use of Creative Commons over traditional Copyright is making it easier and easier for more people to see our content.
2. They care about advertisers, we care about the content: Corporate Media will only pursue distribution methods that support advertising. We actually care about the message of our content and want it to get seen, which opens up distribution avenues to us that they will never adopt.
3. While they listen to advertisers, we can listen to the market: They listen to big advertisers who want to have a 1-stop shop for reaching the entire country, while we can listen to the people, who want more choice and more local and hyper-local content, which makes things harder on the advertisers.
4. Search is King: Its no secret that Corporate Media’s King and Queen are falling (Content and Distribution, respectively). With the oncoming glut of content available through the web, Search is poised to be king. I asked Cox, HBO, and others how they plan to standardize their metadata tagging systems to make their content searchable, and Vince Groff explained that its largely a “secret.” They don’t WANT a standard for search. In the end, there HAS to be a strategic advantage for producers whose goal is the same as the viewer's: Helping them FIND WHAT THEY WANT TO SEE.
5. Technology Development: Those guys are all re-inventing the wheel and keeping it secret from each other. The only way they know how to cooperate in Tech Development is to merge. But they’ll never adopt open-source programming, and that gives us another competitive advantage. We here at Denver are joining a growing number of Public Access stations who want to cooperate in developing a complete, modular, web-based public access infrastructure. From membership tracking to training, to equipment reservation and broadcast scheduling, every little broadcaster in the country who wants to join the club is free to benefit from our development, and the door is open for hundreds of Drupal geeks in their basement to “code a little piece of the revolution”. Together, we’re likely to mobilize a development team that rivals the size of the big-boys, though each of us only have to shoulder a small percentage of the costs.

More info on this project to come at http://www.denveropenmedia.org

Tony, I feel and share your pain ;-)

There may be hope, however.

One of the first things P-CED founder Terry Hallman did as a social entrepreneur was to pitch a business model for the Information Age at the US President. He then posted it in synopsis on the web where it's been for just over 11 years. A "what if" published as an idea virus, for a business which invested profit directly in social purpose, proposed to replace the non profit paradigm. In doing so the intention was to make it free to use for all.

He took that idea and as proof of concept used it to source a microfinance bank in Russia. I adapted it to my business in 2004 to fund a Marshall Plan strategy paper for digital and economic inclusion.

My experience with media organisations, though limited also reflects what you say. Rather than playing a role in the bigger picture, they want the production credits. I've given up trying to explain to them that it's more than about web widgets, or abstract concepts such as "crunchyness" and "soggyness".

The strategy paper we delivered to the Senate Foreign Relation Committee makes the case for deploying broadband infrastructure and social enterprise on a national scale to address the vicious cycle of poverty, crime and disease in a country overseas. I suspect that we we see it deployed much sooner in the US.

I wholeheartedly agree with your advocacy for search standards. We have Google constantly moving the goal posts, keeping a legion of black art practitioners engaged in optimisation. As Charles also knows, they host a smear blog defaming our organisation, whilst ironically delivering themselves the concept of a "for profit charity" which greatly resembles the model we created.

It's not always intentionally secrecy either. Sometimes more a case of failure to connect and understand. For example, I've been here on this forum some 4 or 5 years and many others talking about "swords to ploughshares" efforts applying business social enterprise solutions. While I connect here, sitting less than 70 miles from Oxford, I discover that while I chat here with Charles, a philanthropic group, meets to discuss the same kind of approach with the director of the Skoll Centre. As far as I know, they are totally unaware of the progress we've made in this area.

http://www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/press/philanthropia_trinity.pdf

Thank you for starting such a relevant and important discussion. In the mid 90s I was working with a think tank developing education technology programs applying some of the early Internet based Learning Management Systems. I went from there to the corporate sector developing Internet and Intranet Knowledge Management Systems. Essentially the two were the same but they came from different cultures and missions. The result has been my current work as a social entrepreneur building Internet based knowledge management systems that build bridges between the two. The ultimate challenge is often overcoming the culture of mistrust.

What I hope to see more in the future is the ability for the corporate sector to benefit from the collaborative culture enabling them to be more efficient and learn from their direct stakeholders. I also hope to see the non-profit sector benefit from learning how to build and operate their businesses in a sustainable manner so they are not reliant on grants and donations. This at least would be a good start and it all begins with knowledge sharing.

This is a good stimulus for reflection on our worth on education terms for corporate sectors.

Traditionally NPOs are thought to be value preachers and some practitioners.However , I would not dwell much on this sphere as working for NON- Profit is an objective factor. The objective would set up an OB and organization culture which is different from that of for-profit organisations. But the question is to what extent , this factor is responsible for differential characteristics ( 20%, 30% , 70%?) from Profit sector in NPOs? The socialist states also ran agencies like transport for service and not for profit and whether they are similar to us?

I donot think profit sectors have anything to learn from big bureaucratic NPOs , except the risk taking habits of the staff. Even certain big and bureaucratic organizations are a bad pool of human resource.

I would rather look at medium and small organisations who have manythings to share to the corporate world ;

a) the entrepreneur is highly risk taking and stiil he balances well enough between internal relation with team and outsiders . often she is young at an age when her contemporary in corporate world is too tired and old psychologically. b) the inter-personal relations , inter- team relations is another area the corporate world can learn. c) there are certain organsations who are practising values of sustainable development , emission auidts etc which also is a good area for corporate houses to learn

Having said these things , i would suggest someone to arrange a inter-group sharing meeting and see the outcomes!

There is another factor too . Before , going for the idea to learn one has to remember that there are bad corporate houses and bad NGOs, So benchmarking should be done and sharing on magazines should take place which will help both.

There are lots of useful systems, procedures , norms that can be mutually shared.

Besides, I have found a good idea for sharing is to ask a corporate head to faciliate an OD for a NGO and vice versa.

Another interesting area is the people to people sharing between the 2 teams of corporate houses and the NPOs. It can help both to correct their personality styles and attitudes towards money , materialism and people which may be at 2 extremes.

With regards. lalit ( sociology and HR background) India

With regars

To conclude ,