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Ken Lehman - Guatemala
Ken Lehman, Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala (1966-68), worked with the national staff of the Corps in Washington until 1971. He is now chairman of Winning Workplaces, a not-for-profit helping organizations become great places to work, and managing partner of KKP Group.
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The night before our interview, Ken Lehman had returned from Tanzania where he was inspecting projects on women's micro-credit and lending, water projects, conservation projects, and micro enterprise projects in his role as a member of the CARE USA Board of Directors. In his interview he describes Winning Workplaces, which grew out of his family auto parts business, the Fel Pro Company, which was recognized as one of the best places to work in the US. He ran the business by treating employees fairly and assuming that the employees knew their jobs better than he did. He said the result was high profits and a high level of customer satisfaction. When the business was sold in 1998, he and his family decided to start Winning Workplaces to teach small and mid-sized organizations the lessons they had learned at Fel Pro.Winning Workplaces is a clearing house for information on workplace issues and people practices, providing information and tools to help businesses be successful. Winning Workplaces also provides inexpensive training and consulting for FPOs and NPOs, and, in partnership with the Wall Street Journal, it honors organizations that run great workplaces on small budgets.
He tells of being in the Peace Corps in Guatemala teaching English to the students in the Faculty of Law at an elite local Catholic university. He was the first Volunteer ever assigned to Rafael Landivar University. At the inception of his assignment, he found that the student idealism of the 60's had filtered south to Guatemala. Students looked to him to help them get involved in their own country, so he organized a student action organization which, among other things, taught literacy in very poor neighborhoods.
He says his driving force behind his social entrepreneurship came from his family's values, which were to help others and treat everyone with respect. His advice to other social entrepreneurs is to view failure not as defeat, but as a learning experience. Social entrepreneurs should believe in the rightness of what they are doing and that it can be done. But he notes that competition is tough in both the corporate and civic sectors and social entrepreneurs must deal with the fact that we are all engaged in a global economy. To succeed means learning to compete and collaborate simultaneously.
CLICK on the player above to listen to his interview.
