business IS personal

Only in the nonprofit sector could you get an email that in all seriousness suggests riding Amtrak as a way to get to a professional conference “in style.”  Can you believe:

Are you thinking about coming to the Nonprofit Congress National Meeting, but aren’t sure whether you can afford a flight? Do you want to avoid the hassle of driving and paying a premium for gas? Then get on the train!

Amtrak offers plenty of trains to Washington, DC, a comfortable atmosphere (including outlets to plug in your laptop or other electronic devices on many trains), and now, a 10% discount to Nonprofit Congress National Meeting attendees!

Reminds me of the postcard I received from my friend Adam as he traveled via train shortly after college graduation.  It was an Amtrak-branded postcard, and pictured the train going through a beautifully wooded mountain.  On the back, Adam wrote: “Amtrak destroys yet another one of America’s scenic treasures.”

Note to the organizers: if you’re looking to convince those of us who have to pay for this out of pocket to attend (i.e. our employers won’t pay for it), then consider holding the event over a weekend, rather than Monday-Thursday.  If our employers see the value in this enough to give us time to attend, they’ll generally pay for our travel.  And don’t insult those of us who do need to pinch pennies by telling us that Amtrak = riding in style.  I’ve had to ride Amtrak many times, and I’d never describe the trip as “going in style.”

I know - this blog is in danger of becoming a McKinsey advertisement.  However, when they keep putting out so much good stuff, I can’t help it!  Today there are 5 articles on microfinance/microcredit and banking services for the bottom of the pyramid.  Three of these are premium (paid subscribers only) articles which are only guest passed for current subscribers to the free version for a limited time.  So get reading!

Direct from the e-mail:

Special collection: The biggest market on Earth
In one country, as part of a ubiquitous custom called “five–six” lending, poor people borrow five pesos from informal lenders and repay six, usually within a week. The annual interest rate works out at roughly 13,000 percent.

This is hardly the only place where low-income people suffer from a lack of choices and information. Their options have been limited because legitimate companies have been reluctant to enter the markets that serve them.

These articles from the archive show that large and reputable financial and retail businesses are now finding ways to do so profitably.

A grassroots approach to emerging-market consumers
November 2006

Extending financial services to Latin America’s poor
March 2007

The following three premium articles are available to nonpremium members for a limited time through this e-mail.

Financing Latin America’s low-income consumers (Guest passed until May 16)
March 2007

The CEO as CIO: An interview with the head of India’s top private bank (Guest passed until May 16)
March 2007

Succeeding in Latin American banking: An interview with Banco Itaú’s CEO (Guest passed until May 16)
November 2006

I think I’ve mentioned before that I find the McKinsey Quarterly’s free resources available by signing up for their newsletter to be top notch.  This quarter’s entries for top strategy articles are no exception.  The descriptions below are taken directly from the e-mail newsletter.  I’ve deleted the ones that are only available to premium (paid) subscribers.  I’ve only read the climate change and Brad Bird/Pixar ones so far, but both were excellent.

An interesting discussion is happening on Social Edge about “Travel with a Conscience” and includes not only the more familiar eco-tourism/sustainable tourism, but also “voluntourism” and/or philanthropy tourism.  My positive experience with Solimar Marketing, which is eco/sustainable tourism-based, makes this discussion particularly interesting to me.

Going through the old e-mails again, and found this fascinating article in HBS Working Knowledge that was shocking and inspiring.  First off, I must admit that I’m a fan of the show Boston Legal and that most of my knowledge of Asperger Syndrome comes from that show (yes, i’m pitifully uninformed or misinformed).  However, I’ve worked with autistic children in after-school programs and have heard lots of scary statistics about the “autism epidemic.” This can be a debilitating condition and the success stories seem few and far between - the only one I can think of (disregarding the Hollywood savant examples) is Temple Grandin, who apparently also is in the Asperger Syndrome category on the autism spectrum disorder scale.

Usually, when I think of job training and opportunities for autistic people, I think back to working at the Volunteer Center of Durham 15 years ago, and how we used organizations like Good Work for low-skill labor opportunities such as stuffing and labeling envelopes for mailings.  The results were haphazard at times, and we often had our Board of Directors and Junior League volunteers come in instead to place mailing labels on fund-raising and development mailings to insure quality.  Granted, these were an entirely different population and spectrum of developmental disorders, but still, I never would have thought that anyone on the autism spectrum disorder would be not only well-suited for software testing.  Not to mention that it would actually be so well suited as to provide a competitive advantage.

Enter the shock and inspiration:

“But who is best suited to control and manage the tests? The surprising answer may be found in a group of people previously thought to have a crippling condition: autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

In a new case coauthored by Austin, “Specialisterne: Sense & Details,” an innovative consultancy in Denmark has turned testing into its own specialty. While its 50 or so part-time consultants are considered best-in-class—they are paid industry-competitive wages, and customers include LEGO, Microsoft, and Oracle—75 percent of them live with what others might consider a handicap: They have Asperger syndrome or some form of ASD.”

And later in the article:

Specialisterne now has two offices in Denmark, another under construction in Scotland, and branches being planned in Sweden and India. Its niche, according to the case, is testing when the cost of establishing automated testing is too expensive and complex. In March 2008 Sonne was honored with Denmark’s IT Award for outstanding contributions to IT development. In a statement read at the ceremony, the award was bestowed to Sonne of Specialisterne because “these highly gifted people require special support to get on in society—but via their particular logical skills and sense for precision, they can contribute massively.”

New York Times editorial writer David Brooks devoted his March 21 column to social entrepreneurship. The column and Letter to the Editor “Here’s What Social Entrepreneurs Can Do” written by Andrew Wolk, Founder and President of Root Cause and SEA Member, is saved here as a PDF.

One excerpt that hit a bit close to home (something I hadn’t put my finger on but have definitely noticed) is this description of SE’s:

“These thoroughly modern do-gooders dress like venture capitalists. They talk like them. They even think like them. That means that aside from the occasional passion for heirloom vegetables, they are not particularly crunchy. They don’t wear ponytails, tattoos or Birkenstocks. They don’t devote any energy to countercultural personal style, unless you consider excessive niceness a subversive fashion statement.”

Although to be fair, one of my SE friends is actually more at home in his Birkenstocks listening to Grateful Dead DAT’s as he is in his business garb - you just wouldn’t know it if you ever met him while he’s “on the clock”.  Fashion sense aside, however, the most salient point in the article to me was this snippet:

“Their problem now is scalability. How do the social entrepreneurs replicate successful programs so that they can be big enough to make a national difference”

To address this challenge, I still think that the research and tools produced by Greg Dees is the best place to start (although Jeff Bradach’s work with Bridgespan is a great follow-up, and I am still just starting to read Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits, by Heather McLeod Grant and Leslie Crutchfield).  However, Greg’s research on scaling social impact is easy for me to find and available free online (not to mention his status as an SE rockstar), so that’s where I’m pointing you right now.  I’d particularly recommend the frameworks for thinking about scaling social impact section, which contains links to some free powerpoint presentations, practitioner’s toolkits, and links to articles and papers which go into greater depth about how to use these frameworks (including a couple of great articles by Greg co-authored by Beth Anderson and Jane Wei-Skillern, although the more recent one requires a subscription to the SSIR).

This blog post reports that “Southern California Edison plans to install 250 megawatts’ worth of solar panels on commercial rooftops, generating enough electricity to power 162,000 homes.”  Great post/article that goes into the long and short-term business implications of this decision, including a potential short-term price hike as demand spikes before an eventual price fall as economies of scale ramp up, and potential faster adoption of thin-film solar panels, which use far less silicon than traditional panels.

This report coming on the day that we’re hosting a screening of the documentary Kilowatt Ours with a Q&A session from director Jeff Barrie seems like some sort of good omen, or at least a pleasant coincidence.

Taken from a post on npEnterprise this morning:

Ashoka’s Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship has recently developed a “Social Entrepreneurship Teaching Resources Handbook”. The handbook is an excellent reference guide, and can be found in PDF format here.

This handbook includes a mapping of over 250 professors who are actively teaching or researching in social entrepreneurship
from more than 35 countries, with 29 different competitions, over 800 different articles and 200 cases used in social entrepreneurship
courses.

Sections include:
- Social Entrepreneurship Programs, Courses, Cases, Articles and other learning resources
- Profiles of Social Entrepreneurs, Support Organizations, and Competitions
- Social Entrepreneur Networks, Conferences and Events

HBS Working Knowledge pointed me to this interview with Jane Wei-Skillern about the recent casebook that she and her HBS colleagues James E. Austin, Herman B. “Dutch” Leonard, and Howard H. Stevenson wrote: Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector. Jane co-authored several works with Greg Dees and Beth Anderson that I read when I was working with them at CASE (Center for the Advancement of Social Enterpreneurship), and I really like her work. The book will be added to the list of many that I’d like to buy and read one day. Right now, I’ve got too many in my “to read” pile to go out and buy more!

My favorite part of the interview is excerpted below (emphasis mine), but it’s a brief interview and definitely worth reading in full.

A major challenge facing business leaders is how to enhance the effectiveness of their social responsibility initiatives while substantially improving overall organizational performance.

This challenge cannot be overcome through incremental change in existing activities. Instead, it requires a fundamental transformation in the way that companies do business. It entails identifying new opportunities, creating new strategies, and establishing the structures and processes needed to pursue them. It is more powerful to envision this challenge as an entrepreneurial undertaking aimed at the innovative cogeneration of social and economic value.

MapEcos is a joint venture led by business school professors at Harvard, Dartmouth and Duke. It “brings together information about companies’ environmental management, provided voluntarily by managers in real time, with companies’ pollution data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,” according to a recent article in HBS Working Knowledge.