business IS personal

Harvard Business School professors V. Kasturi Rangan and Susan McDonald are hosting a conversation based on their recent paper, The Future of Social Enterprise. Click here to read a summary of their findings and join in the conversation.

The questions posed center around social sector evolution and measuring ROI and social impact - the conversation started today and already has some interesting posts.  These web forum conversations generally only last a week or two, so check it out now in order to participate!

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.

In college, my friend Jesse and I often discussed the “night guy vs. morning guy” phenomenon. Night guy would say, “I can totally get by on four hours of sleep - let’s stay up.” Morning guy would curse night guy as he rushed to class late and tired.

A HBS Working Knowledge article documents and codifies this type of behavior and provides a link to the PDF of a working paper by Todd Rogers and Max Bazerman. Here’s a brief overview from the executive summary:

Rogers and Bazerman show through four experiments that people are more likely to choose what they believe they should choose when the choice will be implemented in the future rather than in the present, a tendency they call “future lock-in.” They also discuss directions for future research and applications for public policy, an arena in which citizens are often asked to consider binding policies that trade short-term interests for long-term benefits. Key concepts include:

• Tension occurs between an individual’s immediate self-interest and the interests of all others, including his or her own “future self.” Individuals tend to think that their future selves will behave more virtuously than their present selves.
• Four studies demonstrated the future lock-in effect, which describes a person’s increased willingness to choose and support a binding “should-choice” when it is to be implemented in the future rather than in the present.
• Policymakers could leverage the benefits of future lock-in by advocating for reforms that would be decided upon in the present, but go into effect in the future. Future lock-in would encourage citizens to more heavily weight a policy’s abstract merits rather than its concrete costs.

The working paper presents several studies, including one on donation. They find that “the future lock-in effect… suggests changing the structure of the donation such that the prospective donor can commit now to donate in the future.”

This work obviously has implications for development professionals in nonprofits, and also brought to mind another HBS Working Knowledge article from July 2007 (thanks, Gmail, for making email archiving and search so simple!) which was, in fact, also co-authored by Rogers and Bazerman with Katy Milkman. It also chronicles the “want” vs. “should” cognitive dissonance, and study it in terms of grocery shopping and DVD rentals. You can read that article, an interview with Rogers and Milkman, here.

A message on the npEnterprise listserv mentioned a list of blogs centered around social entrepreneurship. This list included several that I haven’t seen and may need to add to my own links. It also included Beth Kanter’s blog, which I haven’t visited in a while. I surfed on over and found this interview with Perla Ni, former publisher of the Stanford Social Innovation Review and founder of Great Nonprofits.