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The post-Covid world may offer new opportunities to push social enterprise as a force for good. But getting the business model right will be crucial. We’ve created a new social enterprise business model toolkit to help, based on a year of research in the UK. Part one explores the what and why of social enterprise business models, and the trade-offs to be managed. Read more
‘What will the sandwich fillings be?’.
It was an innocent question with good intent. The context however, was a Board meeting. The agenda item was the launch of a new facility. The Chair kindly suggested that perhaps staff might deal with this operational matter.
When the corporate world suffers from bad governance, the consequences are significant. Enron, Seimens, Thomas Cook, Carillion – just to name a few of the bigger failures.
But what about the third sector? How do we know what good or bad governance looks like?
One of the most popular tweets at the RMIT Global Shifts social enterprise conference in Melbourne last December was along the lines of “the best way to start a social enterprise is to just go and do it”.
There is a lot to be said for ‘just doing it’. Social entrepreneurs by nature are people who have a big idea, take a risk and don’t give up. But ‘just doing it’ without appropriate planning and strategy is a dangerous approach. Read more
The good apostle Paul of New Testament fame wrote something along the lines of ‘empty yourselves of all the things that make for bad stuff’. Well maybe not exactly that, but people have been misquoting him for centuries.
He also said women should remain silent in ‘church’. And astonishingly some people still take this advice seriously!
But back to the ‘empty yourself’ advice. What does that have to do with strategic planning?
What would it mean for a strategic planning process if it began with something akin to a ‘mind enema’? An emptying of all the noise and clutter, the chatter and unconscious yet chosen meanings, the assumptions and presuppositions, from the deepest parts of the mind? Read more
Organisations can act without morals or ethics. The past several years have exposed corporate disgrace in many places. For-profit greed, hubris and narcissistic power has led to crisis after crisis (see John Harris’s article ‘politics and corporate disgrace’ in The Guardian Weekly). But one could enquire why we would expect anything else? For-profits seek profit. But what about our expectations of not-for-profits? Read more