IdeaEconomy.Net » Entrepreneurship

33 Social Entrepreneurs Who Make This World A Better Place

John — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 03:35:13 +0000

Big Ideas:

Social Entrepreneurs focus on doing good in the world, not only profits.
IdeaMensch summarizes the work of 33 social entrepreneurs making a difference.

IdeaMensch has a great post providing examples of 33 social entrepreneurs. These social entrepreneurs are proof that talented individuals can indeed make a substantial difference to the world.

Some of my favourite examples are:

Emile Cureau and Rachel Cope are developing a charitable web app called LazyAngel that allows Internet users to fight child malnutrition for free.

Print a Forest, aims to plant 75 trees for every tree used for printing on paper.

Matt Flannery is the co-founder of Kiva, the original global microfinance platform. Kiva benefits low-income entrepreneurs by offering microloans from people like you and me.

Kendra Stitt Robins is the founder and executive director of Project Night Night, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing care packages for homeless and transient children living in shelters across the country.

Take a moment now to read about all the social entrepreneurs on IdeaMensch.

Action Items

Get some inspiration and read about the 33 social entrepreneurs.
Think about how you can shift your business or job to doing a little more good in the world?
Profits are not enough for a meaningful life, plan on how you are going to make a difference.

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Why Collaboration Often Fails and What to Do About It.

John — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 21:32:23 +0000

Big Ideas:

Collaboration and creativity are big buzz words now but most businesses don’t really know how to collaborate or be creative.
Collaborative efforts often produce mediocre results because ego gets in the way.
A great team can produce amazing results, but finding those team members is not an easy task.

There is no question that the Internet has changed the way we work and connect with others. From a few people working on a shared Google document to thousands contributing to projects like Wikipedia or Linux, we are collaborating in unprecedented ways. When it works, collaboration is synergistic and amazing. The problem is that too often, real, meaningful collaboration is thwarted by an ugly thing called people.

As much as we talk about creativity and collaboration, most people don’t really know what those things mean. We are all human, so egos get in the way. We want to own, control and dominate. It happens with children playing together, in office politics and in volunteer or non-profit settings. Too often, it is more important to be right than to do the right thing. That is where collaboration fails.

Intuitively, we understand the benefits of co-working, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding or a great business team on our collaborative efforts, but most of us also have many negative experiences where team efforts get mired in bureaucracy and territorial silo building. It is pretty hard to create something amazing when team members are jockeying for control and recognition.

At least from my experiences, I believe that most businesses don’t understand collaboration. How many of your colleagues or customers are still emailing Word and Excel documents as attachments? If you are over 30 years old, chances are your business processes are still heavily influenced from the Microsoft dominated days of installed software more than two decades ago. The world is a different place now. There are plenty of examples of dynamic, young companies are prospering even when the partners are global dispersed, but they are still the exception.

For real collaboration to work, many elements need to be in place:

Trust. Great relationships take time to build. With the exception of old schoolmates or childhood friends, most of us don’t have those deep social connections anymore.
Talent. Each person has to bring some unique skill to the team. Partnerships quickly fall apart when there is even the appearance of a less than equal contribution.
Personality. There are some people you just can’t work with regardless of their skills. Finding people that you like AND are good is not easy.
Shared vision. All members of the team have to be pulling in the same direction for the collaboration to be successful.
Technological savvy. Everyone needs to buy into the tools to work together. There are talented geniuses who can seclude themselves from the rest of the world, but you need to embrace technology if you expect to really collaborate with a good team, regardless of where they are located.
Communicate. Information hoarding is a remnant of the industrial age. Remove all bottlenecks to effective and direct communication. Social capital is more valuable than financial capital.

Collaboration is Still King

Amazing things can happen if you build the right team. The problem is that you have to sort through many less than optimal candidates on your way. It is all a numbers game, work with as many people as you can to find the right talent. Results will be mediocre most of the time, but every once in a while you will find that diamond in the rough. Do everything you can to work with the diamonds and throw the coal back in the ground for someone else to deal with.

Action Items

If you haven’t already, move your business to the cloud. Everything from shared documents, online workspaces, project management and customer relationship management software can be done much better online where everyone has access to the same information in real time.
Deliberately start and join new projects with new team members. The only way to find great people to work with is to work with a lot of people.
Get really good at something. Talented people are not going to want to work with you if you don’t bring anything to the table.
Personality counts. You need to play nice with others if you want them to stick around.
Great businesses are built on great processes. Get organized and anal about how you do business, communicate and serve your employees and customers. Creative breakthroughs do not come from some unorganized eureaka moment. Real innovation is systematic and deliberate, and almost always the result of hard work, rich collaborative efforts and insights from outside sources.

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Introductory Guide to Social Entrepreneurship

John — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 21:10:01 +0000

Big Ideas:

Social Entrepreneurship is about focusing on making the world a better place, not just profit maximization.
Entrepreneurs have a choice of socially good versus socially destructive business activity. We are either part of the problem or part of the solution.

There are many ways to make a living. You could sell gourmet pet food to rich yuppies. You can market $97 get rich quick schemes on the Internet. You can promote the latest abdominal exercise machine on TV promising 6-pack abs with only 5 minutes a day. Maybe you could start a cup cake business selling $5 sugar highs. There are far too many businesses that are a net drain on society, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

It is possible to do good AND earn a profit. Unfortunately, economics has put the goal of profit maximization above everything else. Imagine a world where businesses maximized social good instead. Profits are important, if you lose money for too long you will go out of business, but no one needs private jets, luxury yachts and $200,000 cars – levels of profits, particularly when so much of the world lacks basic access to food, health care and education.

It doesn’t necessarily follow that you have to forsake profits for social good either. What if you could get rich doing good in the world? Money can pervert incentives to create real societal value, but there are businesses prospering with a heavy social good focus. That is what social entrepreneurship is about, using entrepreneurial and business skills towards making the world a better place.

Social Entrepreneurship Links

Social Entrepreneurship on Wikipedia.

A social entrepreneur recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create and manage a venture to achieve social change (a social venture). While a business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit and return, a social entrepreneur focuses on creating social capital. Thus, the main aim of social entrepreneurship is to further social and environmental goals.

Grameen Bank
Noble Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus’s micro loan bank funding rural poor. One of the most famous examples of social entrepreneurship.

Social entrepreneurship on PBS.org.
Examples of social entrepreneurs, lesson plans for teachers, and many great links for further research.

Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at The Duke Fuqua School of Business.
Social entrepreneurship case studies, academic research and other resources.

Skoll Foundation
Leading social entrepreneurship foundation with over $250 million in funding for social entrepreneurs. Many examples of social entrepreneurs.

Ashoka.org
One of the largest and most famous organizations that invests in social entrepreneurs around the world.

Acumen Fund
Invests in entrepreneurial approaches to solving global poverty.

Umair Haque
Harvard Business School professor and leading thinker on the need for socially productive business and economic activity.

SocialEdge.org (A Skoll Foundation program.)
Great articles on social entrepreneurship and related topics.

Canadian Social Entrepreneurship Foundation
Provides funding, resources, and mentorship for social entrepreneurs under 40 years old in Canada.

Social Entrepreneurship on Alltop.com
Links to the latest posts from many leading social entrepreneurship blogs and websites.

GreenMarketing.tv
Articles, interviews with social entrepreneurs, marketing tutorials and more. Very comprehensive site.

School for Social Entrepreneurs
UK based training programs for social entrepreneurs.

Public Radio International Social Entrepreneurship Podcast

Social Innovation Conversations
Large selection of podcasts on social entrepreneurship.

Action Items

Ask yourself, is your business making the world a better place or are you selling toxic products and services that are a net drain to society and the environment?
If you are not happy with that first answer, what can you do to change it?
Read about social entrepreneurs in the links above to see what is possible if you put your mind to it. You might just make the world a little better place.

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The Rise of Social Entrepreneurship

John — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 10:24:59 +0000

Big Ideas:

Businesses can earn a profit and help better society at the same time.
Social entrepreneurship is a growing trend as we seek more meaning and fulfillment in our lives.

I am finding that people of all ages are increasingly searching for more meaning and fulfillment in work and life in general. There is much more to life than a good salary and conspicuous consumption. On my JetSetCitizen blog, I have interviewed dozens of digital nomads, perpetual travelers or location independents that are putting lifestyle ahead of materialism.

A great life is not just about leisure time and personal satisfaction; making a real difference in the world is also becoming an essential component. Entrepreneurship is often necessary to have the freedom to craft a perfect lifestyle, but an even more important factor is the opportunity to really create social good in the world.

What is Social Entrepreneurship?

Social Entrepreneurship is using business principles and practices in new ventures to bring about social change in the world. Profits are a by-product, or the organization will fail, but the real focus is to make a difference in the world.

Why isn’t Every Entrepreneur a Social Entrepreneur?

It is important to remember that our consumption oriented society is less than a century old. We have been trained to be consumers with insatiable wants and the planned obsolescence in all the things we buy is designed to generate more profits, not create societal value.

In the decades after WWII, affordable mass produced goods greatly increased living standards. Large corporations mastered the art of mass advertising. Getting people to buy more goods and services, created jobs and real wealth. Life was good.

Little was known of the environmental and social consequences of those actions. Crime, obesity, pollution and all the other negative externalities of a consumer society were either non-existent or not understood. What was good for corporations, was good for individuals so everyone was happy.

Businesses don’t profit by getting us to spend less, conserve energy or be generous with our time and money. Companies want us to consume high margin products and services.

Fast food restaurants make more money selling sugared water and manufactured food, than anyone could by selling vegetables or advocating drinking tap water. How can carrots and broccoli compete with movie endorsed happy meals?

Wealth is Not Measured by GDP

The health of an economy is commonly measured by GDP growth, basically buying and selling more stuff. Clean air and water, safety, parks and wilderness, income equality, strong community, family values, general health levels and virtually everything that we consider priceless aren’t valued in gross domestic product.

An under-employed worker may only contribute $10,000 or $20,000 per year to a modern economy, however put that same individual in jail, with incarceration costs at more than $40,000 per year and you have doubled or quadrupled that individual’s contribution to economic growth.

There is a Better Way

When business oriented individuals create enterprises to alleviate societal ills, business transactions take place to satisfy the economists, but more importantly real social value or social capital is created that truly enriches the quality of life for recipients. It might not be as profitable as fast food hamburgers or financial derivatives, but there are opportunities to make a real impact in our communities. Profits alone are not a particularly good motivator, we all want to do something good in the world and social entrepreneurship might be the answer.

Social Entrepreneurship Examples

Grameen Bank - Provides no-collateral loans to the rural poor in Bangladesh

Fifteen – Jamie Oliver’s chef apprenticeship program for unemployed youth.

The Big Issue – Print magazine giving homeless an opportunity to earn an income.

The Eden Project – Promoting environmental and global awareness through arts and music events, education, gardens and social projects.

Acumen Fund – Invests in social enterprises.

Ashoka.org – Promoting social entrepreneurship for more than three decades.

If you know of more examples, please tell us in the comments. I would love to create a directory of social entrepreneurship initiatives around the world.

Action Items

Can you shift your business to more socially beneficial activities?
Can you employ, educate or help socially disadvantaged in your community?
How much money do you need to earn? How about reinvesting the surplus into social change?
Having difficulty finding meaning and fulfillment in your life? Perhaps you should start thinking of how you can give more to those in need. The greatest happiness comes from contribution not consumption.

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Hate Conferences? How about an Anti-Conference?

John — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 02:04:19 +0000

Big Ideas:

Social media connections are weak; real world meet ups are still essential.
Smaller conferences focused around an activity build stronger connections.

The Rise of Anti-Conferences

It is more important than ever to make real world connections than ever, but conferences? Spending a few days with thousands of people frantically handing out business cards is a difficult way to establish meaningful connections.

TheNextWeb reported on the rising trend of anti-conferences:

I can go and swap my business card with 500 people at a conference, but at a smaller event I can make 100 solid relationships with people that last a lifetime.

Unconferences have been around for a while providing an unconventional and creative setting for people to meet and network, but I’m witnessing a trend for the conference aspect of an event, (thousands of participants watching a speaker, bad coffee, organized networking) being thrown out of the window and more activity conscious events being organized. Friends who went on Summit Series, an event for entrepreneurs on a charted cruise ship that sailed round the Bahamas, were raving about their yoga/music and shark tagging expeditions as well as the relationships they made onboard.

Social media has made it easier than ever to connect with thousands of people around the world, but most of those connections are tenuous at best. Real and lasting relationships come from intimate real world gatherings where the focus is on something other than generating immediate leads.

Having attendees participate in activities like rock climbing, hiking, yoga, wine-tasting or cooking classes is a great ice breaker that immediately creates shared experiences.

Action Items:

Organize a sporting or cultural activity for clients, suppliers and/or acquaintances that focus on people, not business.
Make a consistent effort to meet other professionals without a hard sell. Focus on them, not you.
Set aside 30 minutes a day to support and connect others online. Again, NO sales pitches.

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Lady Gaga Isn’t a More Efficient Brittany Spears.

John — Fri, 27 May 2011 03:35:01 +0000

Big Idea:

You can’t optimize yourself to greatness, outrageous results require outrageous actions.

Entrepreneurship, Lady Gaga Style

Love her or hate her, there is no denying that Lady Gaga is a superstar. She knows how to shock, entertain and continually push the bar. From bikini stage outfits to arriving at an awards ceremony in a man-carried egg, Lady Gaga knows how to make a splash.

Most businesses don’t think like Lady Gaga. Playing by the rules and doing what everyone else is doing is much safer than taking bold risks. That is why the state of business is so damn lousy. How often are you wowed by a company?

The Problem with Businesses

Ramit Sethi of Iwillteachyoutoberich.com wrote something that has bothered me for a while:

Years ago, American Airlines removed one olive from each first-class salad, resulting in a savings of $40,000/year. They are a massive public company with huge scale, so you can’t get those kinds of results. But the principle — focusing on small actions that give you incredibly huge results — is something you can do.

I am a huge fan of Ramit and I certainly believe in the idea of the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule where focusing on high impact areas can deliver disproportionate results, however I don’t think American Airlines cutting an olive from salads falls in that category.

Far too many businesses strive to cut costs and get more efficient as a way to success. That mentality might of worked in the industrial age, but we are long past that stage.

Do you think Lady Gaga has achieved the level of success she has because she is more efficient or better at cost cutting than the hundreds of thousands of less successful performers?

So many businesses are obsessed about keeping labour costs to some predetermined percentage of sales. Squeezing even an extra 0.1 percent can potentially add a lot of money to immediate profits but at what cost? Companies bullshit about how important customer service and employee satisfaction are, yet try to cut worker hours down to a bare minimum. The result is overworked, stress out employees and customers that are not getting satisfactory service.

What if those companies took a hit up front and actually increased the amount of staff on hand? What would be the long term benefit of a less stressed workforce or customers that can actually get the assistance they need?

United Airlines cut the olive from martinis in business class. Do you think those passengers noticed? I know some that did. What is the cost of an olive per business class traveler? They are saving five or ten cents on a fare that can be thousands of dollars.

That type of cost cutting is short sighted and self-defeating. I wonder how much the consultants were paid that provided the idea to cut an olive from the two airlines? My guess is that companies spending their time counting olives have much bigger problems to deal with.

Seth Godin said,

We see one organization after another, left unchecked, pushing miners or laborers or bureaucrats to exhaustion, all in the name of enhanced productivity.

Cash flow and costs are important but you can’t optimize your way to greatness. (Unless you do it to an extreme, Walmart style.) Instead of trying to giving your customers as little as possible, how about taking a cue from Lady Gaga and go full out for every interaction?

Action Items

Are you running your business with an accountant or entrepreneur mindset?
Are your trying to be more efficient or are you growing a business?
Instead of trying to cut from your customers, think about where you can add more value.
What small thing could you do for your customers or staff that would generate disproportionate results?
Is there merit in diverting a portion of your marketing budget to making current customers happier? It is much cheaper to keep a current customer than it is to find a new one.

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Startups! Don’t Raise Money in Series, Raise it in Parallel.

John — Mon, 23 May 2011 18:45:27 +0000

Big Ideas:

Have many investors compete to fund you all at the same time.
Scarcity tactics get people to buy, use those principles for investors, customers and hiring.

Venture hacks has a good, simple post on raising money for your startup.

Don’t talk to one investor at a time, talk to all of them at once. It’s the only way to get market-clearing terms.

Meeting every investor over a short period of time creates a positive feedback loop of social proof and scarcity that closes deals.

A big splash takes more time and money up front, but it generates much better results over the long haul than a slow grind.

Action Items:

Can you ‘launch’ the funding stage of your business just like you are going to launch the business after you get money? A burst of excitement with a group of investors will be more effective than grinding it out one by one.
Can you use similar scarcity tactics to get customers competing to buy from you? Limited time offers, auctions and early bird bonuses can all add that early buzz to quickly establish momentum.
Look at hiring the same way. What do you have to do to get a flood of applicants competing to work for you? Can you bring many applicants in the same room together to show them that your firm is the place to work.

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How David Beats Goliath – Break the Rules to Succeed

John — Tue, 17 May 2011 22:44:37 +0000

Big Ideas:

You can’t win against bigger or more skilled competitors if you follow the same rules. Create your own rules to succeed.
The underdog has to outwork the competition in unexpected ways.

Malcolm Gladwell has a great article in The New Yorker on how underdogs can triumph against more skilled opponents. (Thanks to Karol Gadja for the link.) There are many great military and sports examples of how unconventional strategies and outworking your competition are the only ways to succeed.

When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the two hundred and two lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe to toe with Goliath the conventional way a hundred and fifty-two times—and lost a hundred and nineteen times

Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought.

This type of strategy is at the heart of all business model innovation. As the old saying goes, “you can’t out Amazon, Amazon.” If you want to compete against established players you need to create new rules that favor your style of company.

Selling T-shirts is a commodity business. Threadless.com turned it into a monthly design contest where customers vote on the best designs.
Apple doesn’t compete on price and features with other computer companies. It sells premium priced, beautiful computers that work better because they monopolize the hardware and software.
Installed software is expensive to buy and maintain. SaaS (Software as a Service) applications turn those purchases into a monthly subscription where data is always backed up and the software is always current.
Discount European airlines can make more money from selling hotels, rental cars and upsells than they can from the flight itself. That is how they can give the flights away for next to free.
Starbucks has a limited food selection that is shipped out of a central location. Great local cafes bake fresh pastries right on the premises.

Action Items

What can you do to change how your industry works?
Could you give away your main product in order to upsell other services?
What unique skill or knowledge can you use to compete against larger companies?
What is the biggest bottleneck in your industry? How can you completely bypass that bottleneck?
Instead of selling services sporadically, can you charge a monthly subscription for an ongoing solution?

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Is Your Business the Right Size?

John — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 15:54:50 +0000

Big Ideas:

Is your business the right size?
Are you expanding to satisfy your ego or because it is essential for your business?
There is a right scale for every business, straying from that point will harm your economic viability.
For most businesses, there are diminishing returns on investments in staff or technology.

Bigger is not Better

Talk to any entrepreneur and you will find someone that wants to grow a business. There is a natural assumption that bigger is better. Bigger may be better for our egos, a fifty employee company sounds much better than a five person company, the problem is that bigger is not always better for our bank accounts.

My wife and I ran a small service business for about ten years. In the beginning we worked hard, cared a lot about our customers and grew steadily. It wasn’t long until we were making a great income and were turning customers away.

Then we started to expand. We hired more staff and opened new locations. We noticed immediately that every new employee or investment we made contributed less and less to revenues and profits. The work my wife and I could do with minimal hassle, required 3 or 4 outside staff or would require exorbitant salaries to attract rock star talent. The worst part was that my time was being spent on boring administrative tasks that added little real value to our customers. Suddenly I was focused on hiring, training, managing, sales, marketing, accounting and countless other tasks that kept popping up. By expanding, my wife and I were working more and making less money.

Sure it was foreseeable that we could have reached a point where we could have afforded to hire staff to do all the administrative work, but that was not an incremental growth level. It would have required us to be 5 or even 10 times bigger than we were. It would have taken a lot of time and money to reach that higher level, and even then it was very likely that we would have been too big for the market to support.

Eventually, we decided against the growth and scaled back to just the two of us again with non-essential work like accounting, web development and graphic design outsourced to professionals. We made more money with shorter work weeks, longer holidays and much less hassles.

The Right Size

In the blog post, An atomic theory of business size, Seth Godin points out that a business can not only be too big, but it can also be too small.

Rightsizing your business is one of the most important decisions you can make. Just because you’re thriving at one scale doesn’t mean that a little more effort or a little more investment magically take you to the next. They probably don’t.

Several times I’ve run businesses that the market liked but couldn’t find the right scale… adding more people didn’t add a significant enough amount of revenue, and fewer people would have cost us our customer base. Just because it’s a good idea doesn’t mean that there’s a scale that works.

How to Really Get Big

Growth for growth’s sake is foolish. If you have a successful business that is generating good profits and it is work you enjoy than be happy where you are and invest your free time in projects you enjoy.

If you really need to change to the world, than look for a better business model. With innovative uses of technology and new business models, it certainly is possible for small teams to accomplish amazing things. However, it is unlikely that any company will miraculously achieve phenomenal returns just by scaling the old business model. Doubling staff will not double sales, and it definitely won’t double profits. Doing more of what you did before will only bring more administrative hassles.

Action Items:

Is your business the right size?
Is your optimal profit level at a higher or lower revenue level?
If your business can’t effectively scale up or down, are you satisfied at the level you are at?
If you can’t find the right scale, maybe it is time to completely reinvent your business model?

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Practically Radical: Four Simple Truths About Leading Change and Making a Difference – William C. Taylor

John — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:27:34 +0000

Big Ideas:

“The only way to stand out from the crowd is to stand for something special.”
Look at your business from the perspective of different CEOs to gain insights and make creative breakthroughs.
Focus on what is right with your business, not just what is wrong.

FastCompany magazine cofounder and author of the book, Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself, offers four simple principles to transform your business in this ChangeThis PDF.

We are living through the age of disruption. You can’t do big things if you’re content with doing things a little better than everyone else or a little differently than how you did them before. In an era of hyper-competition and non-stop dislocation, the only way to stand out from the crowd is to stand for something special. Today, the most successful organizations don’t just out-compete their rivals, they redefine the terms of competition by embracing one-of-a-kind ideas in a world filled with me-too thinking.

There’s nothing quite as exhilarating as watching a young organization reshape its field—a blank-sheet-of-paper startup that transforms an industry, a challenger brand that redefines a market. Alas, there’s nothing quite as common as watching an established organization—a company that reached great heights in one era of technology, markets, and culture—struggle to regain its stature as a force for leadership in a new era. The work of deep-seated, sustainable change remains the hardest work there is.

Here are four of those principles—simple rules for transforming your company, shaking up your industry, and challenging yourself

1. What you see shapes how you change
We’ve all experienced déjà vu—looking at an unfamiliar situation and feeling like you’ve seen it before. Vuja dé is the flip side of that—looking at a familiar situation (an industry you’ve worked in for decades, products you’ve worked on for years) as if you’ve never seen it before, and, with that fresh perspective, developing a distinctive point of view on the future.
TBWA also uses what it calls the “CEO Hat” exercise to encourage organizations with tunnel vision to develop a new line of sight. Participants search for out-of-the-box answers to big strategic questions by reaching into boxes filled with hats, shirts, and other paraphernalia from breakthrough organizations such as Apple, Virgin, Target, Southwest Airlines—and then adopt the mindset of those free-thinking companies as they think about the questions with their clients. “We define possible strategies for companies through the eyes and values and under the leadership of a different CEO,” explains Laurie Coots, TBWA’s chief marketing officer. “The sheer act of being free to think like somebody else gives you permission to generate ideas that you might not get to otherwise.

2. Where you look shapes what you see
The most creative leaders I’ve met don’t aspire to learn from the “best in class” in their industry—especially when best in class isn’t all that great. Instead, they aspire to learn from innovators far outside their industry as a way to shake things up and leapfrog the competition. Ideas that are routine in one industry can be revolutionary when they migrate to another industry, especially when those ideas challenge the prevailing assumptions that define so many industries

3. There’s nothing wrong with your organization that can’t be fixed by what’s right with your organization.
I’m convinced that one of the big reasons for the failure of so many change programs is that by focusing almost solely on what’s wrong with their organizations, and by importing off-the-shelf strategies devised by outside experts consumed with what’s new, leaders undervalue what’s right with their organizations, and overlook home-grown strategies rooted in the wisdom of the past.

4. Success is not just about thinking differently from the competition
Even the most creative leaders recognize that long-term success is not just about thinking differently from other companies. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, about caring more than other companies—about customers, about colleagues, about how the organization conducts itself in a world with endless temptations to cut corners and compromise on values. For leaders, the pressing question isn’t just what separates you from the competition in the marketplace. It’s also what holds you together in the workplace.

Action Items:

Use the CEO Hat excercise to look at your business and industry with the perspective of different executives? What would Richard Branson or Steve Jobs do with your business model?
Look at what is working in other industries and try to bring it to your business? The next time you go to a magazine rack, read something completely unrelated to your business. Find out the most successful companies in that industry and analyze what they are doing right.
Don’t focus on the negative. What is right about your firm? Can you build on that to really become exemplary?
The hardest part of business and life is building and maintaining quality relationships. Businesses shouldn’t only be run by numbers. What can you do to care more about your customers and employees?

Links:
Practically Radical PDF
Practically Radical Book on Amazon
Willliam C. Taylor Website
Follow Taylor on Twitter

Do you Run a Business or a Company?

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