A general focuses on the battlefield and where the enemy is coming from, while the soldier in the foxhole keeps his sight within a 10-yard perimeter. In a similar vein, business leaders must understand the lay of a more expansive external environment while others define and execute day-to-day tactics. Leaders supply fresh strategic insights by connecting the dots between things they observe, read or hear about to identify patterns and themes. It’s called conceptual thinking. Let’s see how it works. Three articles caught my eye in one day’s news. In the first article, The Council of Public Relations Firms was reported to be reinventing itself and the PR profession as traditional PR strategies of media relations and placement backfire in an era of consumer-generated social media. The profession made sense when NBC could reach 1/3 of US TV viewers. Now there are thousands…
“Occupy Wall Street” should applaud social enterprise business model innovation.
As “Occupy Wall Street” protests capitalism’s greed, social enterprise leaders are thankfully tapping the power of market forces to address capitalism’s thorniest social issues. In 2000, Gerald Chertavian founded the social enterprise Year Up to address the “huge waste of human capital” he observed in poor neighborhoods as a Big Brothers-Big Sisters mentor. Year Up gives a “leg-up” to youth aged 18-24 who have been disadvantaged by low income, family dysfunctions, substance abuse, or a criminal record. The high-expectations program combines a six-month professional skills training program (covering topics like writing, networking, time management, conflict resolution, and personal finance) with project-based internships that teach a technical skill. Over 85% of its graduates go on to earn $15/hour or more. A social enterprise, according to the Social Enterprise Alliance (SEA), is “an organization or venture that achieves its primary social or environmental mission using…