Within the space of five days, two eminent thinkers on social change have busted my brain. David Abernethy is a Stanford Professor Emeritus of Political Science. Jed Emerson is the man most often credited with inventing the concept of blended value investing (doing well by doing good with your money).
I am respectfully awestruck. Neither of these social change thought leaders have fallen victim to economic development hubris. Quite the opposite, they are calling for a humbler approach to economic development and social entrepreneurism.
Abernathy, speaking to the Stanford Association for International Development, set the stage with this history lesson:
"The development field has had its fads and fancies....alleged magic bullets...large infrastructure projects (dams, ports, highways) and, at the other end of the spectrum, small-is-beautiful projects (small dams, hand-held solar lights, urban gardens); central government planning and, at the other end, the privatization of public sector activities...; import-substituting industrialization and its opposite, export promotion; land reform; social services, education and health; better macro-economic policies; democratization; better governance through reduced corruption, more effective tax collection and greater accountability...; administrative decentralization;...disaster relief; conflict resolution; economic and social entrepreneurship; microcredit, and so forth."
Five days later, Emerson, speaking at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club, ripped apart the conceit and jargon of social entrepreneurship, venture philanthropy and social investing:
"There is no fixed definition of a social entrepreneur and who cares anyway? It's time to stop talking about social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship is a means, and we are focused too much on it."
"Deification of the individual social entrepreneur -- instead of capacity-building, the team and the requisite community support -- is very destructive.""Social entrepreneurship is about more than a compelling idea; it is about effective management of total resources. Too often we confuse intent with impact. There are too many great ideas and not enough effective execution."
"The pressure from funders and social investors to be innovative results mostly in rebranding old ideas. Most social business strategies are incremental improvements, not blinding game changers."
"We need to end 'drive-by philanthropic acts' and stop 'idea inflation' where too many people on both sides of the checkbook promote unproven ideas. A lot of philanthropy amounts to 'let a thousand flowers wither.'"At the end of the month, I will be at the Skoll World Forum. Billed as "the premier, international platform for accelerating entrepreneurial approaches and innovative solutions to the world's most pressing social issues," I expect to find out - in words, but more usefully in deeds - what social entrepreneurs can and should being doing with their time, money and talent.
As a social entrepreneur (yes, I have surrendered to the word, if not the whole belief structure), I and other Delegates to the Opportunity Collaboration (which I founded) are searching for pragmatic tools that work. The end-poverty-panacea remains so elusive. It is a bit unnerving how little we seem to really know about jump-starting large-scale economic opportunity for the most desperately poor.
What are you working on? Tell us all what you are doing to achieve lasting economic justice.
http://www.p-ced.com/info/se/
The following year, I tuned into these words from the Papal encyclical, Caritas in Veritate:
'This is not merely a matter of a "third sector", but of a broad new composite reality embracing the private and public spheres, one which does not exclude profit, but instead considers it a means for achieving human and social ends. Whether such companies distribute dividends or not, whether their juridical structure corresponds to one or other of the established forms, becomes secondary in relation to their willingness to view profit as a means of achieving the goal of a more humane market and society'
What we've been doing is trying to leverage social change through microeconomic development overseas, with the primary focus of childcare reform in support of large numbers of those institutionalised. This is how the sequence of impact reads back on reporting:
http://socialbusiness.socialgo.com/magazine/read/people-centered-economic-development--social-impact-report---march-2011_25.html .
With regard to the artificial pressure to "re-brand" think of Critical Mass (Tipping Point) or Stuart Hart/Lynn Payne/John Elkington or my own work on the core nature of Value (see "Shared Value", which is simply a re-branding of existing concepts/ideas). A new term is not necessarily a new idea or insight...but may be a good improvement on it!
Even in the case of Micro-Finance, BRAC, ACCION and others have each innovated on that idea-- I'll leave it to historians to sort out who really invented the notion... Its kind of like debating who invented the modern automobile. Bill Drayton and MY are our Henry Fords.... many folks "invented" social entrepreneurship and MF...
Dude! Sorry for not replying for 6 days--i didn't get a notice of your post...
First off, we should really talk about this directly--hard to do via random posts, please shoot me an email (jed@blendedvalue.net). I am happy to compare notes.
Short response:
I find this all "sad" that now 20 some years after this "movement" first got traction, we're still flailing around on this question of how to structure early stage capital for SEs. There are many aspects to this, but a fundamental part of the problem is that it would seem we are still long on vision/verbage and short on execution. I will step right up and own my part of that (as a "writing/thoughtful/promoter of the field" kind of guy), but will in my own defense say that we launched the work I did together with George Roberts in 1990 to offer our own answer to this challenge: identify a set of promising SEs and offer more significant, longer term funding to them in order to provide them with some breathing room to grow. In our case, we did 3 year commitments of $50K to $150K, annually. We did it in our own region, with a group we could see, touch and feel and we backed them through various rounds of failure until they either found a level of success or were able to exit in a responsible manner. (For more see New Social Entrepreneurs, www.redf.org)
In the years since then, I've been surprised at our collective level of discussion relative to our level of capital allocation--but I do think there are some promising examples of folks like the Unreasonable Institute who are on the right track with some of their work. The challenge is in part that (IMHO) I just think we have way too many conferences and promotional activities when (as you rightly observe) we need to just tuck our heads down and focus more on simply organizing better, more effective local (glocal...since they should be executed with a sense of our global context) venture funds to do deep, longer term work with promising SEs...and then maybe in 5 years all meet somewhere to compare notes from our having used our funding to build capacity for SEs to execute on their ideas. With all respect to those of us working the global circuits of the good and the great, I'm afraid we've kind of suffered from the "TEDification" of the world in that we seem to be confusing a good panel debate/discussion or single stand-up presentation with actually doing something. This may be especially true of some of the Impact Investing events where there is a lot of money in the room, but much of it is on the sidelines waiting for the perfect investment that meets each and every criteria.
Thus my conclusion: Less talk; more execution.
The full talk should be up on KQED in the next week or so and will give you the full context for my "Ruminations on SE".
Point 1: the discussion of defining SE has gone on too long. There is no single definition, but rather an array of practices linked by some core concepts, but Yunni's def of SE would not include Ben Cohen or other for-profit SEs, so let's just say there are a variety and leave it at that. SE is a means to an end, not the end itself, so discussions regarding how many SEs can dance on the head of a pin don't actually move execution forward. If you choose to use this extra time to discuss CS, that is, of course, your decision! :)
1) Jed: "It's time to stop talking about social entrepreneurship." ... so shall we continue the conversation about Charlie Sheen instead?
2) Jed: "There are too many great ideas" ... care to name a few that are superflous, Jed?
3) Jed: "... and not enough effective execution." ... so do you prefer the very effective execution the mediocre and bad ideas that we have today? .… Effective execution of mediocre ideas is simply the perpetuation of mediocrity.
4) Jed: "The pressure from funders and social investors to be innovative results mostly in rebranding old ideas. " .... Aha ... maybe if we had a few more great ideas .… see #1 above....
5) Jed: "Most social business strategies are incremental improvements, not blinding game changers." ... Good thinking Jed ... true.... but the real game changers the insanely great ideas ... like what Apple puts forth ... and Google ... and Muhammad Yunus. They are ...well ... game changers.... they have great ideas ... combined with great social entrepreneurship. We need to continue celebrating them and so that others are inspired to follow in their footsteps.