Well That Sucked
I just wrote a longish post on the plane to SF this morning, hit publish, and lost everything.
Normally WordPress autosaves the post when an error happens but it did not this time.
So I’m not going to have time to rewrite that post today.
So maybe we can talk about the topic instead.
I wrote about the best legal/tax structure for social entrepreneurs. I am seeing more and more social entrepreneurs adopt the for profit corporation for their social enterprise. With innovations like the B Corporation for aligning interests, and with more investors understanding that financial returns and social impact are not mutually exclusive, it seems like this may be the better structure for social enterprises that can create a sustainable business model.
Comments (Archived):
I start all of my writing in a google doc. What happened to you is among some of the reasons.
I do too, and I wished there was a plugin or a direct way to then push it to WordPress. As is, I cut and paste it when done. Need Publish As —> Wordpres / Tumblr / etc..
Wondering if the remnants of the post are in a cache somewhere on your laptop.
No, it’s in the ether and in Fred’s brain.
Hah! Well let’s just hope that la Mexican Federal Policia never have any reason to forensically examine your laptop.
Do you write straight on the WP editor? I don’t do that because I don’t even think they have a continuous auto-save like Google Docs has.I write my posts on Google Docs now (great for quickly hyperlinking too), and if offline, straight into the Text editor of the smartphone.
I do the same on EvernoteI find WP editor on my ipad is slightly temperamental anyway
I actually use medium to write most things these days…visually a better editor, and by far the fastest autosave, under a second.
Yup. What WordPress needs is a straight online editor/composer like Medium or Google Docs, then you just hit Publish. That’s a bit how Squarespace and Wix work.
Good point. Ease of use is part of why I use squarespace, worth a few extra $.
Cliche Probe:”ORGANIC CAPITALISM” ? ? ?
On that subject, there’s a fascinating interview that Om Malik conducted with Brunello Cucinelli, the CEO of a famous cashmere company in Italy.”We need a new form of capitalism, a contemporary form of capitalism. I would like to add “humanistic” to that equation.”https://medium.com/backchan…
I am so glad you used the term “humanistic”, as I wrote an article “Humanistic Corporate Governance” (see https://www.linkedin.com/pu… and was about to independently post a comment to say that capital stockholders (as distinct from secondary market shareholders) should set the tone for the issuer with which they have a direct investment relationship. That tone should be embodied by the company’s board of directors that govern the company’s behaviour.Thereby, social benefits objectives could be realized without having B-Corp status. However, this might require the issuance of special classes of shares with distinct shareholder rights. Specifically, capital stockholders should have more say in company leaders’ choices in exchange for sacrificing their right to sell their capital stock (ensuring commitment). Similarly, corporate directors should be allowed to hold only non-equity voting shares that can be sold (analogous to transferrable club membership) in order to preserve objectivity over strategic priorities (it’s not necessarily always about maximizing shareholders’ pecuniary value). In other words, let society decide what it wants from its corporations.I am now working closely with equity crowdfunding initiatives in Toronto, where I see potential for major shifts in influences over corporate behaviour (see my recent article “Top 5 Equity Crowdfunding Trust Barriers” at https://www.linkedin.com/pu….
Thanks Alex. Brunello used that word, not me.
We’ve thought a bit about equity crowdfunding, but not sure we know enough about it or the legal ramifications/options to make an informed decision. My co-founder actually lives in Toronto. FYI I clicked both links and just ended up being auto forwarded to the Pulse landing page; couldn’t access the specific article. Maybe it’s user error..
Try these links Drew:https://www.linkedin.com/pu…https://www.linkedin.com/pu…
I haven’t blogged in ages, but when I do take notes, I use Evernote; best of both worlds in that it auto-saves on my laptop and syncs to my phone. Protected whether online or not.Losing what you’ve written is one of the most frustrating tech situations. Ugh.
Totally non elegant but effective way to make a quick and dirty copy of your screen (under Mac OSX) is to do this in the terminal:while; sleep 30; doscreencapture `date “+%Y-%m-%dat%H-%M-%S-%Z”`.jpgdonedate “+%Y-%m-%dat%H-%M-%S-%Z” merely creates a unique file name. You don’t have to do that you can just overwrite the existing file like this obviously.Will create a screen capture every 30 seconds (change the 30 as you see fit).If you just want to do a single capture from the terminal you can just do this:screencapture myscreen.jpgBy keeping the terminal window open you can just hit the uparrow key and makea new capture with the above.Of course as others suggested you can also write in textedit or word and save but that is more steps.See how much utility you can get from knowing a little basic unix?
Social entrepreneurship may well turn out to be a phase in the history of entrepreneurship. In the future it may become with education a normal part of the decisionmaking to decide how to share value with the alternative stakeholders including non-market players (NGOs, government, etc.). So really social entrepreneurship will become just entrepreneurship and it is therefore no surprise about the for profit selection.
WordPress sent out some email this am that they were updating the system and when I tried to do it they locked me out completely so maybe they are all messed up this week.
wordpress 4.2 was recently announced by Matt Mullenweg on May 11th.
Excellent subject…and lots to dig into about given recent Etsy IPO about not just “social entrepreneurs” but mission-driven entrepreneurs of all kinds! I say worth re-writing full commentary at some point in near future; we here at SJF Ventures would certainly appreciate hearing your viewpoint.
Have had that happen too…..On the B Corp. I am invested in one. Nextspace.us. It doesn’t affect the business decisions, but it does affect the culture.Yesterday, I was at a lunch and heard the CEO of Fieldglass talk about how he ran his company prior to being bought out. He said something that every CEO should adhere to-as a CEO you are the servant to each employee-they don’t exist to serve you. Very very interesting to listen to him.If he were to do another venture, I’d back him sight unseen.
Hooray for B Corps. Bummer re the crash. But you should change the post title to something along those lines.
.I have had the same thing happen to me recently. There is something going on with WordPress.What I did find out is that even when my draft disappears, it is still in the list of posts — on your dashboard, third down “posts” and look at “all posts”.Every time I have had this problem, it has been there though some times it is not as complete having saved an earlier draft.Hope this helps.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
Sorry to hear that Fred. Looking forward to an even better post.If anyone is looking to learn more about B-corps my good friend Kyle Westaway has been teaching a class at Harvard on Social Entrepreneurship and also wrote a book called Profit & Purpose. Really amazing resources for any founder looking to go down that path.http://profit-purpose.com/http://kylewestaway.com/
To me this is a logical extension of technological progress, where more users drove lower prices which drove more users… in a B Corp, you theoretically can absorb lower margins, which drives more users, etc.
As relates to edtech, watch how AltSchool unfolds. A-list VC money and Google Engineers in a B-corp positioned to develop services, some of which will likely be easily adopted by the public systems. It’s fascinating petrie dish to watch on many levels. The Gates Foundation just made a 52M investment in a German biotech to ensure the results of essential R&D can get to people where markets won’t go themselves. This is an interesting time. Friction is leaving the system. Will equity (no pun intended) follow?
.Your comment about “friction is leaving the system” is a very important comment.One could say that is the whole promise of the Internet. Reducing the friction of life.Well played.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
Alt school don’t sound like they want to give anything they create away for social good . They want to license what they create.
I’m sure you’re right. I’m interested to see how/when/on what terms their services begin to roll out beyond the private school incubator. About 7 years ago I was working with a really wonderful group of educators, talking with the Google Apps team about customizing the newly minted App Suite for Educators as a more integrated service. The conversation didn’t go anywhere for all the reasons you can imagine. Alt School is doing small group, project- and problem-based learning, re-introducing the wonderful and hard to measure model of self-directed learning and the portfolio, a framework and outcome that never gets enough seat time in a public classroom. And next gen learning is requiring this now more and more. Education has moved beyond the textbook and is rapidly doing the same with the value proposition SIS systems offer – much of what Alt School is doing appears to be personalized learning as a revisioning of the intersection between backoffice and the classroom.
I’m amazed at the demand for bottom up project based learning tools. My team and I have developed one specific for business / financial education, and we get asked often if it can be used for creative type projects (which it can ). We have learned some really interesting things about PBL – first, it doesn’t need to be gamed, it just doesn’t fit, as the class is up and moving, the class in itself is already gamed. PBL is the genesis of the “whole child” learning model, which is well developed as a method of teaching in international school networks . Technology is almost non existant (as yet ) in this world. It makes it really exciting to see the potential of a whole new generation of tools being scripted that serves teacher and student and bridges into the real world. We are exhibiting at Edsurge’s Teacher Tech Summit in Boston on 13 June, if you know of any teachers in the area please let them know , it is a free event. Where Alt may well end up being a closed system licensable at very high cost, imagine the possibilities of an open source model of tech tools to support a PBL / whole child school
I’m very happy to see this continued progress to normalize purpose driven companies into the legal and financial infrastructure. There are so many of us out there that want to impact the world in a positive and financially sustainable way, and more and more we have strong business ground to stand on.FOR NEW YORKERS: My cofounder Glenda and I have been running a Social Good For Profit meetup in NYC for 3 years now. Our next meetup is May 26th. We meet and discuss issues like this every month and bring in social good for profit companies to tell their stories. Register here: http://www.meetup.com/socia…@fred – would love to have you come speak at a future meetup!
Google changed users habits, they are addicted to getting things for free. In software, ultimately everyone is doing social venture till they don’t start getting revenue.
Agreed. Free is the social model .
Free doesn’t mean something is social. Providing a social good, usually with positive externalities, is what makes you a social venture.Google is not a social venture by any stretch of the imagination — in fact, I’d argue that far from their old “don’t be evil” mantra of the early years, Google is one of the most unsocial and aggressive companies on the planet. And, only part of what they offer is “free”. They charge plenty for things that cross-sudsidize free, and what you get comes with a lot of strings attached.Price and social are not connected in any way, unless you are providing free food and shelter to those that can’t afford to buy it.
Be cool to hear more about how investors see the relationship between B Corp and venture risk….e.g. the ello thing seemed cool (product aside, which I have some doubts about) but it doesn’t seem to add up as a decision that will be sustainable long term (though, it depends on how one defines social good and harm, in the case of social platforms mostly around data).
has ello changed their product yet?
Sort of, I haven’t dug in but they did a full redesign recently… http://observer.com/2015/04… TBD as to whether it makes a huge difference or not, at this point it’s pretty safe to say that the massive signups weren’t due to an initially amazing product.
Right. They got signups based on mission/values. But just because someone believes there should be an ad free social network, “using” one for the years it would take to get to FB scale while all their friends are elsewhere is a completely different question.
Totally agreed.
maybe it was a sign from a higher power suggesting that b-corps actually suck.as i like to say, the B stands for bad.don’t believe me. instead, research for yourself the criteria it takes to become a B corp, and then ask yourself if these criteria really do benefit the world. if you can find science that says, yes, these criteria are beneficial.i don’t think you’ll find a scientifically valid view that finds b-corp criteria to be valid. instead, what you’ll find is that b-corp founders are lobbying for lower tax rates: http://www.csmonitor.com/Bu…i’m a fan of lower taxes, but i hope people will be clear on the real agenda (money).
man you are so far off on this one.
well, since you’ve provided all the facts, i guess that settles it then! 🙂
We are a C-Corporation. We have strong component so we looked in the B-Corporation idea. However, when we considered fundraising we felt that simplicity and familiarity from an investor’s point of view made more sense. As B-Corporation become more common they are probably a better long term fit, but “when in Rome is best to do as the Romans” and stick to what they know and understand.
Same for us. I created a C-corp before I ever heard of a B-Corp. Learned about it after doing a convertible note and at that point my attorney thought it was a hassle and not worth pursuing. He also brought up concerns about future acquisitions — buying or selling — given that it’s fairly new and the implications aren’t clear yet. I’m curious to see where this goes.
I created mine before I knew what a B-Corp was too.. 2012. Plan on switching to a b-corp at some point once we have a bit more of a runway in front of us and have proven our product out a bit.
Auto-save is a brutal blindspot in WordPress – I’ve burned myself many times.
Me too. I hate it when that happens. Literally.
For profit model is scaleable . Nfp model is not. Publicly listed companies offer more transparency than Nfps . An Nfp model does not guarantee the organisation is going to operate efficiently . If there was a simplified method for public like disclosures , that may work . As a startup founder , this topic gets up my goat , having observed many nfps rolling in $$ but unable to transition to the 21st century , many operating fiefdoms that just wouldn’t stand up if they had to report their financials and activities like a listed entity would . The choice to be social in focus is optional, the need to be efficient and transparent should not.
I think the only way to do social innovation is for profit. Being self-sustaining rather than dependent on handouts and the public purse is the only way to ensure long-term viability and control of your social philosophy and charter. I came across this rather more socialist-leaning screed the other day: http://www.socialinnovation… .This article suggests that disruption and social innovation are incompatible, and that you can only deliver social goods work by engaging with political institutions. To my mind, they couldn’t be more wrong: engaging with the existing political infrastructure is a sure way to slow down progress, lose control of your mission, and deliver benefits that are imagined rather than things people really want and need. Not only is disruptive innovation the best way to achieve social goals, it’s the best way to create lasting change that people are willing to pay for. But, I’m slightly biased in that regard.
WordPress picked the wrong post to fuck up on. Grrrr….
I have a small blogging app, Desk, that would be a great desktop publishing solution when not connected… and would save your content from disappearing on you. Love to send you a copy…!
I know bcorps and the whole social enterprise thing is fashionable these days though frankly as a nonprofit dude there’s a bunch of bcorp structural challenges I’ve never understood:- When push comes to shove what’s your primary goal? It’s all fine and dandy to pursue both purpose and profit when the goings good but what’s the priority when it’s late in the fiscal year and your behind on your benchmarks? Do you focus your teams time on doing good or ensuring that your investors get their promised return?- Can anyone name a successful bcorp that’s both A) made a ton of money and B) really made a difference? And no I don’t count Tom’s shoes: https://www.google.com/webh…-How many social enterprises are just monetizing the “omg social enterprise shiny new object” craze? I enjoy popping into the HUBs “social enterprise” incubators though really most of the successful social enterprises I’ve seen fall into two buckets 1) the Tom’s shoes use doing good as marketing to sell more product and 2) the sell education / incubation / other services to do gooders via things like the HUB-Call me old fashioned, but isn’t the point of regular plain vanilla business a “social” enterprise? Isn’t that the whole idea of free exchange for mutual benefit? What’s wrong with producing something someone wants and making a profit off that?-So lastly I think it’s nice idea that you could save the world while simultaneously making a billion bucks and sipping your organic fair trade coffee on the way to yogalates where you achieve oh so much personal fulfillment though I just don’t see how that’s living in the real world that involves tradeoffs.Anyway feel free to take all of the above with a grain of salt since I served as the director of an education nonprofit for a few years back in LA which was definitely NOT a shiny new sexy social enterprise! (Actually that’s how I heard about this blog. A friend passed along your talk about STEM volunteering at ye olde TechCrunch Disrupt.)Hey seems I’m a minority in this crowd though so I’m willing to be convinced with hard reputable numbers quantifying both profit and impact of bcorps.Cheers,PatrickPS There’s NOTHING that prevents a nonprofit from earning revenue and not just getting donations. There’s also NOTHING that prevents a nonprofit from earning a profit. They just have to reinvest that bakc into their mission rather than give it to shareholders.
Your friends are always here to help you out. 😉
When the frustration fades, I do hope you rewrite the post. I’m itching to see your take on socially conscious business.Out here in Seattle, the Apex Law Group does quite a good business incorporating Washington Social Purpose Corporations, and they blog occasionally on the topic. See http://apexlg.com/?page_id=680 and http://apexlg.com/?p=1269And I write and speak about the bigger ideas of conscious companies, http://lunarmobiscuit.com/t… and http://lunarmobiscuit.com/p… as do others http://lunarmobiscuit.com/i…
Washington State has a great thing called a Social Purpose Corporations. I wrote a blog post about SPCs here: http://www.geekwire.com/201…
Hello Fred, congratulations for your work.I’ve sent you a tweet recommending Blogo for your writing workflow, so you will avoid any future problems regarding offline mode and data loss.I want to give you a license as a gift. You’ve been so helpful to the community, this is the simplest way to say thank you.Let me know if I can be of any help 🙂
saw it. thanks
But isn’t that what Google Docs does?
Charlie–define a social enterprise please.Very interested to understand this in detail.
Seems that with your knowledge you could both earn a nice living helping others (companies) do what you do (that they don’t know about) that would extend way beyond what you are able to achieve running the bread company. It’s a nascent field you should consider taking advantage of that if you can. Maybe not though. Being a consultant means you are not building any equity and always looking for the next client. Not building equity means more than what it appears on the surface. It means you will tend to not have the forced savings of building equity.
.There is a huge gap between folks who say they are in favor of good things and those who actually do it.You, Charlie Chrystle, are a doer and for that I applaud you — lightly as I am all alone with my Lab, it is raining and I don’t want her to think I am insane. I prize her opinion of me.Well played!You are perfectly right — all, ALL, of us are offenders. Some just haven’t been caught yet.If I lived in Lancaster, Penn — perish the thought — I would come buy your bread because it has “sand” in it. Do you know what it means when someone in Texas says you have “sand” in you?Trust me, it is a very high compliment.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
I thought the main benefit of B Corp was more around what the Board of Directors is aligned with – the social ‘good’ vs. purely economic?Mind you I’d hope to have BODs who realize they are intrinsically and thinking for short-term profits will harm the company’s long-term financials and survivability.
Charlie, would love to have you come speak at our Social Good For Profit meetup: http://www.meetup.com/socia…Ping me at mdgeer at gmail and I’ll connect you with Glenda, who is running the events these days.
Charlie – thanks for sharing. Wish I had known about your bread company when I lived in Philly! Love the fact that you’re hiring ex-offenders. Always wanted to set up a company doing that… was always going to be someday after I “made” it elsewhere…I am helping a family member set up a company providing therapy and other resources for autism, and doing it as a B Corp sounds appealing. I’d love to hear about your experience.Seems to me a major non-profit advantage you forego is the tax status, esp if real estate (& real estate taxes) are a big part of your business model.I’m very curious about this statement you made:”It’s better to partner with an existing nonprofit and get grants and donations run through them (after an admin fee). Or start your own after the fact, but don’t develop that dependency.”I didn’t know that was allowed. Very applicable in this case since we already have a non-profit autism foundation that would make a natural partner. But I haven’t found any sources that address the degree to which you can mingle nonprofit and for profit entities and remain kosher. Do you have insight into where to draw that line?Thanks
I am w JLM – the line in front of the door marked Doing is never very long.But Charlie will always be in it.Super cool.
I’m actually surprised you are not guest posting about this.You’re probably the resident expert, and have done this multiple times.You should.
Much respect to you and your team for walking the talk.We’re signing up to Benioff’s 1-1-1 pledge and B-corp is a few levels more evolved in terms of social responsibility.I discovered something wonderful the other day. The Prince’s Trust store is a social enterprise that backs young entrepreneurs to make and sell their crafts. Some of those young entrepreneurs may have been in juvenile detention centers for misdemeanors.At the moment the Prince’s Trust Store set-up has no ability to take orders and distribute the orders; every order and sale happens through their single physical store which is based in the heart of the financial district.So I suggested they go and look at Etsy as an example / potential strategic partner.
Check out the Social Enterprise Alliance:https://www.se-alliance.org/
They probably merge on the other side of the circle 🙂
Wow. Respect re. giving a second chance to ex-offenders.
Thanks.Interesting on a bunch of levels.From a pure business level this is only possible in a food biz if manufacturing is in a wage depressed region.Products sell for whatever the brand demands and the market embraces, geography mostly aside in the NE.Living wage where you are and NY for example are obviously not the same and to make it so makes margin an issue.Thought provoking…
We also actively recruit ex-offenders (we’re all ex-offenders, just some of us got caught), because they have more difficulty finding employment and a lot end up back in jail.I applaud that. (Really). Btw, some ex offenses are considered more palatable than others as you know depending on the community you grew up in or surrounded yourself with.Anyway, makes me wonder why a private foundation or for profit corporation doesn’t come up with some kind of insurance program to take some of the risk out of using ex offenders.Seems like what you are doing is ripe for some national publicity which would be great for your brand. You should work that angel if you are already not doing so.
Nice. We became a member of SEA but didn’t know about SVN until now. I am challenged by success metrics that are tied to both revenue and impact and became a member of SEA in hopes they could help with this, however it’s a very hands off organization from what I can tell thus far (about 6 months a member) The measurement piece must coincide with long-term growth strategy of course, and to date, the best information I have found has been via Stanford’s Impact Hub, but most written early 2004. Any other links to rev+impact measurement would be helpful.
will do.
I am heartened by the social impact trend. In Chicago, we have an incubator, TheImpactEngine.com that does a good job with this. ReliefWatch.com is a really cool company that is helping to solve the ebola crisis. At the same time, oil companies are social enterprises too. Any company that can generate a profit, and make our lives more efficient and better is a social enterprise. B Corps to me are all about the culture. At the same time, every enterprise ought to adopt that culture.
Not going to disagree with you but you should always assume that anyone has the potential to cook the books (really). Similar to a physician in theory shouldn’t have to be “more careful” when they know someone has aids vs. not. They should always assume the worst. (Exception might be Ebola).Being involved in small business for the amount of years that I have been I can tell you that the person who does the fraud is never the person who you think would do the fraud (really).
Would your filters exclude, say, these kinds of ex-offenders? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/…Also, bear in mind that an ex-con who did time for drug possession likely also committed violent crimes, but plea bargained down to the possession charge.
I work on these, which are a similar concept applied to environmental outcomes http://finance.yahoo.com/ne… – honestly, the social story you tell sounds more satisfying and with more tangible outcomes 🙂
shelf stable sounds like dream to me.moving from 7 to 20 to 60 days (sku dependent) though is a reality that will see the light of day soon.that’s a huge game changer not because it let’s you go further within standard distribution but it let’s you disrupt it.
If I lived in Lancaster, Penn — perish the thoughtTrust me, it is a very high compliment.Great that you complemented him after telling him how distonic you find his community.
.Hey, LE, I like making up words as much as the next guy, but — “dystonic”?Nothing wrong with Lancaster; it just isn’t in Texas.Call me when Charlie starts making tortillas.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
One of the advantages of attending a top school is that you can do things like that. Kind of like if you went to VMI and served in the military you don’t have to be self conscious if you forgot a small part of how to clean a gun. As long as you can fire it if you get my point.Lancaster isn’t “Texas” (it’s a city) but besides that Lancaster is closer to NYC than Austin is.New Jersey otoh truly sucks as anyone who has to pay 9% state income tax will tell you as well as high property taxes.Texas has no personal income tax which is great. That said it does have that border problem.
You need the rain. Good for zoysia grass.
siding with JLM in this beef; making up words is cause for points deduction and JLM seized the opportunity for comedic relief. well played indeed….
I tried making tortillas, I failed.
.Texas is really two states — south of San Antone is part of Mexico, long may it live. North of San Antone is part of the US.We love Mexicans — not the murderers, rapists and kidnappers the Obama administration is turning loose on our streets.They are a joyful people — messy, but very joyful.They have strong religious beliefs, strong families, a strong work ethic, no knowledge of birth control and know how to party.They invented Mexican food and when that wasn’t good enough, they invented TexMex which was a decided improvement.They make damn good beer which is something people forget about Mexico. They also make excellent tequila.I want Mexico (and Canada) to become parts of the US and am willing to give them Arizona and North Dakota as deal sweeteners. No strings attached.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
.I am bored tonight, so I will tell you a tale.When you have machine guns — fifty caliber — you are not supposed to disassemble them below a certain level. The armorer is the only one in the unit who is supposed to disassemble the gun below that level.It is hard to put back together correctly and then you have to “adjust the head space and timing”. It is delicate to do and if you screw it up, the gun won’t fire which can be very awkward.Of course, the soldiers never follow the rules wanting to be the master of their own fates and machine guns.I used to get a spare part — one of the parts of which there was only one in a fifty cal MG — and when the soldiers were not watching, I would put it on the wool blanket they had laid out to disassemble the gun on.When they finished, I would wander over and ask them — “WTF is this?” pointing at the “spare” part.Of course, everyone would shit their pants because when a fifty is put together wrong it has a decided propensity to blow up when operated.I had a lot of fun doing this but not until I was a Captain and could get away with it.We were short on fun in those days.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
More important than the Mexicans in Texas, is what will happen to our country potentially with Deblasio on road trips to push his liberal agenda. [1]We will return to the days of the 70% top tax rate. [2] That’s plus the NJ 9% top rate. That will lead to more white collar crime as people do all sorts of things to dodge taxes.[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015…[2] Article from 1981: http://www.nytimes.com/1981…
Jonathan Winters – “I Love Canada, one day I hope we take you…..peaceably.’The poster boy for self immolating grandiosity in the vocabularic arts is Canadian – Lord Conrad Black: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…Best line in his Wiki profile – “He is a non-affiliated life peer, and a convicted felon in the United States for fraud.” That is just not a combo you see every day.He is entitlement on steroids. Any country that wants to claim him can have him & we will throw in a bag of pucks.
You and Lianna are in very different businesses.Each with their unique challenges and upsides although in many cases sold under the same roof.
At the same time, if the CEO builds a culture of trust with employees, all decisions are made with the interest of profit. Way too late but would have been interesting to see what the auto industry would have looked like with this attitude. Unions might not have been like a malignant tumor and actually embraced innovation-management might have made better decisions and Detroit wouldn’t be the mess it is.
I don’t know…doesn’t that feel like a naive statement to you? Not trolling, genuine question. I am not an expert on the auto industry & suspect you know lots more about it being in Chicago for decades, but my understanding of auto industry is that union existence in part is due to brutal working conditions and low pay.I mean, Ford certainly innovated the assembly line (some would say created) but it’s hard to argue that he didn’t also enforce brutal working conditions and low pay while reaping massive profits that looked pretty good if you didn’t work in a factory or knew someone who did. Of course, you could argue they were ultimately unsustainable so maybe your point about interest of profit depends a bit on how far out one is looking…
I think there are areas where it can be different. For example employees might value 40 hour work weeks (as opposed to 50-60) much more highly than the additional profits they’d gain by working longer and prefer that the company hire more workers to cover the time or that the factory just produce less widgets. Investors or owners that are not actually assembling widgets aren’t facing a trade off against their free time.
Let’s look at this logically and ignore the stupid decisions management made. (ignoring the Japanese, missing the market for small cars, fighting with import quotas that the Japanese exploited to their gain)1. Assembly line conditions weren’t brutal when the auto companies went bust. In the late 90s and 2000’s, it was very different than early 1900’s. An aside, the workers that got those jobs in the early 1900s were happy to get them.2. Unions stepped in the way of modernizing factories. It would have cost jobs. That hurt product quality, and increased costs. Big Auto had to pay people NOT to work.3. Unions created an adversarial relationship with management to further their own powerbase with union members. It did them zero good to have a good trusting relationship with management like the Japanese unions did with Japanese auto companies. Auto Management responded with get tough tactics of its own to make the relationship even worse.If management would have created a trusting relationship earlier (it’s the CEO responsibility), it might have averted disaster.Of course, social change in the 1930s-1950s caused a lot of the unionization of the American workforce. Unions weren’t 100% responsible for the demise of the US auto industry, but they had a very big hand in making it go bankrupt.
That’s a good point, I hadn’t thought about the comparison to Japanese mgmt approach. Definitely agree re: modernization, and that blockage is still happening today in auto and other industries.Do you think that ownership stake esp at public co level might be beneficial for that sort of scenario? It seems like even culture of trust with a good CEO is hard to do without some profit shared….the reason I say this is that in my experience in a culture of trust there’s usually implied ownership of the community, the way things are done, etc… but that is almost always de-prioritized when you start talking about money.
no margin, no mission.
:/ I’d love to see you soon and show you my bread
.If you were in Austin, I could take you to a place where the tortillas are made as you stand there — automated by hand.You get your tortilla, they throw it on the grill, spoon the eggs onto it and then add chorizo sausage, bacon or ham — then a bit of cheese, salsa, pico de gallo, avocado and there you have it.No potato because we are watching our carbs, cher.If you want to go to burrito size, you make a Burnet Road Burrito — folding it is half of the fun.I will have one in your honor in seven hours.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
.Enough Molson in the deal and I have no problem surrendering to Canada. What do we do with Mexico?JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
Invade,Get into arguments over Tecate v Corona. Attempt to settle argument through reasonable exploration of other side’s PoV.Forget why we went there in the first place.
.Problem with invading, is we Americans would feel compelled to rebuild Veracruz and Mexico City.We need a more economical approach.JLMwww.themusingsofthebigredca…
There is this in the real estate industry: http://www.rebsea.org/I was a member of impact hub seattle prior to leaving for chile, and love the people there. The ceo is an advisor of ours. Big fan of the network in general.
“We’re forming a leasing company, a real estate company…”Lots of potential for using real estate for good, I’ve written about the socially conscious real estate agent:http://geekestateblog.com/t…Also, I’m a huge fan of Give Back Homes – http://www.givebackhomes.com
This is so inspiring. Here in South Africa there are development agendas all around, but not a lot of co-ordination or focus on profitability. (It’s complicated with the country’s sketchy history). It seems like a gap in the market, and treating NGO’s as customers is a nice angle. Food for thought.
Thanks for the reply – you inspire me! Maybe now’s the time to make the move. I’d love to hear more about your journey sometime. (And any additional advice you might have)Please let me know if you’re ever in Boston, I’ll do the same if I ever make it back to Lancaster county. (I used to love visiting the bird in hand bake shop and Lapp’s toys & furniture. And mostly just driving around seeing the countryside. Beautiful country, wonderful people.)
They make it possible for you to put gas in your car, bus, train, plane, heat your home…. make your life A LOT better than it would be otherwise.
most owners of companies work longer than a 40 hr work week.
Good story. [1] I used to love taking things apart and putting back together trying to be careful enough not lose some screw or small part which falls under a machine. (This was before the magnetic tray was “invented”).[1] I always thought that disqus should have an easy way of exporting all of comments and stories (in context to the discussion) for future reference. I actually have a wiki which I call “the stories” where I started years ago to note different things that have happened over the years that I remember.
the burden of proof is always on those who put forth the initial hypothesis, which in this case is that it the Bcorp rationale is actually beneficial. if i were to start MercCorp, and the requirement for being a MercCorp is to give kid mercury all your money, the burden would be on me to prove that this is a worthwhile endeavor.
lol…..true, though one cannot prove a negative. and the hypothesis i put forth is in response to your implicit hypothesis.the arguments that the sustainability stuff is overblown goes back to subsidies and energy density. minimum wage too, while it may have some merits, is a more nuanced issue given the relationship between minimum wage and employment rate. b corp fans like to oversipmlify things and ignore the orgnaizations stated aspiration of tax benefits, which they’ve already accomplished in philadelphia.renewable energy accounts for 11% of current global energy production. its estimated to go to 15% by 2040. that illustrates the long and hard path that awaits renewable energy. this is with all the subsidies. it’s not scalable, and no amount of b-corporation support will change the underlying physics.
source: http://www.eia.gov/tools/fa…
Yesterday when I read this post in my email I clicked over to the comments thinking, let’s see what Charlie has to say about this, suspecting that you would have the most upvoted comment. And there it was…and still is. You do not disappoint. :)See, your work is not yet done here.
modest
I will be in Austin eventually and will email you before that happens, because that tortilla sounds good! Also, bbq