This recent report summarizes a recent survey of 740 organizations on the current state of the SE field in the US. This work was prepared by the Social Enterprise Alliance, in partnership with Community Wealth Ventures and Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship. REDF funded the survey. Some interesting findings include: Top …

Do you try to be perfect? Or do you try to be your best? If you think about it, there is a vast difference between being perfect and being your best. Perfect infers being faultless or flawless – while best infers being finest or greatest. It took me a long time to shift my thinking …

many firms today are trying to introduce and use the role of sponsor on projects. Executed well, this role can contribute hugely to making a project a success in delivery terms and especially the outcomes that projects are intended to deliver. The challenge is: To deliver the role they need to be fairly senior people …

This is a guest post from Steven R Roberts Non-Profit Boards, charities, foundations must fight to establish a brand and a following. Therefore they must be led boldly or their missions will have little chance of being fulfilled. After chairing several non-profit boards, and being on a couple of for-profit boards, in the past twenty-five …

In the nonprofit sector there are two types of “Advisory” groups: those that advise, and those that don’t. In my experience, Advisory Boards are created for just about any reason you can think of; but very often – in the non-profit sector, the term is a euphemism for a group of major donors who have …

I’d like to continue the theme from Janae’s post last week on gratitude, to explore more applications at work and highlight three ways it works. Focusing on What you Have For starters, gratitude gets your minds off of all the things that worry you, annoy you, or challenge you. Instead, when you focus your attention …

An article in The Wall Street Journal* suggested that while team building exercises may be fun (for some people), they really don’t do much to solve workplace issues. For example, sales executive Paul Garvey claimed that the most insightful team-building exercise he ever participated in involved paintball, which in no way helped to resolve the …

Recent calls by the governance advisory community for the individual voting record of each director to be disclosed to shareholders are missing an important aspect of boardroom dynamics – joint and several liability.

Three ways to understand yourself in systems Events, Patterns, and, Structure There are three ways to think about yourself and your behavior in complex systems. To increase your effectiveness as a leader, it is useful to understand all three and how they interconnect. You can understand yourself in systems through the lens of Events, through …

“I’m blessed – thanks!” This is how the finance guy of a local car dealer shared with us in response to the question that we are all asked daily, “how are you?” His response not only made us feel good, we ended up having a very meaningful conversation during our 15 minutes together. Even though …