With the early mantra of “The Tradition Begins”, Kevin Payne and the DC United franchise set two clear goals in 1996. First, play like a premier soccer team. Second, be a respected pillar of the community. Payne explains, “I believe that sports organizations have the ability to influence their communities and members of their communities for the good.”
If businesses are to thrive in the global marketplace, trust must be more than something that is talked about; it must be at the core of everything that is done. Organizations cannot be jungles where only the fittest survive, living in a state of battle readiness in order to meet the grueling tests of everyday corporate life.
Super-fast fiber is worth every penny when it comes to helping Vermont get ahead in smart grid. For a small state, Vermont has big smart grid plans. The Vermont Electric Power Company (VELCO) and IBM will build a statewide fiber optic and Carrier Ethernet network to provide the backbone for communications for Vermont’s utilities.
Thought-leader Alan Webber, co-founder of Fast Company details the four essential ingredients for business success: Trust, Creativity, Courage, Teamwork.
I think it’s fair to say that we live in an economy that is largely made up of intangibles.
A world of brands; relationships; causes; ideas; business models.
That said, most of the way we do our accounting–either actual accounting or informal, mental accounting–still looks at tangible assets as the coin of the realm.
In an economy of intangibles, what creates real value?
Our economy is slowly but surely heeding the signal that carbon is the new watchword. During the past few years, a steady stream of so-called “biobased” products have been making their way to retail shelves – compostable dinnerware made from corn, plant-based laundry detergents, and bamboo flooring among them. Coke and Pepsi are now competing to be first to market with a soft drink bottle derived entirely from sugarcane or other plant materials.
Organizations invest billions annually on a success curriculum known as “leadership development,” which ends up leaving so much on the table. Training and development programs almost universally focus factory-like on inputs and outputs — absorb curriculum, check a box; learn a skill, advance a rung; submit to assessment, fix a problem. Likewise, they leave too many people behind with an elite selection process that fast-tracks “hi-pos” and essentially discards the rest. And they leave most people cold with flavor of the month remedies, off sites, immersions, and excursions — which produce little more than a grim legacy of fat binders gathering dust on shelves.
From early 2008 through 2010 I posted a series of comments here on the Good Business International site in a column titled, “The Spirit/Money Split.”
At first I was simply interested in observing and commenting on the sensibilities of our financial, economic, and political leaders and experts based on orientations I’ve cultivated in the realms of spiritual development and emotional understanding of self and other. These domains are where I’ve spent my career. In the blog I made a habit of remarking on reports that caught my attention in business periodicals such as “Financial Times” and “Fortune.”
This former banker, and now sustainability investor and humble blogger, will not offer grand predictions for 2012. Forecasting in a world of rising uncertainty suggests a lack of understanding about uncertainty. Instead, inspired by my holiday reading, Debt: The First 5000 Years, by anthropologist David Graeber, I will take up the debate about the debt, and offer an uncomfortable third view: jubilee (in some form) is inevitable.
Promoting ideas has been a principal focus of my work for the past six years, beginning with my work as Executive Director of FLOW and continuing today with Being Human, Conscious Capitalism, and Working for Good among others.
Ideas are powerful. Napoleon Hill noted that “Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.” John F. Kennedy proclaimed, “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.” Most everything constructed or created by human beings begins with an idea. As the Buddha observed, “Mind is the forerunner of all things.”
by Capital Institute President John Fullerton – A $20 trillion “externality” appears to present civilization with its BIG CHOICE: economic destruction or ecological destruction, both with chilling global security implications. Here’s why, along with a practical and more hopeful alternative to “Sophie’s Choice.”
Like a lot of other people, I find our government’s response to the employment crisis totally inadequate, especially when compared with our response to the banking crisis. The latter may have been reasonable and proportionate; the former simply can’t be characterized that way.
I started my gig in the social entrepreneur space about five years ago after an experienced venture capitalist and board member of a couple social entrepreneur groups rather forcefully insisted to me in a meeting that the digital media project I was incubating in my small nonprofit organization would be far better served as a for-profit social enterprise. Yours is a great, big idea, he told me, and you will need a good amount of capital to do it right. You will find that capital much easier to come by as a social enterprise, he stated confidently.
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