Take the occupiers out to tea

I clearly remember a day in high school that has proven to be a major formative moment for me (and no, it’s not THAT day, thank you very much). I had a social studies teacher whose name is lost to my aging memory who went off on a riff about how what we see as a political spectrum with opposite ends is actually more of a circle (and if you Google political spectrum as circle, you’ll quickly find a bunch of geeky posts that illustrate this – to any number of individual points). My teacher’s point (what was his name?) was simply that we are more alike than different. I was reminded of this when I saw the lead item in today’s New York Times reporting on the universal disappointment with the lack of results from the vaunted super committee “A Failure Is Absorbed With Disgust and Fear, but Little Surprise” NYT 11/21/11 by Michael Cooper.

Cooper does a great job of bouncing back and forth from liberal to conservative, and showing how both sides are disgusted. And it hit me that this is not just a watershed moment for our country, but a defining moment for social entrepreneurship. We (social entrepreneurs) say that the process of creating value is not in itself flawed. It is the application of that value that has brought us to this precarious moment. The infamous notion that the sole purpose of business is to maximize profit to shareholders is what leads us astray. And that’s why we need to take the occupiers out to tea.

We have two major social movements going on right now in the good old US of A. On the left, we have the occupiers – not just of Wall Street, but Baltimore and Oakland and DC and dozens of other cities. And they’re saying that their sick and tired of the system, it’s broken and needs to be fixed. And then we have the tea party movement - A bit older (in more ways than one) and WAY down on the opposite end of the spectrum. In fact, a steel cage match between an occupier and a tea partier would probably sell out our local football stadium quicker than a Ravens-Steelers Super Bowl game. And what is the tea party saying? That the system is broken, they’re sick and tired, and things need to change. Oh wait, that’s what the….. oh my (what was his name?).

So, let’s do some quick math. Depending on the poll you read, somewhere between 15 and 20% of the voting public views itself as sympathetic to the Tea Party Agenda. A similar percentage (maybe more, maybe less) seems to identify with the occupiers. Put them together and you’ve got a sizable force that may in fact NOT be that ideologically separate. Cooper’s piece in The Times reports that “a record 84 percent of Americans said they disapproved of the way Congress was handling its job in the most recent New York Times/CBS News poll last month.”

Now, before you start ranting about how these two groups are SO different, and whichever side you support is the correct one, and the other guy is just a wacko (as the tea party recently did on it’s website), just stop for a second and think about one thing. What if we stopped screaming at each other long enough to compare notes? What about focusing on ways forward, rather than furthering the space in the divide? What if what feels like extremes is actually the new middle? What if we took the occupiers out to tea?


And yes, I am aware that the notion that there are similarities between the two movements is not unique to my feeble mind. Not just Cooper's piece today, but the polar opposite voice of conservatism The Wall Street Journal also recently published a similar piece (Populist Movements Rooted in Same Soil, WSJ 11/15/11 by Gerald F. Seib) Come to think of it, the Times and the Journal making the same argument may be the only support this notion needs.


But to move forward, we need an answer, not just more questions. And that answer, my friends, is Social Enterprise.

The bipolar disorder in Social Enterprise

This past week, I had the privilege of attending two of the leading conferences in the field of Social Enterprise – The Social Enterprise Alliance’s summit in Chicago, and the Satter conference on Social Entrepreneurship hosted by the Stern School at NYU. You would expect (as did I) that I would be filled with the harmonious reverberations of brilliant new earned income models, great ideas for public policies that move the social order forward, and brilliant social change theories that get to the root cause of deeply entrenched human challenges. Instead, I was left with the distinct conclusion that this movement is bipolar.

In six years of working intensely with a wide range of social entrepreneurs (in well over 100 different organizations), I’ve seen a distinct pattern. The vast majority of the folks leading the charge on the ground come to this work from non-profit or social work perspectives. Now, that certainly makes sense at many levels. You need to know community organizing. You need to understand the delicate nuances of managing a broad array of stakeholders. You need to understand how to deliver services to folk who may not realize they need you, and who are usually not the ones paying for what you deliver. Those skills and experiences are typically found in the training grounds of social work and community development. But if we really want to move toward a social benefit industry where a market based entity is used to drive a social mission, then the basics of sales, profit and loss, opportunity analysis and product development are just as important. And those classes are taught on the other side of campus in the business schools. And these more (dare I say) “commercially” oriented skills are the most lacking – at least in the unscientific sample that has come past my desk. The typical social entrepreneur is extremely passionate about the needs of his or her population, understands how their folks think and is able to meet their needs. But ask them about business models, value chains, cash flow, or any number of b-school basics and they are quickly treading water. Love ‘em all, had a great time in The Windy City, but oy! – do we ever need less social and more entrepreneur.

Jump on a plane to the Big Apple, and I’m dropped down into the middle of the leading thinkers in this field (and I’m talking Alex Nichols from Skoll, Paul Light from NYU, Tom Lumpkin from Syracuse just to drop a few names). And here’s where the bipolar disorder hits me right in the head - Just about all of these folks are from business schools. Now just like the practitioners, that can be explained. B-schools are where most of the social – E courses are being taught (and feel free to go on a rant about why the b-schools are suddenly concerned about social obligations. Go ahead. I’ll wait……………………. – OK, feel better now?) See, earned income is huge. And impact investing absolutely needs to happen. But the first step in any venture is figuring out if your big idea can actually work. And in social enterprise, that is a complex question that deals not only with how you fund the venture, but also with how you know that your social intervention will get to the root issues that cause the disparity you are trying to fix. And let’s not forget the process for measuring if it actually makes a difference over time rather than just putting a band aid on the problem. So now, we’re right back in the social work and public policy fields that we started in.

So here’s the rub – if the practitioners are coming from one direction, and the researchers are coming from the other, there are going to be some really nasty collisions coming up in this space – and it’s going to take a long time to clean up a mess that may be avoidable.

At the SEA summit, the crowd cheered for the guy who said he wanted to hear more from practitioners and less from consultants and researchers at future meetings. No wonder – that’s like an American audience asking for the next speech to be in English not French. More importantly, it makes us (as an industry) look like we don’t know what we’re talking about – like we’re bipolar. And that’s because we are. Here’s hoping we get professional help, and soon.