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.