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At the beginning of the month, Harvard Business Review published Leadership in the Age of Transparency by Christopher Meyer and Julia Kirby. Mr. Meyer and Ms. Kirby argue that the best way to think about corporate social responsibility is in terms of “externalities” – the economist’s term for impacts that firms needn’t pay for because they are difficult to assign to individual business’s activities. In the coming weeks, HBR will hear from a diverse set of business and thought leaders who will debate this question: Does business need a better way to think about responsibility? And if so, what is that better way? Leader to Leader President and CEO Frances Hesselbein will weigh in to wrap up the debate in May.
Here’s my fun fact for the day, provided courtesy of Robert Litan, who directs research at the Kauffman Foundation, which specializes in promoting innovation in America: “Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less,” said Litan. “That is about 40 million jobs. That means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period.” Message: If we want to bring down unemployment in a sustainable way, neither rescuing General Motors nor funding more road construction will do it. We need to create a big bushel of new companies — fast. We’ve got to get more Americans working again for their own dignity. What’s the fix? My mentor and friend, Peter Drucker, decided in mid-career that a big part of the solution for his dream of a Functioning Society would come from the social sector. About the same time, the mid 1980’s, though thirty years younger, I came to the same conclusion. It is what bonded our relationship and drew us together in a unique pairing of an intellectual and an entrepreneur. We were magnetized by a common cause. My general interest in the social sector was nonprofits of all sorts. Together, Peter, Frances Hesselbein, former head of the Girl Scouts of the USA, Dick Schubert, former head of the American Red Cross, and I formed The Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management (now Leader to Leader Institute). Twenty years later, it is still headed by Frances Hesselbein. Our customer was mainly the small and midsize nonprofits. The term Social Entrepreneur was barely beginning to be used. Peter wrote the seminal Harvard Business Review article, “The Entrepreneurial Economy,” in 1984, and as well the early definitive book on the topic, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, in 1985. I looked in the index of the book to find there was still no reference to the term “social entrepreneur,” [but the] latest trend is a significant increase in volunteerism led by independent Social Entrepreneurs. Great leaders with big ideas. They are working in all the domains of society. Two great examples are TOMS Shoes, led by Blake Mycoskie, and Teach for America, led by Wendy Kopp. Teach for America has studied the motivation that drives thousands of graduates of elite colleges to spend their first two years teaching in inner city schools. Their findings: half of these teachers cite faith as a major motive for Main Street instead of Wall Street. I will close with Bill Drayton’s definition of a Social Entrepreneur drawn from McKinsey Quarterly. Bill founded Ashoka which connects 2,700 Social Entrepreneurs around the world. “After all, what defines the true social entrepreneur is that he or she simply cannot come to rest in life until his or her vision has become the new pattern societywide. Scholars and artists are satisfied when they express an idea. Professionals are when they serve a client well, and managers are when their organization succeeds. None of this much interests the entrepreneur. The life purpose of the true social entrepreneur is to change the world.”
Join The Mission Continues and 5,000 other volunteers on Saturday, April 24th for Hands on New York Day. Military veterans and civilians will join together at the Astoria Park War Memorial beginning at 9:30 a.m. to plant, rake, mulch, and paint. Thousands of other volunteers will fan out into all five boroughs of New York City to revitalize parks, community gardens, schools, and public spaces. Participants will also have the opportunity to write letters of encouragement to veterans who are currently completing a service fellowship with The Mission Continues. This project is being completed in honor of Army Sergeant First Class Michael Battles, of the 1st Battalion, 21st Field Artillery Regiment. Michael lost his life on October 24th, 2004, in Iraq when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated near his checkpoint. This project is just one of many being held by The Mission Continues in honor of fallen veterans during National Volunteer Week, April 17th-25th. National Volunteer Week embodies the energy and power volunteers evoke on a daily basis as they lead by example—not only encouraging the people they help, but motivating others to serve as well. In addition to supporting service projects across the country, The Mission Continues awards fellowships to wounded and disabled veterans — with special attention to those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan — as they continue their service at home through volunteer endeavors. This fellowship program enables veterans to spend at least 14 weeks at a service organization in a capacity that matches their skills with the organization’s needs. Find out more or contact Marc Wolf at mwolf@missioncontinues.org or (409) 504-8350.
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs At 1:45 p.m. in the UCCS University Center Ballroom, Frances Hesselbein will give the keynote address at the 2010 Women’s Leadership Symposium May 1 at UCCS. titled “Building Leadership to Build Healthy Communities” which will highlight her management philosophies based on careful study of Peter Drucker in combination with her own management and life experiences. Beginning at 10 a.m., there will be a panel discussion about increasing the impact of women in leadership and challenges facing women leaders. The discussion will feature Pam Laird, professor of history, University of Colorado Denver; Andrea Herrera, professor, Women’s and Ethnic Studies, UCCS; Jan Martin, Colorado Springs City Council member; Cathy Robbins, vice president, El Pomar Foundation; and Margaret Sabin, CEO, Penrose-St. Francis Health System. Lunch and workshops are planned prior the keynote address.
For more information, or to register ($30 includes lunch), please visit www.uccs.edu/wls.
In a NY TIMES article by David Brooks, published April 8, 2010, Brooks wrote, "Some leaders are boardroom lions. They are superconfident, forceful and charismatic. They call for relentless transformational change." Brooks goes on to discuss what the type of leader Jim Collins appreciates:
Jim Collins, the author of “Good to Great” and “How the Mighty Fall,” celebrates a different sort of leader. He’s found that many of the reliably successful leaders combine “extreme personal humility with intense professional will.”Alongside the boardroom lion model of leadership, you can imagine a humble hound model. The humble hound leader thinks less about her mental strengths than about her weaknesses. She knows her performance slips when she has to handle more than one problem at a time, so she turns off her phone and e-mail while making decisions. She knows she has a bias for caution, so she writes a memo advocating the more daring option before writing another advocating the most safe. She knows she is bad at prediction, so she follows Peter Drucker’s old advice: After each decision, she writes a memo about what she expects to happen. Nine months later, she’ll read it to discover how far off she was.
What type of leader are you?
Doug Schallau, former President of Junior Achievement joined our staff meeting today and shared with us words of advice that Peter Drucker dispensed many years ago: "Say please and thank you. Manners count." "Focus on what, not who." "If you have a good idea and you have to explain it, it might not be that good of an idea."
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