Feed: Dave Pollard: Business Innovation - AggScore: 81.5
 This is the fourth in a series of articles about my new book Finding the Sweet Spot. The book is available from most booksellers or online from the sites listed in the right sidebar. A synopsis of the book is here. A complete set of reviews of the book (thank you, reviewers!) can be found on Beth Patterson's site here. One of the things I learned this past weekend at Bioneers By the Bay was that progressives are generally suspicious of business and entrepreneurship. In Finding the Sweet Spot I try to dispel the myth that you have to compromise your principles (notably principles of sustainability and responsibility) to survive in (what as seen as) the "dog eat dog" world of business. Even the terms business, company and entrepreneurship are suspect. At the same time, "social entrepreneurship" has this connotation of "not-for-profit" and therefore dependent on the largesse and generosity of governments, philanthropists and/or volunteers to succeed. Ugh. How sad that a whole set of progressive activities are defined by what they are not, and are assumed to be preoccupied with pleading with do-gooders to fund what is otherwise economically unviable! What a terrible and wrong-headed assumption! I am hoping to work with John Abrams, author of The Company We Keep, to create frameworks and messages to convey just how untrue this is -- that enterprise can be, and must be, responsible, sustainable, community-based and joyful (not difficult, not impoverished, not stressful). Sigh -- it seems we still have a long way to go. Do we need a new term for Natural Enterprise? When I first wrote about this concept, I talked about "collaboratives". Instead of using "tainted" terms like business and enterprise, should we be talking instead about Natural Collaboratives, cooperatives, and Making a Living Naturally? This post is deliberately provocative. Its purpose is to get people to think differently about the whole idea of business, and smash the stereotypes of entrepreneurship that are perpetuated by -- how do I put this delicately? -- the sad preponderance of misguided, ineffective, unsuccessful (on any terms) entrepreneurs. So here is a short questionnaire. If you can answer at least 12 out of 15 of these questions 'yes', then you're making a living naturally. If not, it's time to re-evaluate what you can do to find more meaningful work, to find a better way to make a living, and in so doing to make the world a better place. Here we go:
We can do it, one enterprise, one workplace at a time, allowing the fragile, irresponsible and unsustainable industrial economy and its voracious globalist corporations to crumble and fall by the wayside, to make room for it -- a better way to make a living. Category: Natural Enterprise |
Date Published: Oct 28, 2008 - 9:47 pm
 This is the third in a series of articles about my new book Finding the Sweet Spot. The book is available from most booksellers or online from the sites listed in the right sidebar. A synopsis of the book is here. A complete set of reviews of the book (thank you, reviewers!) can be found on Beth Patterson's site here. We
are all longing to go home to some place we have never been—a place
half-remembered and half-envisioned we can only catch glimpses of from
time to time. Community. Somewhere, there are people to whom we can
speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats.
Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up
as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our
own power. Community means strength that joins our strength to do the
work that needs to be done. Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of
healing. A circle of friends. Someplace where we can be free. -- Starhawk A number of the radio stations that have interviewed me about my book have asked about community-based businesses. Specifically, they have asked whether small locally-owned businesses stand a chance against the Wal-Marts of the world with their massive buying power, advertising reach and (when they need rezoning and favourable tax incentives to locate in your community) political clout. They've also asked whether you really can be a "good corporate citizen" -- whether you can succeed without inevitably compromising your principles and quality just to compete with the big ugly multinational corporations. These are good questions. The answer to both is Yes -- provided you go about it the right way. Most small businesses, unfortunately, start with a product or service that they would like to provide and/or think they can provide well (usually one not very different from what already exists in the community), and then try to find a market and financing for it. This gets entrepreneurship exactly backwards. The Natural Entreprise approach starts by going into the community and talking and meeting with its people, and discovering their unmet needs. Then, you work with your partners, your networks, prospective customers and suppliers, and members of the community to innovate a solution to that need that is significantly different from anything out in the market now. Something that prospective customers, as "co-inventors" of your product or service, are already sold on. Something the people you have met in the process of doing your research and innovation are likely so enthused about that they may well seek to invest in your enterprise, as partners with you. Something that the people in your community, having been involved in the design and development process, will want to encourage and support as something that benefits the whole community, not just the company's absentee owners. Traditional corporations rely on a few "competitive advantages" (aside from using their power to lobby governments for subsidies, tax breaks, trade agreements, and other favours, and forming oligopolies to reduce choice and fix prices), to attract customers and try to dominate their markets -- including those in your local community. These "competitive advantages" are: (1) name recognition, (2) popular brand, (3) low price, and (4) operating "efficiency". These advantages come at a steep cost to those in our communities:
This is what Natural Enterprise is all about. The advantages of dealing with a Natural Enterprise as customers and community members are:
In his book The Company We Keep, John Abrams explains how the dynamics of his company and the dynamics of the greater community in which it is located interact powerfully, and how his company and his community partner and help build and strengthen each other. It is essential that Natural Enterprises be involved and active and engaged in building and helping the neighborhood that is their home, and draw in return strength from that larger community. I think one of the things that is so appealing about Natural Enterprise, beside the fact that it is instinctive and joyful, is that in our modern world we long for a renewed sense of community, to belong to a place as part of a group of people with common Purpose, and, as Dave Smith argues so eloquently, to be of use, of service, to that community. Natural Enterprise, as a community within a larger community, gives us that sense of belonging, purpose, and usefulness twice over. Give people a real choice between a responsible, local, community-based Natural Enterprise and a sprawling, anonymous and indifferent industrial corporation, and it's pretty obvious whom most will choose to do business with. They're just waiting for you, and your Natural Enterprise, to give them that choice. Category: Natural Enterprise |
Date Published: Oct 21, 2008 - 8:25 pm
 Last Spring I told you about my two back-to-back conferences
with different generations of workers, which convinced me of the wisdom
of Nancy White's entreaty that we (who understand both the enormous
potential value of social networking to business, and the way that
business works) need to act as "bridges", explaining how each
generation can be of great value to the other:A few months ago I went
to two conferences back-to-back. The first was a conference for senior
executives on social networking, where there was much concern about
cost, security, and diversion of people's attention from their 'jobs'.
They asked me, as one of the panelists, whether they really needed to
embrace this 'social networking' stuff to attract top new recruits.
They could not imagine any other use for it. The next day I was at a bloggers' conference where (aside from Nancy and me) the attendees were almost entirely young and tech-savvy. They spent the conference sharing some truly brilliant ideas for social networking, and lamenting how hard it was to get anyone to pay for their skills and ideas. It became abundantly clear to me that most of them didn't have the faintest idea how business executives make decisions, or even how businesses operate in today's economy. So here we have two groups of people who need something from each other and who have something to offer each other, but they don't talk, and probably can't talk each other's language to communicate those offerings in ways that the other can understand. They need a bridge, a way to connect with each other. More recently I had a conversation, in conjunction with my presentation From Content to Context and From Collection to Connection, with another group of Gen Millennials about how they were coping with the work world. I had once heard the potential battle for freedom (by Gen Millennium) against security (by restrictive IT departments) described as "nothing short of a war of wills". Failure to accommodate the social tools that these young people had become accustomed to using was inviting them to either leave (to work for an organization that would) or find workarounds that would pose even greater information risks to the company, I had been told. Not so, said this group. They weren't concerned about having workplace access to information they might find useful. They didn't want to access Facebook pages, blogs, or YouTube videos. They had no use whatever for the corporate portals, Intranets or groupware (SharePoint, QuickPlace etc.) They didn't use e-mail unless they had no choice. They told me that they share information through conversations: face to face, by telephone, IM, Skype, screen-sharing and other real-time tools. They share this information with their own social networks, which transcend organizational boundaries. They get better, faster answers this way than from looking at someone else's "dead" content -- any content. They could do most or all of this with their cell-phones, so they didn't particularly care what restrictions the corporate security czars put on content access. In some respects this is good news. The great energy and expense that most large organizations invest in content capture, collection, dissemination and security can, for the most part, be saved, and most of this infrastructure abandoned as irrelevant, useless. But in other respects this is terrible news. Aside from the wasted content effort, this means that most young people will learn from peers, not from mentors. How much of what senior people know will never be learned by younger workers, simply because the networks of trust necessary for valuable conversations will not have been forged (and given that Gen Millennium workers are expected to change jobs on average every four years, might never be forged)? If, as JP Rangaswami said, "More and more, knowledge management is going to be about reducing the cost of, and simplifying the process for, letting someone watch what you do. Nonintrusively. Time-shifted. Place-shifted. Searchable. Archivable. Retrievable.", then how are modern organizations going to enable this learning-by-observation to happen? What's more, the major incidents of the last decade, from Enron, 9/11 and the Katrina response, to climate change and the latest financial market meltdown, are all ultimately knowledge management failures -- problems that arose because critical knowledge transfer never took place. The "cost of not knowing" is in the trillions, perhaps quadrillions of dollars. What is it going to take before we realize that this cost of not knowing, externalized to the taxpayer, struggling nations and future generations though it may be, is simply too high, and start to invest again in people and learning processes that will prevent the next colossal knowledge failure from damaging our weakened society further, maybe even irreparably? |
Date Published: Oct 17, 2008 - 12:17 am
 This is the second in a series of articles about my new book Finding the Sweet Spot. The book is available from most booksellers or online from the sites listed in the right sidebar. A synopsis of the book is here. A complete set of reviews of the book (thank you, reviewers!) can be found on Beth Patterson's site here. My book has three intended audiences:
Many of them will try, mostly unsuccessfully, to make a living doing what they did as employees, going it alone as "consultants". While those age 55+ make up 25% of the workforce, they make up 40% of the self-employed. And unlike younger workers, only a minority of this age group has a high school diploma. For many of them, they only know how to do one job, and wouldn’t know how to begin starting a business to do anything else. Statistically, the vast majority of them will earn much less than they did as employees, despite working long hours trying to find customers who will value their considerable experience. Many will put a brave face on a very stressful and unprofitable period of self-employment, because they can't imagine it being easier to do anything else. Workers aged 55-64 (especially women) are the fastest-growing segment of the labor force. Many women in this age bracket are re-entering the labor force after a protracted period outside it, or even entering it for the first time, and finding the prospect, and the experience, demoralizing and terrifying. Increasingly, lower- and middle-income Americans have no option of retiring -- their savings are utterly insufficient to support them for the thirty or forty years after age 55 that most can expect to live. We hear about the boomers who have benefited from the decades-long boom in the housing and stock markets (that ended abruptly this year) and can afford to retire and live a long life of leisure, but this is a small proportion of the boomer generation, and it has recently become much smaller. And even for this wealthy minority, the prospect of three or four decades out of the workforce is either fearsome or unimaginably boring -- after being burned out from decades in exhausting executive jobs, they are likely looking at second careers that will allow them to give something back, and to do something they love that capitalizes on the immense skills they have acquired over their first careers. These second-career seekers need the skills to create new enterprises, not sole proprietorships that require them to compete with or outsource the work of their former employer. For people who have a lifetime of knowledge that is greatly needed in the challenging 21st century workplace, work as a Wal-Mart greeter is a colossal waste of talent and wisdom. We have to help them do better. It is probably hard to imagine the abject terror that making a living for themselves instills in boomers who have absolutely no experience doing so. Chances are, most of the entrepreneurs they do know went at it the wrong way and failed, perhaps miserably and expensively, so they have most of the same ten ingrained fears of entrepreneurship that the young people I speak to in business schools express: Not having the skills, self-confidence, ideas, money or time; not being able to handle the stress, the failure or the loneliness; not knowing the "process"; and the fear that "the deck's stacked against entrepreneurs in favour of big business". In my book I explain how these ten fears are unwarranted, and how the most successful entrepreneurs have discovered ways to make a living for yourself that is not stressful, risky, exhausting or expensive. The process starts with self-discovery: knowing what you're really good at (your Gifts), what your really love doing (your Passions), and what is needed in the world that you really care about (your Purpose), and finding the "sweet spot" where these three intersect. You might imagine that a worker in his or her fifties would have a pretty good idea what his or her Gifts and Passions are, but you'd be wrong. Most of us did what we were trained to do, and worked at it so hard and so long that we had no chance to even contemplate whether it was really what we were "meant to do." So, much of Finding the Sweet Spot is exercises that help those with entrepreneurial aspirations try to discover what that "sweet spot" is for them. This is a challenging task (and it changes throughout our lifetime) but it can also be very enjoyable. I'm hoping that the book is successful enough that there will be 'circles' of those seeking their "sweet spot" who will get together, not only to help each other explore and imagine the work they were really meant to do, but also to discover partners, people who share their Purpose and whose Gifts and Passions complement their own. Because the biggest mistake that entrepreneurs make, especially those looking for second careers, is to try to do everything themselves, alone. No one has all the skills needed for a successful entrepreneurial venture, and sharing the workload, the challenges and learning of a new enterprise converts the experience from a stressful and lonely one to a joyful, social one -- and greatly increases the likelihood of success. If I can get the future entrepreneurs of the world -- people whose skills, ideas and efforts are so critical to the economy of the future -- to just take these two first steps -- to start with a discovery of the work they're really meant to do, and to do so with partners with complementary Gifts and Passions, I'll have succeeded in my book's purpose. Because with this foundation, they'll be on their way to creating Natural Enterprises, and being a part of a bold new Natural Economy -- one that is purposeful, responsible, sustainable, and even fun. The events of the past few months have shown clearly that the time for that new Natural Economy is now. Category: Natural Enterprise |
Date Published: Oct 14, 2008 - 8:03 pm
 This will be the first of a series of 'teasers' on my new book Finding the Sweet Spot, available from most booksellers or online from the sites listed in the right sidebar. A complete set of reviews of the book (thank you, reviewers!) can be found on Beth Patterson's site here. I've spent most of my professional life helping entrepreneurs succeed. After I'd worked with over a hundred, I began to notice something special about a small number of them. Their people smiled all the time. They loved their work. They didn't work especially hard. Their customers loved them, so much that they rarely had to do any marketing -- word of mouth was enough. They were partnerships of equals, working together, with no 'boss'. They had few or no debts, and were beholden to no one. They were connected to, responsive to, and responsible to, their people, customers and the communities in which they worked. They were environmentally sustainable and economically resilient, not vulnerable to vagaries of the market or economy. They had created the kind of workplaces that made you say "Boy! I'd love to work in a place like that!" So I studied them, to try to find what made them special, different from all the rest. I found they had mostly done six things differently from all other entrepreneurs. When I looked at these six things, they seemed obvious to me, until I realized that none of these things is taught in business school, and none of them is the "conventional wisdom" of what starting your own business is about. So I decided to write a book about them, in the hopes that others could use this "formula" to escape from wage slavery and create their own responsible, sustainable, joyful enterprises -- what I have come to call Natural Enterprises. Chelsea Green agreed to publish the book under the name Finding the Sweet Spot. Here, in a nutshell, are the six things these remarkable entrepreneurs did differently:
As I watch our economy unraveling, I am more and more convinced that we need to create a whole Natural Economy of responsible, sustainable, joyful, Natural Enterprises, and that the time is now. I hope you'll pick up a copy of the book and help me make it happen. Category: Natural Enterprise |
Date Published: Oct 09, 2008 - 7:27 pm
 Leaving the rarefied atmosphere of Rivendell is a bit like a crash landing after a visit to a distant world. I was privileged to spend three days this week in retreat with thirty extraordinary people from across North America -- thirty people with the knowledge, capacities, passion and intention to facilitate meaningful conversations on subjects important to the participants and to the world, subjects that are often difficult, complex, and intractable. The program is called The Art of Hosting, and it presents a full set of facilitation methods and techniques -- Open Space, world cafe, appreciative inquiry, conversation circle, consensus building and others -- plus discussions on when each is appropriate, and the opportunity to practice each with one's peers. The practitioners in this retreat were quite advanced. For most of them, facilitation is how they make their living, and these three days were their opportunity to compare notes and hone their skills. My initial training was earlier this year in Australia with Viv McWaters and Brian Bainbridge, and since then I've become aware that this network of practitioners is global, powerfully connected, and driven to be of use, to make a difference, to make the world a better place. These people are not in any sense like the old style of facilitation consultants, who took instruction from senior executives with a predetermined agenda and pushed participants to deliver on it. Even worse, these old-style arrogant consultants sometimes introduced their own 'expert' point of view into the discussion (usually to the detriment of all). By contrast, practitioners of this new set of facilitation or 'hosting' techniques aspire to nothing more or less than to enable more effective conversations leading to peer-consensual decisions and self-selected follow-up actions. If the participants do not have the complete freedom to decide and to do what they in their collective wisdom know is right, then the responsible facilitator will simply refuse the assignment up front as a fraud. It is hard to overstate how radical this is. It is a reassertion of democratic principles, personal responsibility, true empowerment and the wisdom of crowds. It is a rebuff to the infallibility and 'greater wisdom' of executives, managers, consultants and 'experts'. Practitioners of these techniques can be catalysts for important and truly revolutionary change, and in large calcified organizations, public and private, it may well be the only way to bring about significant change at all. It is a recognition that the vast majority of actual work that gets done in organizations, the vast majority of value actually created, is the result of bottom-up decisions, workarounds and changes (often hidden from management for fear of retribution for violating official policies) made by the thousands of individual workers on the front lines. Those of us who have worked with large organizations recognize that they are substantially incapable of innovation, and that they drive their mavericks, bright thinkers, and imaginative people out, while absurdly over-rewarding (and over-punishing when things go badly) their senior executives. The potential 'facilitated re-democratization' of previously hierarchical organizations could reverse this brain drain and reverse their creative stagnation, to staggering effect. I think the people who are doing this groundbreaking work realize the power it has, and that's why they have embraced it with such passion and have been relentless in urging their customers and potential customers to use these techniques to set their employees (and in a way their customers as well) free, free to do their best work. As our world enters a period of unprecedented challenges and uncertainties, the success of these people to spread this new way of learning, decision-making and acting could well be pivotal to our economy's and our civilization's ability to cope, improvise and perhaps even survive. As we went into the third and final day of the retreat, I began trying to figure out what it is that makes these thirty people, and those increasing numbers like them around the world, so extraordinary, to the point that I actually ached leaving them. The intellectual and emotional high I received in their company has been followed by the typical withdrawal symptoms of quitting a euphoric drug cold turkey. Since I left a few hours ago I find most 'outside' people annoying, unbearable. For three days we were the type of intentional community that idealists only dream of. Now bland, desperate reality with its horrific imaginative poverty and ignorance have reemerged as the terrible reality of most of this world. The world needs these revolutionary facilitators, these artful hosts, and thousands, millions more like them, self-organizing, connecting, smashing learned helplessness, corpocracy, hierarchy, bureaucracy, and inertia. While this list is probably incomplete, here are the qualities and capacities I recognized in these amazing people:
I expect my euphoria from this week will wear off, but I am determined to find a way to sustain the incredible sense of peace, joy, openness, connection and presence I found and felt this week. Those of you from Rivendell who are reading this, thank you, my amazing new friends, artful hosts all, for the privilege of your company. You have filled my heart with love and joy and hope. The conversation started before it began, and it will continue long after it ends. Category: Complexity & Discovery |
Date Published: Oct 02, 2008 - 8:40 pm
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Date Published: Oct 01, 2008 - 9:57 am
 Week 3 of the CCK08 Connectivism MOOC is principally about network theory. I've written a bit about this, notably about network analysis (Rob Cross) and network mapping (Valdis Krebs, who was this week's 'virtual guest lecturer'). All week I've been reminded of how, especially once we reach age 50, we tend to rely more and more on our networks -- both human networks (communities) and knowledge networks (the places we store what we've learned). This is partly due to the fact that we have ever more knowledge to handle, and partly because as we age our short-term memory weakens. Someone once said, famously, when asked how he could command such an enormous store of knowledge, "I keep my knowledge in my networks". I've started using IM, VoIP, and Google Desktop to recall my know-who ("who should I talk to about X again?"), my know-what ("where was that great tapas bar in Vancouver?") and my know-how ("what was step 6 in my Innovation Process?") With a lifetime's practice I've learned to keep in mind that I am only a complicity, a space through which stuff passes, and that my purpose is to touch the right stuff in just the right way as it passes through, in a way that brings meaning and joy and value to myself and to others in my social networks, my communities. To do this I use a particular process (sense, self-control, understand, question, imagine, offer, collaborate) to address each issue, project, decision, and challenge I face each day. Much of this process is social, and it is conducted with members of my communities, my social networks. In fact deciding who to include in which networks, which networks to participate in, and how, and which people to invest time in and seek conversation with (and perhaps even which to trust and love) is probably the most important type of decision I make each day. This week, for example, I decided to meet with Jon Husband for breakfast in San Jose (instead of going back to bed after a 6am media interview on my book). That important breakfast conversation inspired yesterday's post. And shortly after that I met with Second Life friend Michelle Paradis for lunch in Santa Cruz, as prearranged, and discovered to my delight that she had invited five other fascinating people to join us: strategic change guru (and another Second Life friend) Gary Merrill, creativity and narrative consultants Kenton Hyatt and Cheryl DiCiantis, and Living Strategy advisors (and animal menagerie owners) Arian Ward and Beth Alexandre. Between the seven of us we discovered a remarkable number of connections and common friends (many of which also included some of my Tuesday dinner companions) -- to the point we realized that we were all essentially already 'hidden' parts of each other's networks, one or at most two degrees of separation apart. (Thanks so much to the amazing Michelle for arranging all this!) So I began to think about how we make the decision on whether and how to accommodate new acquaintances in our already time-constrained and attention-constrained networks. After all, a recent study by Tom Davenport concluded that the most effective (i.e. productive) people in organizations tended to be those who had the strongest networks and who somehow were able to invest a substantial amount of time each day in nurturing those networks. My right sidebar lists what I've been calling my 'gravitational community' -- the people with whom I have gravitated because of common interests and passions, mutual admiration, respect and love. My lengthier blogroll has been moved off my home page to make room of this more important (to me) list of key networks. These are people I allow and even encourage to interrupt me, anytime, for instant conversations -- if I had known them before the days of the Internet, they would be the people who I'd invite to drop over unannounced, anytime. All of this raises some very important questions about networks:
So much for networks. The mindmap above is an earlier list of the things I believe are most important to learn, the modern 'survival skills and knowledge' list. I'm an advocate of unschooling (self-directed learning) and I believe that we are naturally able to learn these things ourselves, as soon as we discover they are important to us. But I also sense that the modern education system has stripped most of us of this natural learning ability in order to make us obedient and subservient. The Connectivism discussions make it clear that we're as puzzled and divergent in our views about learning as we are about networks. This brings us to four more Important Questions:
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Date Published: Sep 26, 2008 - 9:49 pm