I received my copies last week of The Art of Social Enterprise: Business as if People Mattered, which I wrote with social enterprise lawyer Allen Bromberger. I opened the book with some trepidation. I hadn’t looked at it for some months: I would be seeing it with fresh eyes. My anxiety was partly around this question: “Is this something I can be comfortable with, something I can be proud of?” But beneath this question another was lurking. As a writer, I mainly take pride in two things: high craftsmanship as a stylist, and the delivery of ‘aha’ insights. The bigger…

Many social entrepreneurs have come to believe that having a social mission makes it more difficult to raise money because the vast majority of investors are interested in one thing only—maximizing profits. In our opinion, this is a simplistic and overly negative view. For one thing, while the capital market is preponderantly old-school in terms of its preoccupation with financial ROI, that isn’t always a negative for social entrepreneurs. When the social mission is integrated into the brand in a way that builds value, this will be viewed as a positive by even the most conservative investors. For another, there…

Like its cousin “sustainability,” the term “social enterprise” thrives on imprecision. Everyone uses it, no one knows exactly what it means. Not even the experts agree on what a social enterprise is. Especially not the experts!—who regularly fuss over boundary issues like: Must a social enterprise be a for-profit or do non-profits qualify? Must a social enterprise use earned-income strategies or can it rely solely on grants and donations? Can a social enterprise be part of a larger conventional organization? Can a social enterprise, in other words, be intrapreneurial? Must a social commitment be baked into the organization’s formal documents?…