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?…

Being an entrepreneur, or a social entrepreneur, is like being in a serious romantic relationship. There’s passion, there’s commitment, it’s a roller-coaster ride, and you’ll inevitably face challenges. Fittingly, some of the same rules of the road apply. Keep re-discovering the passion. Babies, bill-paying, taking out the garbage—these things can put the kibosh on romance. Similarly for the day-to-day requirements of running a business—you can forget why you made the commitment in the first place. Who’s going to provide the inspiration, who’s going to do the remembering, if not you? Be the faith-keeper. When the going gets tough, it can…

Social enterprise, which we’ll define for the purposes of this post as an entrepreneurial undertaking with equal financial and social bottom lines, messes with traditional organizational forms pretty dramatically. But is it radical? Is it, more dramatically still, subversive? Depends on who you ask. For Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, the concept of corporate social responsibility in any form was subversive: The doctrine of “social responsibility” taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity. It does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collectivist doctrine. It differs only by professing to believe that…