Business & Social Enterprise

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]