Going to the (Wine) Dogs

High on the list of business ideas I wish I'd thought of first is the Wine Dogs series of books and calendars. I encountered them recently when staying in Healdsburg, CA. -- The Winery Dogs of Sonoma County was an irresistable collection of handsome pooches who get to hang out at some of my favorite places (Wine Dogs and Winery Dogs are competitive series so perhaps there is hope for late entries).

Yes, despite the obvious sentimentality and blatant commercialism I plopped down $38 for a copy. But it was a gift.

What could be more fun than visiting wineries around the world and photographing cute K9s? I'm sure there's a fair amount of sampling the wares on a visit. The dogs from the book we met were all delightful. It might help if I was a photographer, but aside from that small consideration I'm sure I could have done this myself.

Once again, a day late and a Milk Bone late.

Social Enterprise Presidential Debate

The social entrepreneurs I've met in the U.S. are among the most innovative, passionate, and thougthful people in the country. They are in touch with many of the pressing social and environmental challenges that will face the next president.

I would like to propose an on-line debate among the presidential candidates moderated by and with questions posed by social entrepreneurs. It can be online -- let's keep the carbon footprint small, the reach large, and the time impact on the candidates' schedules minimal.

And if the candidates themselves won't make time for us, let's take surrogates for the candidates. It might actually make it a bit easier to focus on the issues rather than the personalities.

For McCain, Romney, Huckabee and Paul it would be a chance to engage with the entrepreneurs they continually celebrate in their speeches. SEs are (often) providing free market solutions to societal challenges. For Clinton and Obama it would be a chance to engage with a group driven to address the problems of poverty, hunger, health, environmental degradation, and other issues that they say are at the heart of their campaigns.

For all of us, it would be a chance to get beyond the usual questions and canned answers that everyone must be tired of by now (Wolff Blitzer was still asking Hillary to declare her Iraq war vote a mistake -- no matter how you feel about the vote, you know she's responded to this about a million times so far).

Join me. Let's pressure the campaigns to address social entrepreneurship.

Backlash on Entrepreneurship?

Jeff Wexler of Uncivilsociety.org has an interesting post about shared space and its lessons for social enterprise:

"What we are seeing today with the backlash against entrepreneurial rhetoric reflects a failure of social enterprise to respect the design logic of nonprofit form. We could view what's happened as shared space in reverse, eradicating cues in context to rely primarily on nominal signs. The problem: when the only thing visibly distinguishing nonprofit from for-profit is the word itself, the distinction becomes incoherent.

The core question, in short, is not whether nonprofits should adopt the values of the market. Such values have been their all along. Rather, we need to focus on how we can transform market relations into an identity beyond exchange. Then, and only then, will nonprofit social enterprise be sustainable."

Social enterprise embraces the ideals of market relationships and makes concerted efforts to curb the excesses and correct the flaws in imperfect markets (news flash: all markets are imperfect). Mainstream capitalism has become an extractive exercise -- stripmining the market and the enterprise to put value created into the pocket of a relatively few shareholders. Social enterprise, by striving for sustainability and mitigation of negative impacts on ecosystem in which it operates, both defines value differently and distributes it more broadly. It is not just entrepreneurship with a benevolent face.

Tough Talk About Social Enterprise

John Bird, founder of Big Issue magazine, had some tough talk for social entrepreneurs reported in The Telegraph.

"I have lots of people coming to me with ideas for new cars, trains, types of soap, and I always say look at the bottom line. Where is the revenue stream? I am a person that has started things with dodgy revenue streams and you learn from getting a good kick in the head," he said.

Toughness should be welcomed by social entrepreneurs -- if their efforts are dependent on foundations and others being "charitable," they aren't really enterprises, are they? But there must be fair ground rules for arriving at the expectations for the return, the timeline for achieving it, etc. Many ventures today are started with the idea of harvesting value through an IPO or sale of the business yet many social enterprises are started to be run for the long haul.

Many also are disruptive innovations -- new approaches serving new markets. These are opportunities that are hard to quantify and forecasts are guesswork at best. Yes, the business plan should represent a reasonable approach to the enterprise -- but there may be a leap of faith involved. The trick is to ensure that the plan allows for fast failure and adaptation when the original assumptions prove less than 100% correct.

It's not that it isn't about return but it is about return over the long term rather than the short.