On Purpose is run by a very clever group of people, and they help people migrate into the Social Enterprise space. I wish this programme had existed for me 5 years ago, as I’d have jumped on the chance (not that I wish I did things differently!)

They’ve just opened applications for their 12 month intensive programme that helps high-calibre professionals kick-start a career in social enterprise. You get two paid 6-month social enterprise placements, coupled to intensive 1:1 support and world-class training provided by professionals from organisations such as McKinsey, Bain, IDEO, the Big Issue, UnLtd and Venturesome.

They are looking for professionals with a track record of achievement and two or more years’ work experience. To apply, please go fill in our online application form that you can access here.

Questions? Ask on Facebook

Deets:

Application deadline: Wednesday 24 August 2011

Salary: £20,000 pro rata

Start date: mid January (if specific date necessary, use 16 January) 2012

End date:  December 2012

Full time

Contact email: recruitment@onpurpose.uk.com

Interview dates: (first round): first 2 weeks of September

The People Speak bring out “Who wants to be?”

The lovely people behind Social Innovation Camp’s excellent videos (2 3 4) run their own programmes. The People Speak bring as many people as possible into a theatre who pay £5.00 each (the new recession friendly price!) They then spend the evening deciding and voting on how to spend the entire box office takings as a collective. At the last few games, audience members have proposed to gamble the money online, commission a democracy bench for an East London park and to turf the streets of Cardiff.

The audience is in control of the game – they can vote on to spend the money, change the rules of the game and even sack the host.  Please find attached our press release for further information.  You can also see a previous game in action here: http://vimeo.com/4074853

Details:

Who Wants to Be?

Part of Adhocracy, 6 August 2011, 8:00 – 10:00pm

Bar  area, Rich Mix, 35 – 47 Bethnal Green Road, London, E1 6LA

Admission: £5.00

Tickets: http://adhocracy.info/booktickets

More info: http://www.whowantstobe.co.uk

Yep, I’ve still been kind of crazy busy.

What have I been doing? Managing & running Social Innovation Camp in Edinburgh and helping build teams to develop these six ideas.

All the ideas seem to be moving forward—but I’ll have more details about that in a couple of weeks. There are a few that I think will really help out people.

I also made a visit out to San Francisco and New York, and didn’t get to see enough of you, despite trying to drink all the American microbrews that exist.

Burning Man ticket

I have 2 tickets to this year’s Burn that were given to me. I’m going to give them away. Why? ‘cos you’re going to do something extra-cool on the Playa this year. What are you going to do? You tell me. Coolest thing gets the ticket. In a pair or individually.

(n.b. – “I’ll get to go ‘cos I can’t afford it otherwise” doesn’t count.)

Email glen_mehn@yahoo.com with what cool-arse thing you’re gonna do.

That’s all for now.

Launch a site based on search, keywords, and no banner ads.

OK, sure, zag when they zig
The thing is, you might go for it. Get off your lazy bum and stop scribbling on beer mats and start up your company. Optimism is what you need. Frameworks. Business models. Adaptability. Entrepreneurial mindset. Zagging vs. zigging. Optimism.

Optimism is great, critical, important. But it’s not just what you need.

Healthy skepticism
This is your ability to look at yourself, your business, your product, with the outside perspective of the skeptic, and see it clearly. Then to turn to the market and proceed with healthy optimism. It’s the difference between blind faith and reasonable optimism. Cultivate it. Then proceed forward as though you’ve already succeeded.

Current status: I’ve stopped consulting… and have a job
I’ve been working the past few months with the lovely and talented team at Social Innovation Camp around growing the business that they’ve started and bootstrapped over the past three years. A few things we’ve worked on together have come together, so I’m joining as a full-time member of the team.

Which is, actually, pretty bloody awesome. What’s SICamp? It is:

A Launchpad for tech-based social ventures

An accellerator for tech-based social ventures which are sligthly further along

An innovation consultancy around technology and innovation for the social enterprise, public, and third sector

A trainer and enabler of global launchpads & accellerators

This is pretty much what I’d do if I had £20M in the bank and didn’t have to work. So that’s not so bad.

Cross-posting with SICamp stuff
I’ll be writing, hopefully much more often, for SICamp’s blog and most likely cross-posting here, on things like entrepreneurship, social enterprise, innovation, and musings and findings of each. I look forward to getting back into the swing of writing again… In fact, I feel a musing coming on.

(Sorry for being not around—I’ve been very busy with several interesting—but unfortunately confidential—projects. I can say, though, that I’ve been investigating strategies for exploring new business opportunities in developing countries rather a lot)

Those of you who know me know me on my bike. I’ve had nice ones, crappy ones, and funky ones. It’s my default mode of transportation, particularly if you have nice employers who provide a shower and/or a locker for your suits (or who put up with you be hot & sweaty in the morning).

Sure, I get wet sometimes. I get sweaty. Sometimes I get shouted at, occasionally I have to cycle home after dark without lights (if I’ve forgotten mine) but overall it’s a pretty good way to get around, particularly if you live in London.

Some drivers who listen to too much Jeremy Clarkson can be rude, but overall London’s a pretty great place to cycle.

Then, occasionally, you get the nasty HGV drivers.

Now, I’m an assertive cyclist. I was hit by a car in about 1996, and am pretty careful these days.

I don’t pass on the inside coming up to lights. I (OK, generally) don’t jump lights (certainly never if there’s anything coming at all). I treat my bicycle as though it’s deadly to humans, and treat anything bigger than me as a big lump of stone.

I’ve occasionally shouted at drivers who have over taken too closely or nearly run me down, but at the end of the day, I figure it’s my job as a small, fragile thing to be visible.

So I do get very cross when a cement truck overtakes in a short narrow lane on a busy highway. But I’ve pretty much stopped shouting. I (hope) I can just get even. And maybe make a bit of difference.

The ubiquitous camera phone is the great equaliser here. I snapped the plate and the driver’s logo,

and then spent two minutes navigating the phone tree at hanson.biz to see if I couldn’t get in touch with a transportation supervisor. Voila! Not too difficult.

Let’s see if we can’t get Hanson.biz to sign up for Cycle Awareness Training or perhaps at least the No Lethal Lorries campaign.

Perhaps even a google-mappy-mashup a la Fix My Street is in order, where we route complaints and publish the results.

Jo from Hanson, I’m waiting for your response.

What do you want to measure?
Sure, of course, you want to know how much online buzz equates to rankings, but what does that really tell you of true value? I don’t think that your advertisers (who pay for all those shows) really care about the number of eyeballs watching your show (whether real or on your PVR).

What they care about is people buying their stuff. This is what google figured out so well ten years ago.

What they care about is showing the right ads to the right people. Like P&G and Unilever sponsoring soap operas back in the 50s.

Market fragmentation
We’ve hit this point where everyone’s got 50+ channels of TV to watch. On top of that, they’ve got 4OD, IPlayer, Hulu, and others. People aren’t watching TV the same way. Media and advertising companies need to pay more attention to the engagement they can have with smaller, stronger audiences rather than beaming out to loads of eyeballs.

Landscape changes
Advertising’s gotta change, and I think it’s a bigger change than using the product placement ideas stuck into this article. The iPad, the web, smartphones, films, and Television create an ecosystem in which you can engage with people and build brands that last.

Go do it.

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It’s not a huge amount of money, but might tip the scales in favour of hiring someone new.

Except.
Except that the jobs have a specified target for new hires: Those who have been out of work for 60 days or more. Now, I’ve been there, and it’s a rough road to get hired when you haven’t been working, but this doesn’t quite fit right, and here’s why.

The potential consequences aren’t well thought out
The best candidate no longer neccessarily gets the job. The tax breaks only apply to new hires, and those who have been out of work for over 60 days. This gives the employer an incentive to go after one employee over another equally qualified employee who’s either in work or recently unemployed.

There’s no incentive to keep people working. In fact, this is almost an incentive for churn, especially for low-skilled or easily replacable labour and early-stage professionals. If you had a whole lot of non-union, hourly employees who were machinists or mechanics or factory workers, it’d be awfully easy to let them go and start claiming 6.2% for the next 9 months on their replacements. Sure, firing is illegal, but if you just cut hours most of the time people will leave. Churn is costly in terms of lost productivity, but I wouldn’t put it past a number of restructuring “experts” who are incentivised over the short term to replace workers. There are loads of ways to let them go.

It’s heavily tilted to large businesses. The businesses who can comprehend and benefit from a small tax break like this tend to be larger businesses, but it’s smaller businesses that provide most of US employment, and who often take the lead in hiring on recession exits.

I hate to be a cynic
But I’m continually concerned by the way we enact laws. I hope this works out, but I’m very afraid it won’t.

Better strategies
More programmes to increase the rate of risk financing to new businesses. The Entrepreneur visa programme. Encouragement of growth capital (and, particularly, liquidity in that growth capital) for existing/successful businesses. Business advice programmes that work.

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That being said, they’ve always delivered in a closed ecosystem. Fair enough. They were niche players. I’ve owned macs at all levels– from 8″ black and white jobs right through G4 iMacs. I’ve always had slight niggles with them– having to load a command line for development from a dozen floppies, often and ongoing issues with build quality, and Apple’s poor response to these problems has made them some enemies– people seem to fall through the cracks of Apple customer service from time to time.

On the flip side, they’ve been building a litany of awesome stuff. I think even the much-maligned iPad has some legs in it, though no one’s quite sure why they want one– it’s made me reconsider the iPod Touch as an interesting platform– a pocketable iPad.

Signs of distress
The last three months, though, has seen an accellerating litany of un-Apple-like behaviour. Here’s the thing: Apple is an underdog. Apple is an innovator. Apple positions themselves outside the mainstream, but they’ve been using dominant market position, patent law, and arbitrary bullying techniques to get ahead.

This isn’t what Apple is good at. I say stick to the knitting. Stop alienating your developers. That $40 billion could be spent on far cooler things like innovative music distribution models that don’t annoy customers instead of legal fees.

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I grew up in New Orleans, whose Saints are headed to the Super Bowl this Sunday. You can’t really come from New Orleans and not bleed black and gold– even the most die-hard non-sports people in my family and friends are all excited for this Sunday. The Saints have always been a decent all-round team, but have never really been very good at anything– generally better offensively, but aside from the Morten Anderson years, never a particularly strong scorers or on defence.

Until this last year.

The Change
I’ve been watching mostly highlight reels (hey, I live in the UK, and with no TV, it’s easier). I noted one thing: Every game talked about a defense who scores, and a team turning over the ball, a lot.

What they’ve done is picked (or identified) a core competetive advantage: The Strip. The Who Dat boys have decided that defence is not about stopping the team moving forward but about getting the ball back, which means knocking it out of the hands of the offensive players and turning it over. This has an enormous effect on the opposing team: They suddenly have to play defensively and in many cases the defense has scored.

The Saints are now the highest scoring team in the NFL.

What’s this have to do with business?
I know, sports metaphors are somewhat overwrought, and American Football metaphors are lost on my heavily-influenced UK/EU audience. Sorry about that. American Football works so well because it lends itself to analysis as it’s a play-by-play game.

Entrepreneurs (and up-and-running businesses): What are you good at? Do that.
The great thing about entrepreneurs is that they are on top of the world, and feel they can do anything. The worst thing is that, particularly in the early days when revenue is scarce and as deals fly by because they’re “not quite right”, they feel they can do anything.

Here’s the thing: If you’re a decent team, say, a consultancy, the temptation is to diverge from your goals and do too many things. Pick one thing that you do really well, and do that one. Do it well. Pass on work that isn’t quite right, or better yet, tell the potential client how you’d approach it within your own framework. Be unambigious about how the game is played– that you focus on the ball (metrics, change management, ideas-to-market, etc).

We focus at the intersection of ideas, people, and technology, building organisational capacity to bring products to market.

There were a number of emerging themes through the conference, and not necessarily the ones you might think– access to finance, more capital, education.

Nope. What came up again and again was:

TIA
This is Africa. Sometimes problems can seem overwhelming. I have talked about this before, but it bears repeating. My take on it: Break the problems down, solve what you can. Innovate around what you can’t.

Open Source/Open Platforms
FrontlineSMS, Android, Ubuntu Linux– these give you the tools and abilities to build cost-effective, replicable platforms that won’t break the bank. For all the thrill of open source technology in Silicon Valley, the true innovation may come in Africa, where stuff like Microsoft’s failing ability to register its software (due, admittedly, to fighting rampant software piracy) may mean that the sotware is unusable.

Open platforms create frameworks and fertile ground for new innovations. Enough said.

Turn up and do something… and listen when you get there.
The power of doing something, getting over your own inhibitions, going, turning up, is far more important than your ability to make a big, great plan.

On the other hand, the developing world works differently than it does in the developed world. Teddy Ruge of Project Diaspora.suggests getting a member of the diaspora on your team. In whatever case, however, listening is critical. Go. Take a risk. See what works. Give yourself permission to fail, early and often, and learn from your mistakes.

Africans have the solutions to African problems.
You know a lot, but you don’t know the context. Africans can solve African problems– this is the difference between Busines Incubation projects around entrepreneurship and NGO projects– Incubators should offer mentorship rather than direction. The essential difference is that mentorship offers assistance to someone to help them do what they want to do, rather than demanding that they do what you think they should do.

The flip side to the TIA problem is that it’s important to believe that things get better, that the creative, innovative entrepreneur inside can find a solution to the problem. The flip side to mentorship is the encouragement, so that when your entrepreneur finds a wall, he figures out how to go under, around, or through it– or to turn that wall to her own advantage.