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

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.

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.

9th-10th Oct, 2009.

I’ll be speaking about, in general, the challenges that investors and entrepreneurs face in Africa, with a specific focus on my partner organisation Appfrica Labs. Come out if you can.

Details at Africa Gathering and on the EventBrite page.

I’m on at 11 AM on Saturday– and to be quite honest, the lineup of speakers puts me in pretty esteemed company.

Sorry this is late– I’ve just been indundated by the types of things that inundate your life at the end of five months on the road: I hadn’t slept in the same place (and mostly in the same country) for more than three weeks between April and September. A lot of laundry, email management, and general decompressing time needed to happen.

Metrics
MBA-ism is filled with metrics. In fact, there is some research on the impact of metric-heavy MBA thinking on entrepreneurship, and the basic idea is that the two schools of thought are are diametrically opposed.

Dr. Saras Sarasvathy from the Darden School of Business posts her findings at effectuation.org, which broadly suggest that for a certain type of entrepreneur, the whole idea of finding markets, estimating market sizes, and attempting to essentially pre-plan the value of a business is opposite to disruptive models of innovation where marekts are created– i.e., no MBA would have invested in an ice machine because the value of the harvested ice market was too big.

Metrics, Development-style
Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is a tricky, hard thing. It’s a nightmare for lots of international NGOs as the data collection is done from far away, sometimes by people who don’t understand the value of the information they are gathering (Appfrica may be on to something with their new approach to this…).

Now, add to the difficulty of collecting metrics the ability to compare several projects:

- A clean water project
- A new ICT training centre
- A new delivery system for vaccines
- A new collective agriculture scheme

All of these may cost the same, and have variable outputs– some will have smaller effects on more people, others might be drastically transformational for the lives of a very few. How do you compare them? How you choose between them? How do you decide which was more successful after they’ve run?

Measurement metrics
There are a few different approaches to this, many of the latest (ish) are in things like Blended Value and SROI. These attempt to monetise the outputs, so if you increase someone’s productivity (training), then their increased productivity can be measured, turned into dollars, and compared against the increased sales prices that the agriculture scheme generates for its members, and then you report them along with your financial statements. You can add them so that you achieve “profit” in “social returns”. It’s crude but it’s something.

(if you have any better ideas, then by all means suggest away– I don’t think anyone’s particularly tied to these, although they do yield some kind of apples-to-apples comparisons, although the methodologies for each monetisation vary so they end up being apples-to-pears all to often…)

Operational metrics
These are, generally, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These should be the sorts of things that tell you what’s going on while you’re working– cost per vaccine delivery, cost per avoided pregnancy, cost per trained person. This lets you know if you’re on- or off-target, and then you can start to adjust your thinking and approach based on what’s happening in the field.

My question
The question I had with all of this was “What does it all tell you?”

Here’s the thing: Saying you trained 100 people to use the Internet is almost meaningless when you’re 5000 miles away. Saying that you created $50,000 worth of increased productivity is even worse. What you’re trying to get to is a deeper understanding about the effect thatyouvé had on people’s lives.

You want to get to people’s stories. You need the context to know exactly what it means to increase someone’s effective wage $100 a month.

There’s an important thing happening at and around SoCap about creating better, more comparable metrics, but it’s important to not just be stuck in the Excel sheet, but to also communicate what it is that you’re trying to change. There are too many “successful” projects on the ground that achieved exactly what they set out to on the Excel sheet, but didn’t create lasting change.

Strategy professionals take a different tactic: Profits and the bottom line is oxygen. You can’t live without it. A strategy that chases profits at the expense of all else, however, will likely not produce significant profits in the real world.

Think about it. You don’t walk around saying “Where can I find some oxygen?” You move around pursuing your own needs– taking care of the kids, getting to work, minimising time stuck on the Tube, getting the right diet and exercise, and the oxygen is there.

What happens
Companies that pursue profits kind of die. They are too focussed on the short term. They dilute their core service offering and don’t have a core competitive advantage. Imagine if you had a company that cared for lawns. Your strategy is to pursue profits at the expense of all else, but what you know is lawnmower care, maintenance, grass growing rates, fertiliser application, and the transport and logistics required to care for all of this.

Someone comes along and shows you slot machines. These have higher margins. Your strategy is to make the most money possible. You sell your mowers, fire your people, and buy a bunch of slot machines and try to go round and put them wherever appropriate. You don’t know the licensing, bar owners, etc. This isn’t your business. What do you think your profits will do?

Imagine, now, that you have a different strategy: To make the most beautiful lawns in the city. You do your business well. All of your employees take pride in their work. Customers flock to you.

SoCap09
What I’m hearing at SoCap is a lot of thought about impact along with investment– and most of the most interesting people are, broadly, making this point. Figure out what effects you want to see (beautiful lawns) over profit, and find the best entrepreneurs (or social entrepreneurs) that you can to build these businesses, whether they are for-, non-, or aren’t concerned about profits.

Myself and many of my peers, however, don’t really mind. The average Gen-X-er, it is thought, will have 3-5 careers (not jobs) in his or her lifetime (at last! Somewhere where I’m right on target– my third career in my mid-30s). We were called slackers and told we had ADD in high school and in our 20s, but in all actuality (or at least from my perspective), we are the first wave of constant learning and constantly changing what we do.

The old way
My grandmother was born in 1907. She was one of eighteen children because it was the tail-end of an agrarian economy where children’s lives were often too short. There weren’t cars. If my grandmother were in the UK, she’d have been using shillings and guineas.

The people of my grandmother’s time have had to deal with decimalisation, the shift to the metric system, world wars, an end to protectionism, the rise of a globalised economy (twice), the great depression, the end of banking hours, the introduction of ATMs, credit cards, chip-and-pin systems, push-button phones, mobile phones, computers, the Internet (my grandmother stopped here– mobile phones were enough) and more.

…And now
You may notice on this list that, as these new introductions have come closer to the present day, they have gotten closer and closer. Disruptive innovations are a huge driver in the economy, from google to facebook to email to twitter to openid to SOAP to java, we have to deal with new things all the time– new modes of interaction, new tools that we love to joke how they “simplify” our lives (we have to email, blog, and tweet)

How many things have you had to learn in your job? Word. Excel. Powerpoint. (and the new interfaces) Salesforce. Gmail. SharePoint. Your VPN. Your SecureID fob. IM. Skype. The new phone system. The fiddly expense form. The new reporting system on the Intranet. The TPS report forms.

Not only that, but the rules are changing faster and faster. In accounting, there’s XRBL, new and changing IFRS, and new laws coming in every market due to the financial crisis.

In software development, there are always new frameworks and companies are reinventing themselves so quickly that much software is released as “beta” these days. Gmail has just come out of beta after five years.

Modes of charity, development, and giving are changing constantly– almost too fast for us to keep up.

Your job
You have a single job: this job, if you are broadly a professional, is to learn. Constantly. Not necessarily in school, although we do see more people going to school later in life and schools like the Open University reporting increased enrollment.

Economist subscriptions are up, even as newspaper subscriptions are down. Chart-topping books include social psychology by Malcolm Gladwell, economists like Steven D. Levitt, and statistics books like Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

What opportunities does this open up? How does this change the game? Branding? How you prepare for your career? What you want from life?

The difference in Zimbabwe from the last time I was here six month ago is palpable. And the country is, quite simply, beautiful. It’s not the water world that Uganda is, but it’s well-appointed with water and could quite easily take its place back as the Breadbasket of Africa.

Why on earth was I tempting cholera and fuel shortages in order to go to Harare now, in the middle of winter (without even a proper jacket– it was about 8 degrees Centigrade)? Mobile Transactions has been developing a electronic voucher product that could be of huge use in agricultural subsidies, which can help support and grow markets rather than undercutting local businesses with subsidised imports. The problem with vouchers is the liquidity issue– shops need to purchase inputs and then collect vouchers to get paid for them– which may take months. With an electronic account, distributors can be credited instantly– and the voucher scheme operators get to monitor the usage of their vouchers in real-time, adapting the program as they see fit and as needs are required, including running different types of vouchers in different areas.

The trip
TIA did rear its head, a bit. Our assistant didn’t get the proper paperwork to export our vehicle in time, so we couldn’t drive across the border (we were a bit concerned as the fuel in the tank was *probably* just enough to get us to Harare and back to the border. Loads of people sell fuel– potentially cut with water, cooking oil, or whatever– near the border but we would only risk it if required.

We decided to go ahead and cross “by foot” as they say, and hire a taxi on the Zim side. The only issue– no taxis. Busses would leave from Lusaka but wouldn’t stop at the border. We were advised that hitching was our only option.

The very nice official, however, who issued us our visas told us to talk to his friend the guard at the exit gate, who hooked us up with a truck (labeled of course “no unauthorised passengers”) who took us to Harare for $10US, getting us there just in time for our meeting.

Dollarisation
Zim’s been switched to US Dollars, although South African Rands, British Pounds, Euros, and Botswanan Pula are widely accepted. Prices are quoted in dollars and change (if any) will be given in Rands or Pula.

Prices have actually stabilised a bit– The latest inflation figures I’ve seen put it at -1%.

Things aren’t all rosy, however. Huge settling has happened in the economy which is good, but the outlook is bleak, if tinged with a bit of hope. Just a bit, though. The general sense is that things are going to get better, but not after they get a bit worse.

Stores are closed. Fuel lines are common (though less so a couple of months ago)– Americans who remember the fuel crisis in the 70s may recognise this:

That’s a filling station on the left, and a huge queue for a minibus in front.

What next?
We exited the country after a single 2 hour meeting, twenty-nine and one half hours after entering. Even for me an dmy ridiculous amount of travel, this is a new record (the previous was about 50 hours in Kenya).

Mobile Transactions thinks that there’s huge potential in Zimbabwe: It’s got smart, driven people, and a desperate need for liquidity. It’ll be a while before Mobile Transactions can perform its core business, but MT are keen on and hopeful that they may be able to run their voucher programme and reduce transaction costs rather significantly.

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I’m working with Mike on his pitch for SBSVC. He don’t exactly need capital, but it’d make AEP move faster, further, and achieve profitability sooner.

The early-stage companies that I’m working with, has got me thinking, as I always do, about the market and landscape here in sub-Saharan Africa, most of the same problems and issues that entrepreneurs face back in Silicon Valley, London, New York, or Asia– they are just magnified here.

Venture capital
There are a lot of misconceptions around venture capital and angel investing. Most entrepreneurs go out looking for the largest possible cash flow at the lowest valuation, without considering what else the VC might bring to the table, i.e.

Experience
Contacts
Networks
Advice
Business
Modeling

These are just a few of the things. Most VCs (the only ones I’d want investing in me) have experience as entrepreneurs and at running businesses. Most of what I see as the big failures in VC from the past– I lived & worked through the heart of the dot.com and the Web 2.0 bubbles– have been, broadly, the fault of having the wrong investors. Kozmo.com being the prime example– some guy with an Excel spreadsheet thought they should take this FMCG service company and sell Palm Pilots at a huge markup.

The VC should be the person who, once they’ve picked you as an investee, will do the right things to make the pie bigger. It doens’t matter so much if you give her huge equity slices; she should work to make the pie big enough so that all parties have more actual cash.

Partner
One of the women I’m pre-screening as a p0tential investee is a fascinating woman. She’s lived and worked all over the world, but is here in Uganda and has invested heavily in a fish farm. Fish farming is controversial worldwide, but here in Uganda the fish that are typically farmed are catfish and tilapia– two of the “OK” fish to farm (low resource usage, high tolerance for variable conditions, etc).

She is excited about the opportunity to work together on an equity basis, in partnership.

Mentor
Mike had originally been using the term “Venture Search” for our model, but it has a fairly specific meaning that is tangential to, rather than describing exactly, his business model.

I like the term “Mentor Capitalist”: Provide many of the benefits of a traditional VC, but in a more hands-on fashion. Provide network breadth while the VCs provide depth.

Building markets
The market for angel investing and venture capital has to spring from the fertile ground of entrepreneurship; entrepreneurs, however often need start-up capital. In some cases– in the cases where AEP is trying to work– tilling that entrepreneurial soil to attract interested investment capital and a new network of angel investors, setting up a virtuous cycle.

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