Mission & Outcomes

Soulful Work – My Interview with Big Life

An interview with Shelly Immel from Big Life, where she helps me cut to the essence of my work on making business a better force for good in the world.

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When Organizational Goals Clash with Social Change Goals

This morning I received an online petition to support changes to US fuel efficiency standards, and the reasons I didn't sign it say a lot about the problems of the social change sector today.

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The Sole of a Business

Shoe repair man, Mr. Lee, teaches me the beauty of business and its ability to be of service to society.

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Netflix Explodes Its Customer Goodwill

Netflix is slowly exploding all its goodwill with customers, through a series of decisions on pricing and reshaping its service offerings. It's been a bad six months for the company, and I don't see things turning around for them again for a while ... if ever. It's too bad. It's a good company that just made some bad decisions.

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Software Will Replace You

Going, going, gone.

Software-based businesses like Amazon and Netflix are rapidly displacing traditional businesses, but it goes much deeper than that. Software will soon replace much of what you do at work - and at lower cost and with better service. The question is - how far will we take this? Will software someday run our companies?

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Social Enterprise and the Renaissance of Local News

All the news that's fit for mission

The old business model for local news is deep in debt and essentially running on fumes. The notion of a truly mission-driven news entity is quite compelling. We see examples of it running quite effectively in the nonprofit world in entities such as YES! Magazine, Grist, and High Country News. While these organizations have editorial voices and geographic territories that make them operationally quite different from a local newspaper, they do paint a picture of what could be possible on a municipal level.

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The Great Unbundling and Collapse of Local Newspapers

Ads evaporating into the Interwebs

The web's unbundling of the local newspaper business model didn't occur all at once, but as a one-two punch of vertical marketplaces for easily aggregated data like car buying, and crowd-sourcing platforms to get at the fragmented, more difficult to aggregate information in local markets. In essence, what the Internet did was enable web-based businesses to cherry-pick the profitable pieces out of the local newspaper's business model. When that happened, the flow of money for reporter salaries came under increased pressure and newsrooms across the US were slowly eviscerated.

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How to Strengthen Your Organization’s Influence Mapping

Lots of targets, lots of influence

Part 4 of 4: Organizations that are permeable are more open to influence from their external environment. That makes them more resilient and able to align themselves with market forces. Being open to influence is only one aspect of permeability, however. The other crucial aspect of permeability is being able to exert influence. As I’ve noted, influence mapping is an important ...

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Influence: the Flip Side of Permeability

I am you and you are me

Part 3 of 4: Doing effective influence mapping isn’t easy, just as creating effective geographic maps isn’t easy. To be useful, the map needs to describe the actual terrain – and for that, you need people who understand how the decisions that impact your desired outcome actually get made. Not how you wish they get made, mind you, but how they actually ...

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5 Steps to Influence Mapping

Influence: getting them to melt in your hands

Part 2 of 4: As Walmart’s move to sustainability illustrates, when you scratch below the surface of most institutional change, there’s usually a handful of relationships that play a disproportionately large role in bringing those changes about. That’s part of the reason it’s hard to truly separate institutional change from personal change. Each of us depends on our ability to create change, and quite ...

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