Are Bankers missing the fairness gene?
Posted by Sharon 7 February 2010
I laughed at Lynne Taggart’s blog about investment banker bonuses being announced in the same weeks that celebrities were trying to drum up donations from regular folk for the Haiti appeal. Most of us are brought up to value fairness - not investment bankers in the USA according to Taggart!
A friend of mine says, “I refuse to allow someone else’s meanness to determine my generosity”, so give now to Haiti if you have a few extra dollars.
Today’s Social Enterprise Ideas
Posted by Sharon 2 February 2010
Ideas for this week.
Check out Fast Company’s list of the 5 Social Capitalists for 2010 and their businesses. From a number of sources I am getting the message that mobile phones and the accompanying connectivity are life changing in rural areas, where landlines are non-existent.
Also check out Better World Books which recycles books.
How were you better today?
Posted by Sharon 27 January 2010
The cute video advertising Daniel Pink’s new book Drive, suggests we ask two questions:
1. “What’s my [epitaph] sentence? E.g. “She loved connecting people with ideas that their growth”.
2. Was I better today than yesterday?” …or the strengths-based version - “How was I better today than yesterday?”
Next Director - what is an NFP?
Posted by Sharon 27 January 2010
I am following a very interesting discussion on the Next Director community discussion on LinkedIn about how a new director can deal with a Chairman who appears averse to the CEO’s moves to shift the organisation from being a “loss leader” to operating on sound business principles.
I like a lot of the comments and found the comment by David Willcox from NEM particularly appropriate and amusing: Not-for-profit is a misnomer and most NFPs “would object if they were referred to as “for loss”. In reality, NFP are ‘not for distribution of their net profits, except in accordance with their constitution’”.
If you are interested in joining the Next Director community send an email to sharon[at]apassion.com.au and I will invite you to the discussion group.
TEDxSydney - the place to be May 22, 2010
Posted by Sharon 31 December 2009
Not one but two conferences to look forward to in 2010.
TED is coming to my home town of Sydney and I’m looking forward to getting involved before and during the event. If you know about TED, click here to find out about TEDxSydney.
If you don’t yet, know about TED, do yourself a favour and check out the TED site for some fabulous talks about “ideas worth spreading”.
Nurturing social entrepreneurs & enterprises
Posted by Sharon 31 December 2009
I’ve just finished a year long Salon for Social Entrepreneurs, in conjunction with Cheryl Kernot from the Centre for Social Impact, Julian Noel from Aware Business and an amazing group of existing and budding social entrepreneurs and supporters. We’ve learned a lot about what’s required to set up and build social enterprises and there’s lots more learning to come as our entrepreneurs put the ideas and contacts into operation.
Last night I finished my paper exploring the year’s lessons, which I get to present at the SLaM Conference: Feb 11-14. The paper attempts to answer to the question I’ve been asked all year when I talk about the Salon - “What do you mean by social enterprises?”
The real lesson for me has been how much I love nurturing and supporting these inspiring people and connecting them with ideas, contacts and access to support.
A new niche is opening for me personally and with A Passion for Results.
Positivity and the Magic Ratio
Posted by Sharon 29 November 2009
We’ve got the golden mean and the 80/20 rule. Now, thanks to Barbara Fredrickson, author of Positivity, we have the magic positivity ratio of 3:1: if you have at least three positives - thoughts, phrases or actions - for every one negative, your life will change for the better.
Medical, psychological, marriage and business research all seem to be converging on a similar prediction - that high performance teams, partnerships and individuals all have in common a three to one ratio of positives to negatives.
Australian Giving Week - give and you get the benefit
Posted by Sharon 29 November 2009
Thanks to Rainforest Rescue for reminding me that this week is Australian Giving Week. A perfect way to start the silly season by doing a big cleanout of “stuff”. As well as the groups listed on the Give Now website, here are two groups that I give stuff to. Please add your favourites to this page or the Give Now website.
Work clothes go to Suited for Work - a not-for-profit organisation that provides clothing, styling, presentation and interviewing support to disadvantaged women to help build their self esteem and support them to gain independence.
Items that aren’t good enough for sale can be listed on your local ReUseIt site - a website for people who have second hand junk that might be someone else’s treasure and who want to see less go into landfill.
Resilience - avoiding the “last straw”
Posted by Sharon 18 November 2009
Here’s an activity to get your team thinking about resilience and supporting others before they reach the “last straw”.
Start by asking whether people have heard the story of the Arab camel owner who was rushing to market and because he wanted to sell as much straw as he could, he loaded the camel’s hump higher and higher and higher until finally with one last piece of straw, the camel collapsed - it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Then ask them to stand in a circle and tell a shared story about a day in the life of the team, i.e. each person describes one incident (and each must be different and true). You can start the story with a bit of a warm up: Just last week I got out of bed and the first thing I did was kick my toe on the door jamb, ouch it hurt Read the rest of this entry »
Complementarity - what it means for organizational change
Posted by Sharon 20 October 2009
In my research into sustainable leadership practices, I have come across some helpful research on “complementarity”, which may provide both an answer to the question of “why does it seem so hard for the average organisation to change?” and potential guidance for organisations who do attempt to make a change, especially a change to being a sustainable organisation.
I first came across the idea courtesy of John Roberts and the Modern Firm and am now perusing the supporting literature.
The essence of the academic idea of complementarity is that variables (in this case organisational performance variables) are complements when “doing (more of) one of them increases the returns of doing (more of) the other” (Roberts, 2004, p34).