1- do not wait for a revolutionary idea, the idea of your life will never happen, just focus on a simple exciting empty space you see and execute as fast as possible 2- share your idea as much as possible, the more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors. 3- build a community around you through blogging and social software 4- listen to your community, answer questions and build your product with their feedback, involve bloggers as early as possible and get their feedback, if negative, adapt your product permanently 5- gather a great team with a very different skill set than yours, look for people who are better than you without being afraid of it 6- be the first to recognize a problem or a mistake you have made. Never hide it behind the carpet. Address the issue in public, learn and correct it. 7- do not spend time on market research, but launch as early as possible in alpha or beta versions. Keep improving the product in the open. 8- do not focus on a large spreadsheet business plan, you are so sure it is not going to happen anyway 9- do not plan huge marketing, growing with your community loving the product is much more powerful 10- do not focus on getting rich or selling your company, focus on your users, money is a consequence of success, can't be a goal
"California No Drive Day on April 29, 2007. Give yourself and the planet a breather -- be incredibly creative in how you get somewhere that day or be incredibly lazy and go nowhere."
Please, if you live in California, don't drive on April 29, 2007. That's a Sunday. Take a rest. Thanks, Nora Gallagher Patagonia Environmental Editor
“Entrepreneurs create their businesses for a diversity of reasons. However, I believe that most of the greatest companies in the world also have great purposes which were discovered and/or created by their original founders and which still remain at the core of their business models. Having a deeper, more transcendent purpose is highly energizing for all of the various interdependent stakeholders, including the customers, employees, investors, suppliers, and the larger communities in which the business participates. While these deeper, more transcendent purposes have unique expressions at each business they also can be grouped into certain well known and timeless categories. Philosophy dates back to Plato; the timeless ideals of “The Good”, “The True”, and “The Beautiful” that humanity has been seeking to create, discover, and express for thousands of years. If we add the ideal of “The Heroic” to the above three we have the framework of higher ideals which most great businesses seek to express in some form or fashion.”
"The revolution really has started," says Yvone Chouniard with a slow, curling and just slightly subversive smile. "I'm blown away by Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart does one-tenth of what they say they're going to do, it will be incredible. And hopefully America will get a government that we need rather than one we deserve, that will put pressure on business to clean up its act. But the most powerful pressure will come from the consumer. Oh, my God, it's going to be really powerful."
As Chouinard sees it, there's only one downside to this good news: It's probably too late. "There's a race between running out of water, topsoil or petroleum. I don't know what's going to be first. Or maybe it will all happen at once."
Wal-Mart’s CEO launched “Sustainability 360,” an initiative that involves working with suppliers to reduce packaging by 5% by 2013 – an effort that will be equal to removing 213,000 trucks from the road, and saving approximately 324,000 tons of coal and 67 million gallons of diesel fuel per year. Wal-Mart's six path strategy focuses on its own environmental footprint and that of its 60,000 suppliers. It has big ambitions to cut the waste sent to landfill, build more energy efficient stores and take "a hard look at what is on our shelves". The question is: are these thousands of suppliers genuinely trying to understand what sustainability really is? Or are they only changing their practice just enough so as to maintain Wal Mart as a client? If Wal Mart is strict enough in its policy, and keeps setting higher sustainability standards, does it really matter if suppliers only go after Wal Mart business or if they truly embrace the sustainability phylosophy? I believe one leads to the other, many companies like Patagonia, Interface, Natura, American Apparel have found the benefits of sustainable Business practices. Currently, Wal Mart and its suppliers are on the way to discovering this.
Paul Hawken, The author of the Ecology of Commerce, defined in a recent interview that "Sustainability comes when the light bulb goes on and you start to see that we are all involved, that everything is interconnected that your actions affect others", and when we do see this, you longer ask, or discuss, if it is right or wrong, you look for a solution.
100 million customers visit Wal Mart every week, many light bulbs should go on in their stores.
Yvon Chouinard lists Patagonia's values, and with them five steps to action> They are I believe, the five best actions to reach sustainability.
STEP 1: Lead an examined life. Most of the environmental damage human’s cause is a result of ignorance. STEP 2: Clean up your act. Once you learn the environmental costs, try to reduce them. And when you can reduce them, you must. STEP 3: Do your penance. No matter how diligent a corporation, it causes waste and pollution. STEP 4: Support civil democracy. It’s obvious that governments and corporations hold a lot of power, but so do small groups of people who care passionately about an issue and press their cause.
STEP 5: Influence other companies. If you undertake the other steps, this one is a natural. The company that discovers new ways to be more environmentally responsible has an obligation to spread the word to others – to share the knowledge of what can be done.
At this moment Wal Mart is leading the influence movement on other companies, 60,000 of them!.
I have just discovered a new term in Yvon Chouniard's book "Let my people go surfing". A concept I had never seen applied before, at least for the human race.
Survivability.
To those that have come to understand the philosophy of sustainability, our greatest fear is that this term, could evolve into a more complex and irreversible situation, much beyond unsustainability. This more "complex situation" has just been presented to me as: Survivability.
These three forces –the revolution of the social sector, sustainable development and the participatory media– converge in the dawning of the 21st century to generate a radical change in the way we communicate, do business, and cooperate with the rest of mankind. Each of these currents in turn drives the growth of the others.
The “tipping point”, that moment in which something that is unique will become commonplace, is very near. The signs are out there for all of us to see.
Ordinary people’s participation in the media cannot be turned back. While YouTube, Current TV, and AOL are supplying them with simple publication and edition tools (for blogs, photos, and videos), mainstream sites like those of BBC and CNN are demanding contents created by this rising and powerful army of citizen journalists.
From participatory journalism to interactive advertising
People who increasingly participate in the communications media question and reject unidirectional advertising. And the phenomenon is on the rise. The new individual become global citizen participates and browses the Net as part of his daily activities. He connects when and how he likes. He demands a new relationship with companies and the manner in which the latter promote the sales of their products. Accustomed to conversation (permalink), this individual asks to engage in dialog with companies and expects to be heard by them.
Companies that progressively adopt sustainability practices will be the ones able to engage into and sustain an authentic dialog with their clients. Those that have grasped the fact that, in order to stay successful, they must change their way of extracting raw materials and producing – and reduce their impact on both the environment and humans.
There are myriad consumers looking for corporate information on the Web, talking among themselves about the products they consume and the history behind such products, and reading company blogs. The post on Kryptonite the padlock manufacturer is one of many proofs of the existence of a watchdog community operating via the Internet. They observe, share information, denounce and reward the companies they identify with.
Conscious consumers are creating communities where they review the impact of corporate behaviour (check dotherightthing.com)
The power of networks
The new participatory media is making an unprecedented impact on the social sector as well. Online communities are the natural ecosystem in which change-makers multiply. The tools for this are out there and within everyone’s reach. Thanks to the use of available technologies, every day there arise more people who –like Rodrigo Baggio and Iqbal Quadir– create their own networks for social transformation.
As Bill Drayton said in words quoted above, “if we multiply the number of change-makers from 1% to 20% in the next fifteen years, that will be the most radical change ever witnessed since the agricultural revolution.” The participatory media will have achieved that – and more.
25% of Internet users participate in online communities. Glocalization ensures that, after conversing for hours with people from all over the world who share his interests, the new individual goes out to the street and starts building a commitment towards his neighbors, school, club, and community.
The new Internet, the Web 2.0 (blogs, vlogs, permalink, free software), is creating a space for conversation and universal community. Wikipedia and Ohmy, for their part, have shown that when the community claims ownership of the media, there grows a bond of trust that gives rise to a universal intelligence – where joint striving for the common good and collective building eradicate bad practices.
Our future lies in the weaving of virtual networks, held together by common values and issues. Social participation and sustainability are clearly two dimensions deeply related to awareness, responsibility, and growing commitment. And, faster than we can even begin to envision, the world is heading in that direction.
The media is here and the truth is out there. This conversation has only just begun.
As an alpinist who set out to make gear for my friends and never thought of myself as a “businessman” until long after I became one, I’ve wrestled the demons of corporate responsibility for some time. Who are businesses really responsible to? Their shareholders? Their customers? Their employees? None of the above, I have finally come to believe. Fundamentally, businesses are responsible to their resource base. Without a healthy planet there are no shareholders, no customers, no employees. As the conservationist David Brower liked to say, “There is no business to be done on a dead planet.”
But what does behaving responsibly to the environment mean? It took me nearly 25 years in business to learn how to ask that question. It has taken another 15 years of trial and error to uncover the process that Patagonia – or any environmentally minded company – has to go through in pursuit of answers. I think I know how to break that process down to five steps. These steps apply to individuals as well as to companies who want to reduce the harm they do and make a difference.
STEP 1: Lead an examined life. STEP 2: Clean up your act. STEP 3: Do your penance. STEP 4: Support civil democracy. STEP 5: Influence other companies.
Conclusion
In the end, Patagonia will never be completely socially responsible, nor at any time soon be able to make a totally sustainable (“cradle-to-cradle” recyclable) product. We have a long way to go and we don’t have a map – but we do have a way to read the terrain and to take the next step, and then the next.
The Patagonia Catalog might be the best example of creating environmental awareness while marketing products.
Patagonia's 2006-2007 campaign is devoted to de Ocean, In the catalogs, retail stores and on the Web site, they analyze the” vitality of human life and the marine environment".
The recent spring catalog has two very good stories about the human impact on the ocean's degradation.
This is an excerpt of The eye of the Marlin by Dick Russell.
Not so long ago, the ocean's bounty of seafood was believed limitless. Today, the United Nations reports that 75 percent of the world's fish populations are being overfished. Over 3.5 million fishing vessels scour our oceans, utilizing high-tech gear. "Factory" trawlers ensnare 120,000 pounds of fish in a single scoop of the net. Their impact on the seafloor is like fishing with a bulldozer that tears through fragile coral reefs.
Vessels that set 100,000 miles of longlines – holding nearly 5 million hooks – kill over 90 percent of the billfish. Marlin are considered "bycatch" and thrown back dead into the ocean. Both white and blue marlin will soon be on the endangered species list. The majestic bluefin tuna is on the verge of extinction in the western Atlantic, the victim of seines, harpoons and traps. An estimated thousand dolphins and porpoises a day drown in tuna nets.
Yunus affirms business schools should start turning out social-business MBAs trained in creating social returns: "People say, 'Don't be stupid.' I say there are a lot of stupid people like me. I don't want to make money. Lots of young people don't want to make money, because their mother, their father made so much money. They don't know what to do with their lives. There are many such kids in the U.S. They don't have any challenge left. Give them the challenge: Fix the world. Create a social business enterprise."
"The new wave in business is, forget corporate social responsibility and philanthropy - how do you integrate this into your core business?" says Yunus.
"The idea Danone has of creating a social dividend for shareholders - that's cutting-edge. No one else has come up with this interesting a model. It supports your brand, returns your capital, you're not going to lose money and you give your shareholders a vision of doing something good." he says.
In the fall of 2005, Yunus invited Danone CEO Franck Riboud to come to Bangladesh and build his first social business enterprise. Riboud listened, then agreed. The yogurt Danone would make would be fortified to help curb malnutrition and priced (at 7 cents a cup) to be affordable. All revenue from the joint venture with Grameen would be reinvested, with Danone (Charts) taking out only its initial cost of capital, about $500,000, after three years.
"I am destroying the culture, yes," Yunus says, beaming mischievously at the thought. "Culture is a dynamic thing. If you stay with the same old thing over and over, you don't get anywhere."
The same applies to Yunus's concept of microcredit. Sticking with the same old idea over and over only gets you so far. To really get somewhere, Yunus says ... well, there's this Big New Idea.
Last summer the practice water skiing on some Patagonian lakes suddenly went out of control. A significant increase of tourism, the economic reactivation combined with state deflated gas prices summoned, on any given sunny day, dozens of outboard motor boat fanatics. Powerboats took a preference to the wind-shielded, still waters of the Morenito.
The ecosystem was deeply impacted as the natural habitat of black-necked swans and rainbow trout gave way to oily and raucous sketches of risky crisscrossing wave trails. While authorities were well aware of the situation they acted obliviously to the many letters of eco conscious neighbors, kayakers and fishermen.
The impact of Cybermedia. YouTube changed everything; all I had to do was to post this short video describing a normal summer day.
Suddenly the reality was there, accessible to anybody anytime. Over a thousand visits to Youtube echoed the mails that people were interchanging on the matter. In no time, the video link was reaching the local authorities. Not just another complaint letter to be filed in a drawer. Two months after the video was posted the practice of waterski on the Moreno lake was banned altogether.
The video.
The Municipality resolution.
A letter sent by a neighbor describing some of this summer events.
Hi Ernesto,
Just wanted to thank you for all you have done to recover the tranquility of our Morenito!
Your campaign was successful; there was no skiing in the lake.
Things were rather funny: the day after you left (and during my siesta...) a group of 4 boats arrived jointly, took as base Scioli's place and started skiing. One boat even stopped at your floating sign and spray painted it.
Well, some 5-6 kayaks showed up trying to stop them. I jointed, with Marina, in our gomon - camera and Prefectura's resolution in hand. We had some very unpleasant discussions with the Sioli's friends and a tough (but more or less reasonable) conversation with this Repetto guy. They finally left.
Susana Jimenez organized for the next day a visit of Prefectura. They showed up by boat and car. Whilst the boat patrolled the area, Susana visited with the Prefecto Some neighbors. Since than Prefectura comes once a week.
The other day, apparently a newcomer, started skiing and immediately an armada of floating devices covered the lake. We saw these people never again.
Doubtless all neighbors appreciate the new situation, it is wonderful to see the lake with sometimes more than 25 windsurfer, rowing boats, canoes etc, plus people swimming without fear.
Susana than also invested a bottle of nail polisher to clean up your sign.
When we left it was common knowledge in Llao Llao that the Morenito was off-limit for skiing, actually plenty of outside kayaks come to visit.
As the Web evolves beyond 2.0, thank to open source participative software, people are finding each other online around shared interests, and although these thousands of active communities are not tangible, they are real, this is a not virtual phenomenon as many assume. Geography is been redefined and becoming totally irrelevant as a Brazilian organic grower starts sharing real time information and content in an extremely efficient knowledge created partnership with a New Zealand farmer who shares his same passion. This goes further than getting information from Wikipedia, it is no longer about downloading content, people are grouping in specialty communities revolutionizing decision making processes in a way it never seen before. Consumption, production and communication patterns are changing as people, influenced by others they trust online, share news, information create a collective intelligence and constructive partnerships. Since this is a web occurrence, most people are not aware of the enormous activity that is taking place online, since in our “real” world everything flows as usual, but we are about to get our heads up when Technorati will soon announce 100 million registered bloggers and MySace 200 million users online. Since the demographics are so overwhelmingly young and the Millennials are not in power positions, we are not experiencing yet any real transformation in behavioral patterns nor corporate changes. But these adolescents, that are now partying online, will soon be making corporate, political, and consumer decisions in the real world. They are accustomed to watch little television, and since they access the news online they seldom read newspapers. They do not respond to traditional marketing campaigns or advertisers. They respond to each other. Their trendsetters are their peers on MySpace, people who they trust. Opposed to us, the boomers, they are not to be influenced by mass media, they decide for themselves. They are accustomed to the constant exchange of ideas online; therefore corporate communications will have to change dramatically in order to dialogue with, and between, these new stakeholders. As these increasing online communities seem to build themselves around common interests and goals, companies that want to develop relationships, will have to open up and integrate management, employee and customer blogs into a common blogosphere where product, corporate responsibility and customer information will be shared in Wiki like platforms. Stakeholder’s active participation will probably outgrow customer reviews, and powerful new models of production and consumption will be created based on a new integration of community collaboration and self-organization.
Social entrepreneurs are essentially individuals who have decided to face by themselves the answers to problems afflicting their communities, and to do so by applying the same vision and determination for achieving goals that characterize businessmen and –women.
Bill Drayton has accurately defined those people as “persons possessed by an idea, who, by means of unquenchable determination and revolutionary ideas, are solving problems around the globe.” Like himself. Like Rodrigo Baggio, Iqbal Quadir and Fabián Ferraro, who transformed football into a tool for the social inclusion of kids from low-income neighborhoods.
Bill Drayton: “The most radical change”
“How do you intend to put your initiative into effect? How will you manage to make others join you? How will you do it?” How, how and how. The kind of question theorists hate, but which obsesses Bill Drayton and all entrepreneurs of his kind.
Drayton, an American, studied in Harvard, Oxford and Yale and was a member of President Carter’s administration in the EPA. Almost thirty years ago, influenced by Gandhi, the American civil rights movements, and his own travels in India, Indonesia, and Venezuela, he reached the firm conclusion that everywhere in the planet there were people who thought that their ideas could improve the world significantly. It was the passion and enthusiasm expressed by those people that persuaded Drayton that every one of them was a social entrepreneur, a catalyst for large-scale social transformations. And this is what he had in mind when in 1980 he revolutionized philanthropy by eliminating the words “non-profit” and “donations” from its vocabulary and creating Ashoka, the organization of which he is both president and CEO.
During its twenty-five years’ existence, Ashoka has supported 1,700 people in 62 countries – people Drayton defines as social entrepreneurs, using the latter word to signify their ambitious, competitive characters, which one would rather expect to find in the business world than in this area.
“Magical opportunities are out there for everyone willing to face the challenge and go for a social solution,” he affirms, adding that “if we allow people the deep satisfaction of being able to contribute, of feeling they are total citizens, they will love it, because it’s contagious. We are nearing that end: if we multiply the number of change-makers from 1% to 20% in the next fifteen years, that will be the most radical change ever witnessed since the agricultural revolution.”
Rodrigo Baggio: Everything started with a dream
A dream in which slum kids transformed their reality by means of informatics. The year 1993 was drawing to a close and the dreamer was Rodrigo Baggio, at the time an employee of IBM and bound to be featured a couple of years later on the cover of Time magazine as one of 50 youths likely to change the world in the Third Millennium.
Baggio created the Committee for the Democratization of Informatics (CDI), an entity that currently has branches in 10 countries and has already introduced more than 500,000 youths to the use of new technologies.
“How can we use information technology as a means for transforming our society into a more just, equitable, and free one?” he asked himself at the beginning. In 1994 he started the first computer-donation campaign Latin America had ever seen. “We received the computers from companies and delivered them to low-income neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro. But then I started thinking about a model school of informatics and civil education.”
What Rodrigo immediately realized was that, in order to make a real change, he needed to replicate the school he had created in one Rio de Janeiro neighborhood in the hundreds of other slums or low-income areas of the region. Aware that he clearly couldn’t do it on his own, he decided to work jointly with the communities, creating a simple franchising system that could be autonomously developed in different parts of Brazil. It was then that he made the fundamental decision of trusting this project in the poorest areas of his country and gave local leaders the responsibility of making the schools work.
“We believe that through our schools we help young people help themselves,” Baggio says.
Meet Rodrigo Baggio
Iqbal Quadir: “Connectivity is productivity”
Thus the motto of this entrepreneur who grew up in the rural areas of Bangladesh. A motto that in 1997 led him to seek answers for the telecommunications problem of his country, where one had to wait over ten years to have a phone installed, and that at a cost of USD 450, one of the highest in the world.
Combining state-of-the-art digital wireless technology and the Grameen Bank’s experience in granting micro-loans, Quadir created Grameen Phone and launched the Village Phone program. His aim: to increase the non-urban, low-income population’s access to communications, by means of the introduction of mobile phone terminals managed by rural operators, preferably women.
Community telephones have been installed in 40,000 villages since the program’s inception, which means that 50 million peasants are connected.
Telephones are used, among other purposes, to exchange information about health issues and product prices. “Not only is the program socially beneficial, it is profitable as well. It has also represented a significant increase in the Bangladeshi communities’ economic activities, promoted commercial exchange, and created new sources of income,” Quadir explains, adding that “the economic impact is also relevant with regard to the person managing the telephone service: rural operators are usually women who, thanks to their jobs, can be the source of about 25% of their homes’ income.”
Fabián Ferraro: “The wonderful thing is to see the changes”
“… and see how kids start changing their personal appearance, their way of acting, their vocabulary – how they respect each other, want to improve their lives and start having hopes. It is with these kids that we have to work, because it’s them who are going to make the changes,” says Fabián Ferraro, who lives in Chaco Chico, a densely populated neighborhood in the Buenos Aires suburbia where many of the 6,500 residents are unemployed. Like many Argentinean young men, Fabián had played football since he was a kid, and soon after started playing it professionally. It was around this time that he began working with street kids. And then, convinced that football could be a powerful tool for social change, he decided to quit professional playing and create the Asociación Civil Defensores del Chaco (“Chaco Defenders”) club.
Says Fabián, “in 1996 we formed a team and started working with fourteen youths. As the club started growing, we began teaching the older ones how to train the younger.” Like Rodrigo Baggio, Ferraro had also grasped that giving responsibility-involving tasks to young people who grew up marginalized and undervalued by their environment could have a real impact on their personal development.
The organization Fabián leads uses street football as a method for social inclusion, violence prevention and informal education for youths in “risk situations”. For some 1,500 children and teenagers, its offices have become a space for having non-competitive fun, for teamwork and collective construction.
Meet Fabian Ferraro
In the words of its founder: “Defensores is no longer a dumping ground. These sports fields and this club that we built jointly with lots of entrepreneurs are a school without walls. This is a space for education, where human values are intensely transmitted.”
Ideas in action
The sheer variety and quantity of social organizations formed by these and other entrepreneurs is glaring evidence of how far these people are from traditional relief organizations focusing on charity: they have new, distinct work methodologies, new concepts – they develop a management style in accordance with their aims and their members are people with very different qualifications and profiles. They are joined by a central idea: that solidarity is not enunciated but practiced; that one must not give away the fish, but teach how to cast the nets; that the common good is everyone’s good and we have to act now.
