Social enterprise canary in the coal mine

Wow, long day. Fun, though--one of the highlights was talking with a photographer about how the fear of a picture's stealing one's soul could be a metaphorical expression of how people set aside their normal identity when posing for a shot. Fifty or so of the things I intended to note today are sitting in a pile in my file cabinet, and I'm too lazy to look up the articles on the web. Still, there's one I absolutely did not want to leave behind.

It's a quote from today's NYT column by David Brooks on tax cuts and the waning of supply-side economics. The column is interesting enough to a guy for whom reading "The Way the World Works" was one of the pivotal moments of middle school (What can I say? I was a dork), but that's not why I'm writing this post. The following sentence, that's why I'm writing this post:

The entrepreneur is no longer king. The wage-earner is king.

Why does this matter? Well, as I like to say, social enterprise is not so much a movement as a metaphor--it's a rhetorical form whose popularity is in part a function of the Reagan/tech market booms. As that market recedes new modes of expression are emerging--or, more accurately, old modes of expression are re-emerging. More and more people are looking for certainty, not risk.

The ongoing sustainability (ba-dum-bump!) of social enterprise will depend on its adherents' adeptness at adapting to this environmental change.

GLASS HALF EMPTY EXTRA:

Ah, what the hey--here's another one. Scott Shane has a nice write-up of the top ten myths of entrepreneurship over at Guy Kawasaki's blog. Number 8 is one I try to hammer home whenever possible when speaking to social entrepreneurs:

Most entrepreneurs are successful financially.

Sorry, this is another myth. Entrepreneurship creates a lot of wealth, but it is very unevenly distributed. The typical profit of an owner-managed business is $39,000 per year. Only the top ten percent of entrepreneurs earn more money than employees. And the typical entrepreneur earns less money than he otherwise would have earned working for someone else.

If it's true for pure profit players, it's doubly true for folks trying to generate profits in areas of the economy traditionally seen as low return. More on what scale-free networks mean for social enterprise is coming soon.