SWOTting social enterprise

There's been some interesting conversation on the web recently about the culture clash between nonprofits and business, which, if you poke around here, you'll see is a subject of some interest to me. Folks who don't think it's an issue really should pay attention; observations such as this are signs of a growing backlash that the social enterprise movement must face if it is to survive.

I know some of you are wondering, hey, Jeff, what's the deal--you're a professor of social enterprise, but you're not all rah-rah like other social enterprise professors. Schizophrenic much?

To which I answer, no, not at all, and for two reasons:

First, I believe it's important as a professor to stand perpendicular to any movement you're studying, even if you think it has value. Social enterprise, nonprofit studies, civil society--one of the things holding these areas back as academic disciplines is that we tend to replicate the same fusion of advocacy and analysis characteristic of nineteenth century first generation sociology. One of the reasons sociology evolved was that professors came to realize that they actually didn't help social movements by merely serving as a mouthpiece for the latest trends. Our value-added, I'm convinced, lies in providing a broader analytical perspective on what's going on.

Which is a nice segue into social enterprise itself. Anyone who teaches business will tell you that an enterprise won't go very far if it doesn't get real about its own situation. Yes, every startup has a moment in the beginning when the founders know they have a cool idea that's going to make them bazillionaires in a month. But to make it work they eventually have to face facts.

In a business plan, a core part of this is the SWOT analysis, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. The strengths and weaknesses sections assess things internal to your organization; opportunities and threats, things outside your control. A startup's chance of success will increase the more it is honest in addressing these issues; the more it pretends that there are no weaknesses or obstacles, the less its capacity to overcome them.

Social enterprise as a movement, sad to say, belies its own entrepreneurial values in refusing to acknowledge its internal weaknesses and external threats. Instead, its foremost advocates and their followers take the position that there are none--everyone who disagrees with them is simply wrong and obsolete. When things are going well it's a heady brew, but getting drunk on success is a straight path to the ditch if you don't sober up soon enough.

One of things that's going to trip social enterprise up is failing to understand nonprofit culture. In fact, another thing that's going to trip up social enterprise is its failure to understand corporate culture. There are commonalities between the two--in this respect social enterprise has positive value--but the movement has by and large not sufficiently identified what these commonalities are. The result is a movement whose lifespan will be limited to that of the entrepreneurial metaphors flourishing amidst an economic boom.

My own aim, to the extent that I have one, is to explain how everything relates. Social enterprise will succeed by making itself obsolete, by functioning as a transitional form that takes us beyond artificial divisions between art and business or faith and finance. No B Corps or cause marketing or social businesses--they're all just a symptom of the very problem that people have been trying to correct for much of the past two hundred years.

What's that problem and what's the solution? Stay tuned . . .