February 2008 Archives
Via Earth2Tech:
Less than a week after the New York Times celebrated Texas’ dominant position in wind power, a cool, still day dawned. The cold weather drove residents to crank up the heat, but the lack of wind to turn turbines pushed the state’s electric grid into emergency mode. On Tuesday night, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas cut off power for 90 minutes to those customers who had agreed to accept power interruptions. And it was a full three hours before everything was back to normal.
Jezebel opines on the good, the bad & the ugly of this animal-free collection.
"Social enterprise is charity’s web 2.0—a would-be revolution as open to interpretation as a Rorschach blot. If commentators agree on anything in regard to social entrepreneurship, it’s the lack of a consensus as to what the concept means."
That's the opening of a section from Is Social Enterprise Sustainable?, an article that I'm scheduled to present at the upcoming First International Conference on Social Entrepreneurship and Complexity. It's a subject I've been studying for years and am now scribbling out my conclusions in various forms. I'll link to the articles when I upload them in their entirety; in the meanwhile, every so often I'll post excerpts addressing key issues.
Such as the issue of defining social enterprise. Since taking my current gig as a professor of social entrepreneurship I've been "What is social enterprise?" about every other day, and truth to tell, it's a question I've had myself ever since I first heard the term. My approach to finding an answer has been more that of a historian than evangelist--confusing the two is a sure-fire way to get a result that pleases the partisans but overlooks key flaws.
Here is a summary of my conclusion--well, part of my conclusion anyway, as I explain at length in the rest of the piece. But that will be a matter for another day. For now, here's the sliced-and-diced initial section on defining social enterprise from an early draft; I'll serve up the rest, including references, in a couple or so weeks.
This ad has received steady airplay here over the past few weeks. From the Victrola DJ to the JibJabbish animation to the catchy jingle, it makes me laugh every time it's on. If I were buying a car, I'd drop by if for no other reason than to get NYLIHonda.com to hire the same production studio again.
One of many monastic wine pictures on Flickr.
Ah, for the good old days, when "the crying scandal of the day" was "the brewing of beer and the sale of the same by the Catholic monks of the famous Abbey of St. Vincent." To see how the monks tried to avoid becoming a mainstay in the TMZ Kinetoscopes of 1895, read the New York Times' archival classic Monkish Beer Defended, which is just one of the delightful subjects featured in Joanna Sugden's survey of religious beer.
Speaking of which, law types will no doubt remember a famous case involving monkish alcohol--1961's De La Salle Institute vs. U.S., in which a court held that the Christian Brothers Winery--back then, the largest domestic producer of brandy in the U.S.--did not qualify as a church for purposes of exemption from the unrelated business income tax (in prehistoric times, churches were exempt from UBIT). For key quotes from the case, click the link below:
If you spend a lot of time, um, doing research on the web, you've probably seen the mock video battle between celebrity SOs' Sarah Silverman & Jimmy Kimmel. What you might not have thought about is its significance for social innovation. From today's New York Times:
In a telephone interview on Tuesday, Mr. Kimmel said that the most difficult part of the project was arranging the schedules of the stars featured in his video — they included, in addition to Mr. Affleck, Brad Pitt, Harrison Ford, Cameron Diaz, Don Cheadle, Robin Williams, Josh Groban and Huey Lewis.
“Every once in a while Hollywood rallies itself for a worthy cause,” Mr. Kimmel said. “We saw that with the ‘We Are the World’ video, with ‘USA for Africa’ and after 9/11. This is just the next natural step in that progression.”
The gaggle of celebrities was wrangled by Jill Leiderman, an executive producer of “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” who also performed the not-insignificant task of explaining the premise of the enterprise to the various stars — who, while certainly regular viewers of Mr. Kimmel’s show, might have been at a Hollywood premiere or volunteering at a soup kitchen on the night Ms. Silverman’s video was first broadcast.
A couple weeks ago I wrote about the social benefit of African American cartoonists.
Here's a much more thorough overview: Dart Adams' invaluable two-part survey, Black Like Me: The History of Black Comic Book Heroes Through The Ages, 1900-2008. Above, a sample of 1937's landmark Torchy Brown, highlighting the link between fashion and identity:
Jackie Ormes became the first Black female cartoonist to have a syndicated strip when her creation “Torchy Brown” was published throughout Black newspapers by way of the Afro American Continental Features Syndicate via the Pittsburgh Courier. Torchy was a bright, independent Black woman in a world of Black professionals that looked like human beings and spoke like them as well (about damn time!).
And don't forget one of the web's earliest efforts to bring this history to light: Tim Jackson's Pioneering Cartoonists of Color.
"We must curb international flows of capital," from the Financial Times. Think of the entrepreneurial rhetoric of the past decade, then read this:
If the risk-taking behaviour of financial intermediaries cannot be regulated perfectly, we need to find ways of reducing the volume of transactions. Otherwise we commit the same fallacy as gun control opponents who argue that “guns do not kill people, people do”. As we are unable to regulate fully the behaviour of gun owners, we have no choice but to restrict the circulation of guns more directly.
What this means is that financial capital should be flowing across borders in smaller quantities, so that finance is “primarily national”, as John Maynard Keynes advised. If downhill and uphill flows are both problematic, capital flows should be more level.
What does this mean for the future of social enterprise? I'll be talking about it at this weekend's StartingBloc Institute.
The speaker: Sadaffe Abid, CEO of Pakistan's Kashf Foundation. Ms. Abid knows her stuff & represents the organization well, not just praising its work--a requisite part of making the rounds--but offering a refreshingly forthright analysis of the challenges ahead. That's a strategy that is far more effective in building trust among potential supporters than empty spin, especially when you're working in an environment widely known to be unstable.
For more about Kashf's noteworthy accomplishments, check out its website. Here, since they are issues that arise more globally, are a few of the challenges discussed in the meeting. Note that this is me, Jeff, writing what's below, not Ms. Abid; please blame me for anything you might not like about what follows, especially since much of it is going to be my personal assessment.
- Intractable systemic poverty. In a short but significant aside, Sadaffe noted that while Kashf was able to help a number of women develop their own ventures, the microfinance model was not a panacea; some families are so poor that giving them financial assistance as a gift, not an investment, was more appropriate. This is something that some true believers won't ever concede, but acknowledging it actually strengthens trust in the speaker's assertions about social enterprise.
- The turmoil in banking worldwide, which apparently is leading some banks to dampen their support for microfinance. As I've noted here before, charity is a luxury good--as the economy collapses, we can expect the contours of support to shift, not to mention the contours of organizational rhetoric.
- The political turmoil in Pakistan. Here Sadaffe went into detail concerning the effect of the Karachi riots on Kashf's work, providing concrete evidence of the network's capacity to adapt to violent disruption. Of particular interest to me was the Foundation's decision to suspend repayments in the region for ten days to help loan recipients rebuild. Once again, the Foundation was flexible, not rigorous in applying the entrepreneurial model--a good strategy for maintaining a strong reputation as a truly charitable endeavor.
- Secular legal issues. The Kashf Foundation is organized as an NGO, not a commercial business, which in Pakistan as in the U.S. places some practical limits on what it can do. Kashf looks to be developing a hybrid organizational network, and fortunately it has an established relationship with experienced lawyers.
- Religious law. The prohibition against usury; an imam opining that the organization's support to women violated the principles of Imam--Sadiffe described the issues and how Kashf responds. As anyone who has worked in Islamic regions knows, these are complex issues well worth a breakfast talk of their own.
- And last but not least, men. Women earning more than their husbands is a sensitive issue in the U.S.; it is equally if not more so a potential issue in Pakistan.
Such religious communities typically have a rich metaphorical infrastructure that one can engage to reinforce social enterprise, but it's not a language in which most secular groups are fluent. Difficult ethical quandaries can also arise; one could argue that practices a group like Kashf would not accept--the dowry system, arranged marriage of young girls--are cultural practices to be leveraged in an evolutionary strategy for stable long-term reform, but there's undeniably something about such an approach that punches us square in the gut.
As tends to be the case on this site, there are more challenges here than easy solutions, but judging from Sadaffe's presentation Kashf has been doing an admirable job in providing help to those it serves.
A tried and true tactic of junk mail solicitations is to make the envelope look like it contains a bill.
Above: a fundraising solicitation I've received at work and at home, in which NYC's Museum of Modern Art adopts the same tactic. Sealing the deal: the use of a nonprofit stamp.
My first reaction was, shall we say, rather negative, as stuff like this serves to reinforce the perception of big charity in reductionistic financial terms, a trend that usually ends up with lawmakers imposing new restrictions on more savvily designed nonprofit business.
Now I'm trying to convince myself that it's just a pop ironic commentary on postal spam.
It doesn't look good for our heroes:
Giving to charity has tax benefits. But some chief executives may be unfairly trying to increase the tax advantages in gifts to their family foundations.
That's the implication of research by David Yermack, a finance professor at New York University whose seminal research in 1997 helped unearth the option-backdating scandal nearly a decade later.
In a new study, Yermack finds that chief executives and chairmen of public companies have an uncanny ability to time large stock gifts to their own family foundations directly prior to big declines in share prices. For example, he found that four out of five stock gifts in the week before an earnings announcement were made right before a decline in the price of the stock.
Such gifts, which are exempt from insider-trading rules, typically come right after a run-up in a company's stock price and right before an abnormal 3 percent drop within the following 20 trading days. In comparison, other types of large charitable stock gifts—while also well-timed—come before a smaller 1 percent average drop in share prices.
Of course, the big question is how are these executives able to time their gifts so well?
Insider knowledge is one possibility. If executives know the company is about to release some bad news, they may legally gift stock at higher prices and in turn earn a higher tax benefit while still holding on to the voting power of the shares. That's because most family foundations are run by the executives themselves or close family members.
Evidence supporting this view is that 15 out of 18 donations made following earnings announcements came after the news was good.
Another explanation is that since stock gifts don't have to be reported for long periods after they have been made, executives may be backdating the donations.
This would require collusion on the part of both the foundation and the company. While there is no evidence that this has happened, it is also not difficult to imagine, given what emerged in the investigations into backdating.
A personal tax return claiming a charitable deduction based on backdated gifts "would likely represent tax fraud," says Yermack.
Whites' images of the African-American community all too often mirror our perception of Africa itself--poor, helpless, needing us to intervene.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Throughout the nation's history, a rich array of ventures blending business with social benefit emerged from African American networks, both slave and free. Today Kottke calls attention to one whose influence we still hear everyday:
According to Wikipedia, a rent party is:
a social occasion where tenants hire a musician or band to play and pass the hat to raise money to pay their rent. The rent party played a major role in the development of jazz and blues music.
Further reading suggests that rent parties started in Harlem in the 1910s as a way to offset rising rents.
Harlemites soon discovered that meeting these doubled, and sometimes tripled, rents was not so easy. They began to think of someway to meet their ever increasing deficits. Someone evidently got the idea of having a few friends in as paying party guests a few days before the landlord's scheduled monthly visit. It was a happy; timely thought. The guests had a good time and entered wholeheartedly into the spirit of the party. Besides, it cost each individual very little, probably much less than he would have spent in some public amusement place. Besides, it was a cheap way to help a friend in need. It was such a good, easy way out of one's difficulties that others decided to make use of it. Thus was the Harlem rent-party born....
Either the type spacing in this PSA is poorly designed or the Ad Council wants me to combat cybersquatting.
Last night was tough. Not the Oscars--didn't see the movies, had no personal connection. What really got me was seeing the end of Cafe La Fortuna, a place that, for me at least, has long been synonymous with New York.
How long have I been going there? Here's a clue: it was a cherished haunt back when I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation. So many years, so many changes, with Fortuna wending through them like Theseus' thread.
Places like this are one reason why I bristle at attempts to draw a moral distinction between social enterprise and for-profit business. The opera music playing in the background, the magical garden out back, the decades of historic Met memorabilia decorating the walls--Cafe La Fortuna was a social benefit, a transformative space that brought people together in a refuge from the rush of the now.
But if you look at the obituaries, you'll also see why this community had begun to dissipate before Fortuna's all too sudden closure. That John Lennon was a regular was always quietly in the background, with the occasional John & Yoko photo mixed in with the Carusos. In recent years, though, new owners decided to shift the cafe's identity in an apparent attempt to attract more tourists. After the renovation Lennon souvenirs popped up everywhere--music, displays, wall hangings, even a big screen TV looping his videos & bio.
Fading in the mix: the very communal atmosphere that drew Lennon there years ago.
Even after the shift to Planet Lennon Cafe La Fortuna remained a special space; you just screened out what ownership felt it had to do to bring in a few extra bucks. Nonetheless, as has been noted by others, the number of customers was declining, with the regulars themselves conspicuously drifting away. Now that Fortuna is gone, what we'll miss is not the John tchotchkes or the Yoko wall, but that inestimable feeling of a place apart.
Whenever I hear about the revolutionary innovation of social entrepreneurship, one of the first things that always comes to mind is the Oscars. Jump over to Guidestar sometime and you'll see why. The Academy is a nonprofit trade association exempt from taxation under 501(c)(6), and, as is common, it has a related 501(c)(3). Each year the Academy makes 50 mil+ tax free from licensing the broadcast rights to Oscars, more than enough to fund the Academy's promotion of the movie industry and the charity's own work.
Which isn't to say that social enterprise isn't significant--just that folks haven't figured out why.
Marshall McLuhan used to say that behind every joke is a grievance. Sometimes it takes the form of a popular female evangelical Christian who riffs on housework and husbands . . .
It was easier for me to submit myself to him when I was younger and thinner. . . . But then I got older and gained weight, and it’s harder for me to submit to him. Because basically I think I can take him.
. . . others, the not-quite-happenstance association of a wild-eyed love of laundry detergent with a giant cleaver "made for home use."
The 1970s didn't just produce the creative commerce of musicians such as Devo; it also gave rise to trenchant critiques of mindless consumerism. One of the most iconic: the zombie mall muzak scene in Dawn of the Dead.
One of the things that strikes me about the rising generation is the obliteration of the line between integrity and selling out. The two are harmonized now, with selling out an extension--not a betrayal--of authenticity.
I don't see this as a problem. It's actually consistent with the trend toward total integration that's been unfolding for years.
Here's an illustration of how the current sensibility came to be, from a recent interview with the founder of Devo, Mark Mothersbaugh:
Q: Do you feel that this sort of consumer-based art conflicts at all with the critique of consumer culture that you were doing with Devo?
MM: Not at all. In fact, we used to get criticized back in the early days of Devo because, to us, what we were about, back before it was very cool to be into merchandise, we thought of our album cover as a place where we could do the inner-liner sleeves... as a matter of fact, if you look at any of the old Devo records, our inner-liner sleeves were always a merchandise page. We thought of it like the back page of a comic book where you'd see all the things you could order. Smith-Johnson novelties, stink bombs, baking powder-propelled rockets and X-Ray specks and all that kind of stuff. I loved that page of a comic book every time and I always looked at that stuff and sometimes would order it, and the Devo albums, we wanted them to be like a Cracker Jack box where you'd have a prize in there. I remember in 1978 when we put out our first album, and somehow our manager also managed Neil Young, and I remember Neil Young going, "You guys, I don't know what you're doing bringing merchandise into rock ‘n roll—that's so uncool!" "Of course now, all these years later, he sells a ton of t-shirts and DVDs and things. But at the time he thought it was kind of sacrilegious, and we're like, "You don't understand! This is all fun! Rock ‘n Roll is better than that!" It's like, everything that turned you on when you were a kid, you should still be able to be part of it. So for us, we thought the merchandise just had to be smart instead of stupid. So we tried to do smart merchandise, and I'm still trying to do smart merchandise.
This reprint from a 1943 magazine has prompted the usual gee-aren't-we-enlightened-now responses. But it also sparked this interesting exchange:
- "What idiot came up with the idea of discarding half of the species as mentally unfit to function in civil society?"
- "Psssh... Civil society? Any place that forces people to toil endlessly simply to eat and stay warm is no more civil than any slave or surf wielding society."
And so we learn the origin of Middle Earth's Ents, as Toyota's new environmental sustainability initiative hybridizes humans with trees. Which is just what everyone wants in a carmaker: a vegan Dr. Moreau.
Another topic of discussion in my entrepreneurship class: politicians as social entrepreneurs, with Barack Obama as exhibit #1. Marketers and scholars alike will be studying his methods for years--they're an innovative fusion of contemporary media and old-school Chicago-style micro-organization. And in scenes like those shown here, the effect can be a marvel to behold.
That's the message of this so-bad-it's-good PSA parody of March of the Penguins, which substitutes naked people for the birds. The message the UK's Environmental Agency wants you to get out of it: do the green thing by turning down the thermostat and relying on body heat instead.
Folks in the U.S. should watch this ad with particular interest, because trust me--you'll never see the like from the Department of Energy.
Richard Taylor alerts us to a blog post by an American physics student in England last year at http://fliptomato.wordpress.com about a 1994 paper by M. M. Tai entitled: "A mathematical model for the determination of total area under glucose tolerance and other metabolic curves" (Diabetes Care, vol 17, p 152).
Just what is it about Tai's finding that has made it worth a mention after all this time? As Flip Tomato suggests, let's substitute a variable in the title: "A mathematical model for the determination of total area under x curves". Now, anyone who persisted with mathematics into their late teens may recognise that Tai has reinvented integration. That would be the mathematics of finding areas under curves, as originally devised by Isaac Newton and/or Gottfried Leibnitz - in the 1670s.
To be fair to Diabetes Care's readers, some of those commenting on the article noted this. Even so, Flip Tomato found 75 papers citing what Tai calls "the Tai method", and when Feedback looked there appeared be up to 90 that reference it.
That so many still cite a paper that "discovers" something mathematicians have known for three centuries makes the case, as Flip Tomato notes, for "the importance of interdisciplinary communication".
With that in mind I decided to check out Rickles' recent memoir for further confirmation. And Rickles Book didn't disappoint. Not only does he meet everyone you've ever heard of from 20th century entertainment, he provides a number of anecdotes that illustrate the dynamics of human social systems.
The story I'll probably end up using in class someday comes from the chapter "The Great Summit," in which he explains how he became part of the Sinatra inner circle--the pivotal moment in his life.
Thanks to being a talk show obsessive as a boy I was familiar with Rickles' legendary greeting the first time Sinatra caught his act--"Make yourself comfortable, Frank, hit somebody!"--but what I hadn't known was why Frank went there in the first place.
Turns out that while Rickles was performing in Miami Beach his mom Etta was there too. But she wasn't just soaking up rays; she had her ear to the ground. Here's how Rickles describes what happened:
"Unbeknownst to me, the unstoppable Etta Rickles had discovered that Dolly Sinatra, Frank's mother, was staying at the Fontainebleau. Don't ask me how, but Mom made it her business to meet Dolly.
"My mother was the easiest person in the world to talk to, and Dolly enjoyed her company. After two or three weeks of these get-togethers, Mom learned that Sinatra was about to play the Fontainebleau.
"Two days before Frank's arrival, the Great Etta-Dolly Summit took place. The conference was brief:
"'How long will Frank be here?' Etta asked Dolly.
"'A couple of weeks,' said Dolly.
"'Wonderful,' said Etta. 'It would be great if you could get Frank to go see Don.'
"Not skipping a beat, Dolly said, 'Don't worry, Etta. I'll make sure Frank shows up.'"
And he did. Rickles adds that Sinatra himself confirmed the connection:
"It became the starting point of our long friendship. . . . In later years, he always told me, 'Don, your mom and Dolly were friends. That meant a lot to me. It really did.'"
It's Friday, which means it's the morning after my almost three hour (ack!) Thursday night class. As usual, it was a lot of fun--for me at least--in no small measure because I changed the format from lecture (the official designation, and blah in a florescent-lit room with no windows) to info-gathering-and-discussion. Also didn't hurt that I've been functioning on precious little sleep the past week, which for some odd reason seems to translate not only into -2 intelligence but +4 charisma. Go figure.
One of the things we talked about was the deceptive lure of online ads as the path to profitability, as well the need to adapt to hard reality. Here's one startup's striking experience on that score, via GigaOm:
Peanut Labs, a company that couldn’t find a business as an also-ran social network, took a different route and now conducts market research on social networks using virtual goods to reward survey takers. The San Francisco-based startup said today it has raised $3.2 million from Leapfrog Ventures and BV Capital (which had funded its original and now side project, the social network Xuqa). The Series A-1 round brings the company’s total funding to $4.5 million. Of Xuqa, Peanut Labs CEO Murtaza Hussein said today:
“The CPMs are so low it’s really hard to build a real business unless you have several billion page views and your own sales team. Social networks get 5 to 10 cent CPMs, and less outside the U.S. At one point we were averaging 3 cent CPMs. We figured out if we all got up and worked at Starbucks instead we would make more money as a company than selling 300 million impressions a month of ad space.”
To reiterate what I said earlier, there's a lesson here for web-based social enterprise. Defaulting to Google ads as your source of sustainable revenue is usually not going to suffice.
Her music may be sublime, but I don't think the dress will scale:
The sleek, striking strapless gown was fashioned of brownish-white material decorated with a matrix of triangle shapes. Several long trains in the back and on the sides looked a little stiff and made a crinkly sound as Ms. Lee settled onto the bench with some difficulty, offering self-effacing apologies to her audience.
For a big-picture look at how high-profile carbon footprint reduction efforts can be morally satisfying but not likely to have a substantial impact on the environment itself, check out Michael Specter's Big Foot in the current issue of the New Yorker.