StartingBloc at Yale--slides and notes

Today I had the pleasure of speaking at another StartingBloc Institute, this time at Yale just a few yards from where I used to meet every other Monday with the folks from the University's Program on Nonprofit Organizations--meetings that led me to think about going to law school, which eventually led to this site.

I didn't make the connection just out of nostalgia; my point in the session was that while social enterprise seems all revolutionary and worldchanging now, the same was true back then when folks were touting the civil society revolution and before that, nonprofits as the cutting-edge in administering government welfare programs. From there I did a brief SWOT (well, technically, SOWT) analysis of the social enterprise movement itself to assess whether social entrepreneurship is sustainable or just another fad in a cycle that tends to resolve not in the private sector but the state.

While I have my own answer to this question, I decided that instead of yakking at the SB gang for the whole hour I'd ask 'em what they thought, and I'm glad I did. It was a most engaging discussion, ranging from the ethics of Darwinian competition to the potential dangers of a market-focus to the ways in which a market model can make a charity more responsive to social needs.

Several of the questions hit square on subjects on which I'm currently writing longer articles that will eventually be excerpted on this blog, so if you're interested in Hegel, symbiosis or corporate identity, you might want to check back here every so often, because I'll be addressing those questions soon enough.

I'm going to post the obligatory Powerpoint slides for anyone who's interested, but unless you were there they probably won't make much sense--for example, the Jetsons cartoon may seem nonsensical, but the point was to start with a jokey jab at retro-futures that sequed into asking what future generations will think about the utopian claims made for social enterprise. As for why my slides tend to lack words, well, I've come to use slides for associative iconic reinforcement, not bulleted lines that I read. I'm also lazy as all get out, but please don't tell anyone, because it sounds a whole lot smarter to blame the whole thing on cognitive science. Maybe once I get past next week's deadlines I'll record what I said for the archive, albeit without most of the jokes and all the swears.