families." I wanted to start by acknowledging my wife Randi, who is responsible for me being here, not just by creating the space to allow me to do my work and care for our family, and having been the primary caregiver for our kids. She also carried the financial burden - when we started our first company, she was the only one of the three of us (who started the company) that actually had income. And so, to the extent that we had food on the table, it was because she was employed.While that business grew incredibly rapidly and was quite successful, there was a period there in the back half of it which was also quite painful. There was a Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael sort of schism; a ... posted on Apr 16 2024 (1,643 reads)

boss who enjoys the glories (and bears the burdens) of success all alone. That’s what makes executive life (in theory) so glamorous: Who isn’t eager to match wits with brilliant rivals and stay one step ahead of a complex world? Of course, that’s also what makes executive life (in reality) so exhausting: What happens when rivals come at you from more directions than ever, when markets change faster than ever, when problems loom larger than ever? As a business culture, we’ve made the lure of executive leadership hard to resist—and the job of leadership virtually impossible to do. A harrowing essay in the Atlantic (titled, appropriately ... posted on Jun 17 2013 (26,120 reads)

works on forging ties between her Nepalese staff and her manager in Uganda, the other country where her organisation has saved the lives of thousands of mothers and their children. “If you want to know me,” the former corporate lawyer and banker says as she greets me at the door, a flourish of blonde hair, blue eyes and Nepalese silk, “you have to know me in this context. The truth of me is here, it’s not dressed up in high heels and a business suit in Sydney.” This is the woman who New York-based distressed debt manager Victor Khosla tells Good Weekend has raised hundreds of millions of dollars over the past deca... posted on Oct 28 2013 (29,395 reads)

people who are affected by wars, people affected by discrimination. They come to us for a seven-month course and [then] go back and create social impact within their own community. Knowledge@Wharton: So you are definitely involved in the whole area of social entrepreneurship, which is a pretty hot term these days. What have you found works in this area, and what doesn’t work? Tenberken: First of all, I have a problem with the term social entrepreneurship because people say only business helps to make the world a better place. I don’t really agree. We feel that there are many, many other methods and tools that need to be focused on to make a sustainable difference. Peop... posted on Apr 28 2014 (10,207 reads)

in the workplace, these are symptomatic of a deeper underlying cause – the way we relate with life, and our sense of place and purpose within life. Our relationship with ourselves, each other and the world us, is in desperate need of our dear attention. This way, we move beyond applying the very same logic to our well-intended solutions that created the problems in the first place. For several years now, my focus has been on attending to the relationship our leaders, managers and business change agents have with Nature by exploring how our organizations can be perceived as vibrant emergent living systems that thrive by tending towards harmony with life (regardless of whether t... posted on Apr 3 2017 (11,053 reads)

with the ServiceSpace movement -- because they say, ‘hey, let's do small things, or big things; let's just love and serve others.’ Preeta: So in the prairie where you grew up, there is so much about individualism and finding your own way in the world.  There’s pride about rugged individualism.  How did you find resonance with others or talk about Pay It Forward in that context?  Greg: I think for some it was really hard. I was in the business school where we learned to monetize, maximize profit, return resources for shareholders.... I didn't connect there. I found myself more interested in the international students or people ... posted on Jan 2 2019 (3,222 reads)

You teach this, go to the balcony, to all kinds of people all over the world. Outside of meditation, how do people develop this capacity, this quality?   WU: Practice. We have a chance to practice every single day. All these things, these are lifelong lessons, whether it’s learning to pause or learning to listen to the other side, but they’re natural human potentials that we all have. And I ask audiences, I say to them, the people I work with, all kinds of audiences from business people to unions, to teachers, to students, “What’s your favorite way to go to the balcony?” And everyone has one. I mean, it could be just to breathe, like they teach you i... posted on May 13 2024 (1,993 reads)

and part of the difference between now and the mid-20th century is that — and I don’t want to say we don’t have a moral center of gravity — we don’t have a vocabulary of morality or worth or value, except for the creation of wealth. I’m going to use a wealth analogy: We are really impoverished. Mr. Giridharadas:I would think about this almost as the second hat problem, which is, I think if you were to go back a little bit in time and think about businesspeople in 1950 or whenever, they would always have — in addition to their businessman hat, they’d have a second hat. That hat may just be “strong community member”... posted on Feb 22 2019 (4,856 reads)

1966, a dyslexic sixteen-year-old boy dropped out of school. With the help of a friend, he started a magazine for students and made money by selling advertisements to local businesses. With only a little bit of money to get started, he ran the operation out of the crypt inside a local church. Four years later, he was looking for ways to grow his small magazine and started selling mail order records to the students who bought the magazine. The records sold well enough that he built his first record store the next year. After two years of selling records, he decided to open his own record label and recording studio. He rented the recording studio out to local artists, including one na... posted on Jun 25 2015 (24,381 reads)

worked, and it worked incredibly cheaply. He’s been able to measure that and try it in other cities. It’s even being introduced in Syria right now. This idea of trying creative new approaches, measuring them carefully and tweaking the model in a sort of iterative process to get the most impact you can at the cheapest price is such a powerful model. Grant: What can companies learn from this approach? Social impact is a theme that runs throughout your book, and what do you think businesses should be doing differently based on everything you’ve been learning and studying? Kristof: Businesses tend to approach corporate social responsibility [CSR] as this kind of fringe... posted on Sep 26 2015 (12,221 reads)

her own pace with the support of the community. Most students are coming for practice 3-6 times per week. The third key element of this practice is the relationship between student and teacher. Because practitioners are coming for practice regularly, there’s an opportunity to cultivate deep relationship, and for that relationship to nourish both the student and the teacher. Aurora: What prompted you to start your own studio and how did you overcome the fear of starting your own business? Pranidhi: I was inspired to start my own shala because I felt I had the unique ability to create an environment for practice that was inclusive to all people, regardless of financial... posted on Apr 21 2017 (9,836 reads)

welcome! Scilla Elworthy: I'm delighted to be here with you. Aryae: You've been involved on many levels with peace initiatives in the world in many ways and in so many places. From the ones you're involved with today, what really has the most energy for you right now? Scilla:  When I look back on 45 years of working at the top level of nuclear weapons policy-making, as well as the grassroots locally-led peace initiatives, what has most energy for me right now is the business plan for peace. Nobody's ever done that before.  We all in the peace business know about how much it would cost to actually prevent war worldwide and that's what I wrote about in... posted on Feb 15 2019 (7,468 reads)

winner of the 2019 Barry & Marie Lipman Family Prize at the University of Pennsylvania is World Bicycle Relief, a nonprofit organization that mobilizes people in the developing world by building and distributing rugged bicycles in rural areas where walking is the primary mode of transportation. With help from its business partners, World Bicycle Relief has delivered more than 450,000 bicycles to people living in sub-Saharan Africa and other developing areas around the globe. Wharton management professor Michael Useem, who is also director for the school’s Center for Leadership and Change Management, spoke with Dave Neiswander, chief executive officer of World Bicycle ... posted on Aug 21 2019 (4,463 reads)

Chairperson - Society for Organizational Learning Dr. Peter M. Senge is the founding chairperson of SoL and a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Senge is the author of The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. He has lectured extensively throughout the world, translating the abstract ideas of systems theory into tools for better understanding of economic and organizational change. He has worked with leaders in business, education, health care and government. The Journal of Business Strategy (September/October 1999) named Dr. Senge as one of the 24 people who had the greatest influence on business strategy o... posted on Aug 28 2011 (11,543 reads)

Korean shop owner and her wares. Photo: David Stanley. What do coffee growers in Ethiopia, hardware store owners in America, and Basque entrepreneurs have in common? For one thing, many of them belong to cooperatives. By pooling their money and resources, and voting democratically on how those resources will be used, they can compete in business and reinvest the benefits in their communities. The United Nations has named 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives, and indeed, co-ops seem poised to become a dominant business ... posted on May 30 2012 (9,521 reads)

almost incomprehensively ambitious vision unsupported by any sort of business plan may sound like a vision doomed to fail. Yet more than 35 years after the first Aravind Eye Clinic was set up in South India, Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy’s (Dr. V) mission to eliminate curable blindness in the country is surpassing even the most optimistic expectations. This excerpt from Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the World’s Greatest Business Case for Compassion describes how a precisely defined set of creative constraints, including never refusing to provide care, never compromising on quality, and never relying on outside funding for patient services, became t... posted on Jun 10 2013 (47,953 reads)

this is 1979: If you were reading this article back then, chances are you would have read it on paper — with a printed newspaper or magazine in your hands. Today, you are probably reading it on a desktop computer, a laptop (or as a printout from either of these), or perhaps even on your Blackberry or iPhone. The pace of innovation has been so hectic in recent years that it is hard to imagine which innovations have had the greatest impact on business and society. Is it possible to determine which 30 innovations have changed life most dramatically during the past 30 years? That is the question that Nightly Business Report, the Emmy Award-winning PBS business program, and Knowl... posted on Nov 17 2013 (35,777 reads)

and other world regions. The internet is awash with articles and websites that celebrate the vast potential of sharing human and physical assets, in everything from cars and bicycles to housing, workplaces, food, household items, and even time or expertise. According to most general definitions that are widely available online, the sharing economy leverages information technology to empower individuals or organisations to distribute, share and re-use excess capacity in goods and services. The business icons of the new sharing economy include the likes of Airbnb, Zipcar, Lyft, Taskrabbit and Poshmark, although hundreds of other for-profit as well as non-profit organisations are associated w... posted on Mar 2 2014 (11,504 reads)

Elisabet Sahtouris is an internationally known evolution biologist, futurist, professor, author and consultant on Living Systems Design. She shows the relevance of biological systems to organizational design in business, government and globalisation. She is a Fellow of the World Business Academy, an advisor to EthicalMarkets.com and the Masters in Business program at Schumacher College, also affiliated with the Bainbridge Graduate Institute's MBA program for sustainable business.  Dr. Sahtouris has convened two International Symposia on the Foundations of Science and written about integral cosmologies. Her books include A Walk Through Time: from Stardust to Us and... posted on Aug 11 2017 (11,252 reads)

Orians is a staff attorney at The First 72 Plus, a New Orleans nonprofit founded by six formerly incarcerated people to help other formerly incarcerated men and women navigate the first 72 hours of their release. She is also the co-founder of Rising Foundations, a partner nonprofit that provides pathways to self-sufficiency for formerly incarcerated people, with an aim to stop the cycle of incarceration in low-income communities through small business development and home ownership.   Even as a high school student growing up in Castle Rock, Colorado, and then as an undergraduate at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Orians was attuned to the failure... posted on Jul 16 2018 (7,425 reads)