Category Archives: Current Affairs

Military takes lessons from disruptive businesses

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Great headline for an article in USA Today: “Can small businesses help win the war?“. Apparently the US military have taken note of the success of businesses such as Craiglist, YouTube, and the like, and are studying how traditional businesses are responding. Why? Because Al-Qaeda is a disruptive organisation based on decentralised leadership. See the following:

“How large, traditional companies fare in this
fight may prove invaluable in developing a strategy against al-Qaeda.
That’s why the military is going to school. A book making the rounds at
the Pentagon is The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.
It was written for a business audience, but military strategists are
saying, “This is the best thing I’ve read that applies to
counterterrorism,” says Lt. Col. Rudolph Atallah, a Defense Department
director in international affairs.replica relojes suizos de lujo

The premise of The Starfish and the Spider
is that centralized organizations are like spiders and can be destroyed
with an attack to the head. Decentralized organizations transfer
decision-making to leaders in the field. They are like starfish. No
single blow will kill them, and parts that are destroyed will grow back.”

The three-option solution to dealing with a decentralised opponent? Change the ideology that fuels them (aka hearts and minds), centralise them (governments easier to deal with than terrorists; Google takes YouTube), or decentralise yourself. I’m not quite sure how far you can take this analogy (a decentralised  military force is a pretty scary prospect), but shows the impact on our culture and ways of thinking that new organisations/ways of doing things are having. And I might be getting hold of that book too….In fact, while we’re at it, here’s Amazon’s list of the top 10 business books from 2006 (for some reason, Amazon.co.uk only has a list of 6, of which only 2 overlap; go figure)

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Afruca and child trafficking

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Debbie Ariyo, the amazing social entrepreneur who founded and runs Afruca (Africans Unite Against Child Abuse), has sent us a link to their campaigning video on YouTube. We played the video at the recent Fellowship ceremony in London, at which Debbie’s cohort of students completed their programme.

It’s a powerful video that reminds us how the most vulnerable can be treated as a commodity; a message that carries particular weight at this time of year. Long may Afruca’s very necessary work continue.

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Enterprise Week and Social Enterprise Day

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I’ve been tracking a few associated pieces about Enterprise Week (and Thursday, Social Enterprise Day). Today is of course, Women’s Enterprise Day (because the acronym is WED?)….anyway, here are some related bits of news:

– Jonathan Bland of SEC in the Society Guardian today saying what you’d expect, really: a rolling out of the 55,000 numbers and a rallying call on procurement

– A couple of slightly more critical responses from the Adam Smith Institute and the Daily Telegraph, the latter of which looks at whether government legislation has helped foster an entrepreneurial culture in the UK…and questions whether event days actually work

– …well, judging by the FT’s coverage, they don’t do any harm, as they have a series of interviews running all week, including some top tips for entrepreneurs (from John Caudwell and Sir Tom Hunter, amongst others)…although the FT is the official media partner….

– Gordon Brown applauds a renaissance of entrepreneurship and enterprise at the start of the week

– Check out the Trailblazers supplement as part of the campaign (via Social Enterprise Magazine)

– From a personal point of view there seems to be a little less going on this year (maybe, because there was SO much going on last year: awards, publication launches etc….), although there is a shindig at no.11 tomorrow (at which SSE will be rolex cinesi perfetti appearing, I believe….), the launching of the social enterprise plan, which will be pored over by us all, and the launch of a new venture from SSE Fellow James Greenshields’ Media for Development: Inside Job Productions

What’s most impressive about the day and the week are the organisations it brings together in one co-ordinated campaign, and that enterprise is promoted by all of those as a means to job creation, wealth creation and improving people’s lives in the round. If some greater focus is given to these issues as a result, then it can’t be viewed a failure: promotion and marketing is a key part to any campaign’s success….

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Social Innovation blogs and links

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I’ve just returned from Beijing, at a Social Innovation conference, which was tremendously interesting….and of which a more focused post soon. But, in the meantime, here’s a list of blogs and sites that I follow in the wider world of social innovation:

– First up, the mighty WorldChanging, who are also connected to TED (and the TEDBlog; see TedTalk for podcasts)

– Social Innovation Conversations, led by Tim Zak and others…for the podcasters amongst you

– Doors of Perception for a design-centred approach (see their take on the Beijing conference here)

– Xigi.net which is newer but has interesting stuff around social markets and investments; Acumen Fund is a funder of social entrepreneurs with a decent blog…

– Springwise is an offshoot of Trendwatching, giving a ‘daily fix of entrepreneurial ideas’…

– Audeamus, this blog (!), the 4 Non Profits PACE blog, and (the active bits of) SocialEdge pretty much cover social entrepreneurship

– David Wilcox’s Designing for Civil Society is interesting on partnership, governance, networking and knowledge…and Clay Shirky is great on the interface of society and technology

– Of the (UK) think-tanks, Demos’ Greenhouse is most active and most wide-ranging

– There are also RSS feeds of (crazy, humorous, and sometime socially-oriented) new ideas from the Global Ideas Bank, Idea A Day and HalfBakery

I’ll add to this soon: all suggestions welcome…

UPDATE: (more sites than blogs, now)

– John Thackara adds design-related innovation links to the pot, of which I’ll pick out particularly…
Architecture for Humanity, the Next Design Institute and GeekCorps as well as the Stanford Social Innovation Review, which I should have mentioned before

– Site-wise, social entrepreneurs are also well-represented on the new spangly Ashoka site, as well as Echoing Green, Schwab and others.

– Headshift is good for social software stuff

– Uffe from Kaos Pilots (who deserve a link here as well, of course!) sends through Emerging Futures which is a new one to me

– Also, ideas and technology-wise, we can throw ShouldExist and Lazy Web (for tech ideas) into the mix, as well as MySociety‘s portfolio, including Pledgebank, WriteToThem and TheyWorkForYou
 

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Bangladesh, North Wales, London and Beijing

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A few things to report in on this weekend; sorry to group such disparate things together….

– the first, of course, is Muhammad Yunus winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work in microcredit; he’s had many plaudits (rightly: read Audeamus and Social ROI blogs, for example) which I don’t need to add to. Worth reading some articles about his work on the Global Ideas Bank, though; search for ‘Grameen’

– from Bangladesh to Wales…I spoke at a BLOC seminar in Betws-y-Coed the other evening, along with Francis Irving of the mighty MySociety, and Alan Harris of KnowNet. Will blog about this more soon (particularly the most amazing taxi drive ever…), but take a look at the BLOC site which is doing interesting things around promoting creativity, technology and enterprise across Wales.

– and across, more predictably, to London, for the launch of the Enterprise for All Coalition’s launch of its report "Progressing the agenda"; it’s an excellent piece of work, and very much accord with SSE‘s current thinking, so I will post up when it’s available for download. In the meantime, you can read the Times’ take on the report within this article

– and, finally, the SSE blog is off to Beijing to a Social Innovation conference; internet access allowing, I’ll be blogging from there over the next few days….

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