Social Entrepreneurship – The Need Of The Hour And The Demand Of The Future

Economics states that the Theory Of the Firm is essentially to perform those activities that maximize profits. A firm should focus on improving the productivity of it’s inputs so as to decrease the cost of production and increase profits.

Well, this is what has been taught in Economics at Business Schools for the past many years and it is unlikely that these basic theories would ever change. However the Business Environment today demands new rules and new ways of thinking and that’s what makes it exciting to be a B-School student at reputed International university as of today. The theory of the firm is essentially what has led to the current Recession and it is this ideology that needs to be changed over the next decade.

Any kind of change would always trigger the birth of new ideas and concepts and one such Idea is that of Social Entrepreneurship. So what exactly is Social Entrepreneurship:

Social entrepreneurship is different from business entrepreneurship because the main goal of the former is to promote social development, not profits. Social Entrepreneurship is not Charity, Philanthropy or CSR, it is all about optimizing profit rather than maximizing profit.

Social entrepreneurs drive social innovation and transformation in various fields including education, health, environment and enterprise development. They pursue poverty alleviation goals with entrepreneurial zeal, business methods and the courage to innovate and overcome traditional practices. A social entrepreneur, similar to a business entrepreneur, builds strong and sustainable organizations, which are either set up as not-for-profits or companies.

Today the Students of AGSM, Australian School Of Business had the wonderful opportunity to listen and interact with Dr.Pamela Hartigan(see picture below), a pioneer in Social Entrepreneurship and the former MD of the Schwab Foundation of Social Entrepreneurship.

Her experience and stories truly left the audience spell-bounded and drove home the point that Social Entrepreneurship is the need of the hour and the demand of the future. Watch the video below, to hear her amazing stories and thoughts about Social Entrepreneurship.

Obama in Class – Dissecting The Qualities Of A Leader

21^st January, 2009(Sydney Time) was a historic day for the United States of America and for world in general. It was the day when Barack Hussein Obama stepped in to become the country’s first ever Black President. His road to victory in itself was quite remarkable and very few people in the world could have ever predicted that such a man would ever become POTUS.

Over here at the Australian Graduate School Of Management a bunch of 65 odd global citizens and future global leaders were busy dissecting the Obama speech to discover the qualities of a good Manager/Leader. Obama without a doubt is an excellent orator and speaker and packs such a force when he speaks that it’s hard not to feel emotional at the end. We watched the 15 minutes + of his acceptance speech and came up with the following qualities that must be present in a global leader,

1. The ability to communicate effectively.
2. The ability to set goals and make decisions.
3. To be able to stay calm and still be fair.
4. To be culturally sensitive.
5. To be charismatic and pragmatic.
6. To have a positive attitude.
7. The ability to motivate and work under pressure.
8. To be able to listen and ask good questions. Many a times asking the right questions is all it takes to solve even the most complicated problems.

The above are just a small subset of the numerous qualities that the class came up with and it’s amazing to see that while Obama does not have a lot of political experience, people still expect him to have most of the qualities mentioned above, just because he is able to portray some of them effectively. What do you think are some of the essential qualities that a global leader must have ? Share them with us.

The Right Side Of The Graph

In the last few days in class(at the Australian Graduate School Of Management in Sydney), we have been going through a phase of self reflection. This phase included surveys, inventories and questioners, as well as group discussions and self reflection, both written and mental.

The last day, our facilitator presented us with the following graph:

The basic idea is to think about our parts in teams and later about our jobs and pinpoint actions we employ daily to their respective places on the graph. I think this is a very simple but usable tool in order to self reflect.

But looking at it, made me think about how managers can use this. Because of this simplicity, managers can use this simple tool to know a lot more about their employees.

I believe good managers should focus almost all their efforts on helping people find their strengths and concentrate on them, because this is the way to help people truly excel. Thus, great managers should focus their time on their employees’ strengths instead of focusing it on their weaknesses and areas of improvement. That said it is important to understand that there are different kinds of weakness and different kinds of strengths.

If the weakness is a result of insufficient knowledge or skill, then the manager role is to supply the knowledge, teach the skill or get the employee to learn the skill from an outside source. This is true in a limited number of cases. Sometime people feel incompetent and dislike certain actions, because they don’t know enough about them and never had proper training although they truly have a talent for it. In addition, most skills can be learned to a certain degree.

But in order to excel in certain skills you need talent. And different people have different talents. And with talent I mean not only to quality of being good at something, but actually having the right mental state and the natural inclination for certain skills. And most of time, this talent, if used correctly, can help overcome any weakness much more efficiently then dealing directly with the weakness. Therefore, when a manager recognizes a weakness he should explore which kind of weakness it is and if training or knowledge will help the employee overcome it.

On the other hand, many times as managers, we perceive strengths of people but forget to ask them an important question: do you enjoy doing that role/action? Because some people are really good at something, but they hate doing it. if they don’t feel good when they are doing it, when they don’t reach a state of flow, than they would not be able to that for a long time and they would not be able to truly excel. And what great managers do is find ways to make their employees excel.

The MBA so far has been a really enriching experience and there is still such a long way to go. As leaders in the making it is important for us to have the right vision of the future and this was explained by an excellent quote by John Scharr,

The future is not some place we are going to but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.

Note: This article has been reproduced with explicit permission from the author. Check the original post here.

Breaking The Golden Rule – How Should We Incorporate Differences Into The Way We Manage People

The past week in class we spent a lot of time in Self-Reflection. The idea, which I strongly agree with, is that you should know yourself before you try to work with other people, not to say, manage or lead them. We did all sorts of activities aimed at discovering ourselves, including learning about our learning style (Reflector, Theorist, Pragmatist, Activist), Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to discover of types and preferences (I am a INTJ, by the way), etc.

The results were quite extraordinary and very interesting on the personal level. One the group level, I think we discovered how different we are from each other and the facilitators were able to demonstrate our differences in many ways. But I think that this is not the important lesson. If I had asked most of the class before today’s class to predict the results of the class, I think they would have probably described it quite accurately even if the numbers would not have been precise. We all know, in some level, that people are different and that there are different styles and preferences.

But the problem is we are wired in the wrong way to deal with that knowledge. We have difficulties when we see someone who is different than us. More importantly, we have difficulties imagining how he wants to be treated. So if we make an effort, it is usually to treat him like we want to be treated.

We all know the “Golden Rule” because it is widely know across cultures and religions. For example, all Jewish people know that The Sage Hillel formulated the Golden Rule in order to illustrate the underlying principles of Jewish moral law as follows:

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn

This is a good general concept and at a religious (and maybe political) level it is a smart rule. But the problem is that if you move into the world of management, this well intentioned rule leads you to bad managerial decisions like much conventional wisdom. Because, if we do agree that we are all different it also means that we hate different things. This means, I may hate the way you like to be treated. And if I follow the rule, I will avoid doing just what you wanted me to do.

I know I made this mistake a number of times in my life. I tried to treat my teammates or followers as I wanted to be treated. But each of my teammates was (and is) different and unique. They don’t want to be treated like I want to be treated; they want to get individualized attention. The mad similar mistakes with building classes and presentations the way I wanted to see them. But different people have different learning styles.

In his book, “First, break all the rules“, Markus Buckingham describes what great managers do. One of these things is ignoring the Golden Rule:

The best managers break the Golden Rule every day. They would say don’t treat people as you would like to be treated. This presupposes that everyone breathes the same physiological oxygen as you. For example, if you are competitive, everyone must be similarly competitive. If you like to be praised in public, everyone else must, too. Everyone must share your hatred of micromanagement.

So, next time you get to work in a team or lead one, don’t make the assumption that although everybody is different, by treating them how you would want to be treated will be enough. You need to find out, how they would like to be treated for each and every person. Being a good manager is certainly not easy and whoever thinks so has certainly not been to Business School.

Understanding The “Manager”

When you hear the word “manager”, What do you think about? Which role do you imagine?

Yesterday, I was presented with the following question in class:

From your experience, What specific qualities does it take to be an effective manager ?

Now, I have my own answers, like the ability to listen, to identify strengths and weakness in others and the ability to give specific, constructive and practical feedback. But then someone in our class said: “entrepreneurism”. For a minute I was shocked. I value entrepreneurism, but what does that have to do with managing people?

Then it hit me. He was not talking about managing people; he probably had a different picture of a manager in mind. Because, if you are a product manager or a customer service manager or any other type of role that comes with the word “manager” attached to it, you don’t necessarily manage other people. You might even work alone or directly with clients but with no subordinates under your direct supervision. You might work in as a part of team of very independent people who work as equals.

And if any of those descriptions fit your role, it means that this role requires different “specific qualities” in order to be effective. For example, you might need to have enough confidence to admit that you don’t know everything. Or you might need the ability to make hard decisions in short times. Or you might need to have leadership qualities. And sometimes you might need to have entrepreneurship qualities. But not always. It depends on your role. Because the fact that you have the word ”manager” in your title or on your business card does not mean anything.

So, what is the bottom line? I think that when we discuss the word “manager” or think of hiring someone for a “managerial” role, it is very important to understand and to communicate what exactly this manager is? Because the word “manager” triggers the imagination of people differently and it had become too generic to be understood by its own.

The Leader – Manager Dilemma

Today we had a very interesting session in class dealing with leadership. Every person of our 65 people class(at my B-school AGSM, Sydney) had to walk up and talk for about a minute about one important characteristic of a good leader that they think they embody. Now, I know this sounds a bit corny, but the main issue was getting people to speak about themselves and see their presentation skills as well as getting the know everybody.

There were some very interesting presentations and many people talked about important characteristics: Well organized, a good listener, Able to take harsh decision under pressure, passionate, determination, confidence, delegating of authority and more.

But the process and the above mentioned list did get me thinking about the difference between leadership and management. A lot of people mix them. Do leaders really need to be well organized? Or have confidence? I can think of a few leaders who aren’t. I do think it is more important for a manger to have these characteristics.

I was wandering why people mix the two definitions (actually the words are sometimes used as synonyms). I think it is because in too many roles, people are expected to be both. The problem is it is hard to be both.

I think leadership and management are different. I really like Marcus Buckingham’s theory in the book “The one thing you need to know“, claiming that managers’ role is to find the strength of every employee and do what they can to allow him exploit it to excellence while leaders are agent of change, their role is to paint a vivid picture of the future in order to dissipate the our natural fear of the unknown and the uncertain.

Recently, I read Seth Godin’s book Tribes, where he writes:

Management is about manipulating resources to get a known job done… Managers manage a process they’ve seen before, and they react to the outside world, striving to make that process as fast and as cheap as possible. Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change that you believe in… Leaders have followers. Mangers have employees. Managers make widgets. Leaders make change…

So why is the difference important? If you accept that there is a difference then you accept that there are different talents, skills and knowledge for each group. That means that usually, we cannot expect the same people to do both. But so many roles do. Instead of finding out what is more important to the success of the role, there is an attempt to achieve both, which ends up in an average result. And average, in our society, is just not good enough. So I think this is another conventional wisdom that needs to be broken.

A Journey Back To School – First Day At AGSM

Hi, this is the first in a series of blog posts that I plan to write about my MBA experience at the Australian Graduate School Of Management at Sydney, Australia.

Today 12^th January,2009 was my first day at B-School, a day I have been looking forward to for the past many months and something I was working towards for the past 2 years. An International MBA is truly an enriching experience and quite similar to a roller coaster ride. A full-time MBA is a significant investment in time and resources and is a life-changing decision that pulls people away from the comforts of home, a steady job and carefree weekends with no guarantee of what lies at the end.

Starting out on the MBA can be tough and may involve a lot of after-thought. You may wonder whether you made the right decision, sometimes you may think that you made a big mistake in deciding to do an MBA, because it is an investment in your future and the future is always uncertain. But the MBA is like adventure; one that will give you opportunities for self-development, learning, personal growth and most of all discovery.

Imagine walking into a class having about 64 students coming from 30 different countries right from Honduras to New Zealand. Imagine sitting in a classroom where the youngest person is 25 years old while the oldest is 35+. Imagine a day when you get to meet and interact with all these people for more than 8 hours whilst also learning the fine points about making effective Business Presentations. Such was my first day as B-school, an experience I’ve never had before and one that I’ll cherish for the rest of my life.

Before I end, I would like to share some important points on the art of making effective Business Presentations that I learnt today.

• Always Start Slowly And Clearly: This helps to establish rapport and rhythm
• Pause… And Allow Ideas To Land: It allows your audience to relax
• Breathe: Allows a person to relax and just takes the tension away
• Remember To Smile: Shows that you are relaxed and confident
• Stillness Is Strength: Shows that you are centered and focused