Scaling Social Impact: Cain and Abel

Quite an amazing initiative of Bridgespan and HBR, with support by Omidyar Network. Bit by bit you can see the new worldview of social impact investing and social entrepreneurship building out its infrastructure of thought leaders, prestigious publications, consultants, funders, cultural heroes, aspiring super-smart students, and popular press hagiography. As a loser, I watch leaders with admiration, and always have followed them where they point. I am the other guy in that famous picture of  Napoleon crossing the alps on horseback. The emperor in a magnificent cloak, is pointing triumphantly up the mountain. I am the soldier in the threadbare greatcoat in the snowdrift rolling the canon uphill. Anway, this Scaling Social Impact looks, along with Social Enterprise Review, Bridgespan's own site, FSG, and Lucy Bernholz's site, to be among the best places to not only to learn about social enterprise and but also to learn how to do it, and how to be a Leader within it. You can also learn in adjacent HBR posts about Successful People and their Habits, Pervasive Corruption in Financial Services, and How not to Sabotage your Career just because you are so Smart. Somehow this is all part of a culture of Excellence (it being Harvard and all). The jury is still out on whose interests are served by Scaling Social Impact, but it is clear whose sense of self is served in this emerging Romantic Narrative of Moral Heroism. Cain goes to Occupy, Abel goes to Harvard.

Comments

[IT company]

The 2011 Social Impact Exchange Conference showcased many examples of great ideas that have scaled. But the conference also emphasized the need for innovative approaches so others can scale. Collaboration, drawing from proven models, risk tolerance and business-like planning were all in the mix. No nonprofit can reach that tipping point — so much impact that the nonprofit isn’t needed — without funding from philanthropists, governments, private investors, and combinations thereof.