Conches

Incentives, motivation, outcomes and logic models

2012-01-25T16:02:00-08:00

Logic Models: The purpose of a Logic Model or Theory of Change is to map activities to the world we want to see. I would like to point out two recent news stories that highlight the need for logic models. The first is microfinance in Anda Pradesh. Bad incentives and aggressive profit/financial targets pushed loan officers to poor outcomes. Instead of tying the loan officers actions to specific outcomes in the lives of the poor, they were tied to profit numbers of the orgs that served the poor and there was no clear connection to that orgs financial success and...

Entrepreneurship, Growth and Value

2012-01-23T16:00:00-08:00

I recently found this short and very compelling video from the Kauffman Foundation on enabling entrepreneurship. It is worth watching and kinda necessary for the rest of this post as critique. Here are my comments... Growth: The approach in the video seems to advocate for a gross measurement of growth as any new enterprise any where which buys in to the all growth is good growth myth. Failure: There is an assumption that "improving" the failure rate of new enterprises will improve the economy which brings up the question about how many of new companies "should" fail? Is the failure...

What Ifs...

2012-01-21T10:10:59-08:00

Very interesting article from TechCrunch on the wasted opportunity (my words) of technologists. Look at what we just saw is possible with SOPA / PIPA. We went from a backroom deal that they hoped would sneak through to public embarrassment and backpeddling that killed an otherwise sure thing. The reason why SOPA/PIPA were written has very little to do with pirating (not nothing, but very little). They were written to protect the privileged market position of entertainment arbiters in the face of innovation that makes them nearly irrelevant. (Same idea with Big Oil and alternative energy though not so stark...

The Golden Rule

2011-12-24T12:35:53-08:00

I am reading Karen Armstrong's "Twelve Steps to a More Compassionate Life". I posted a quote from that book to Facebook: Compassion is aptly summed up in the Golden Rule, which asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. An excellent discussion ensued. The gist of the discussion was about the tactics of compassion. The do-unto-others bit makes sense but is not a roadmap. As Karen Armstrong says in her book, the first question is always, "What do I do next?"...

Pro-Community Business Models Part 2

2011-12-06T21:54:20-08:00

In my first post on this topic I proposed a list of community based business models and claimed to be able to fill them out with some more detail. Here is my first effort. Traditional, old-school, tried and true, community development. After asking some friends in the community development field about efforts by community development practitioners, intermediaries and funders to generate, recycle, and retain capital at the ground level, here is what I found out. The foreclosure crisis has given rise to a number of coordinated efforts to stabilize communities, that is, to identify those levers (resources, human capital, grassroots...

Really Basic Shit

2011-12-03T09:15:22-08:00

Really Basic Shit about Hiring: Demand drives hiring Consumers demand. Consumers demand when they have money and demand more when they have good, reliable, productive jobs. When businesses have more money, they might invest in their business. When businesses have more customers, they hire. Really Basic Shit about the Rich: Rich people are not businesses. Rich people own businesses. Their money is not their buisnesses money and vice versa. When The Rich have more money, they put it in the bank. Giving money to the rich DOES NOT create jobs. They are rich, they have money and they are not...

Capitalism has Replaced Democracy

2011-11-27T08:23:38-08:00

I had started to write a post last week on the tenshion between Capitalism and Democracy. Since then I have run in to the articles below... Harold Meyerson of Washington Post: The Growing Tension between Capitalism and Democracy What Stubb is proposing, and what the markets are doing, is, in essence, extending to the realm of once-equally-sovereign nations the one-dollar-one-vote principle that our Supreme Court enshrined in itsCitizens United decision last year. The requirement that one must own property to vote — abolished in this nation in the early 1800s by the Jacksonian Democrats — has been resurrected by powerful...

Pro-Community Business Models

2011-11-23T08:55:51-08:00

The Occupy movement has everybody asking, "What do they want?" I have stated previously that I think it is a much more productive question to ask, "What do we want?" While we have the media's attention, we need to establish a vision, we need to infect our collective mind with new meme. My unecessarily convoluted mind has glomed on to the idea of The Generative Capacity of our Communities By this I specifically mean, how can we generate real value that can be realized in the economies of our communites. More on this in my previous blog, from the center...

From the Center to the Edges

2011-11-15T14:31:23-08:00

What creates change? In the US we are looking to Egypt and the Arab Spring right now to ask, how can we get some of that? Not the violent uprising. I truly believe we are beyond that, outside of the inevitable clashes with the police, a nonviolent popular uprising is possible. However, it is critical to understand the entrenched forces that are against us, against we the 99%, a super-majority. The most powerful engine available to mankind today is the market. And, it is critical that we recogonize there is no necessary connection between the physics of economic markets and...

Generative Capacity of communities

2011-11-12T07:49:08-08:00

We need new models that achieve scale by linking the generative capacity of communities. I remember the original CK Prahalad Bottom of the Pyramid paper that suggested a company like Levis could make jeans that were affordable by moving production closer to the consumers. This would also provide jobs and add the money to the community needed to by the jeans. In this era of 3d printing this is possible however it won't aggregate wealth in the center. It will spread wealth across the value chain. That is a good thing for everyone but the 1%. PG&E here in CA...