Digital Archive....

"Do it tomorrow" Seth's Blog Stupid advice, certainly. But free. I didn't charge you anything for it. There are very few categories where there is less correlation between price and quality than advice. You can buy a million dollars worth of consulting, a thousand dollars worth of coaching or read a few tweets for free--your choice. This widespread variety of pricing leads to two interesting questions: Are you confusing what you pay with what you get? (Does expensive advice feel more valuable than the free stuff?) and Are you more likely to take action because you've paid a lot? One of the most effective ways to get your ideas implemented is to charge a lot for them. It increases the perception of value and creates an impulse to execute so that the investment won't be wasted. Of course, I said that for free... Sent with Reeder  

Nonprofit, For-profit, or Something in Between? SSIR Opinion & Analysis The second most frequent question I get from startup social entrepreneurs is: "Should I start a nonprofit or a for-profit?" The first question is, of course, "Where can I find the money to pursue my dream of innovative social change?" As someone who has started more than a dozen for-profit and nonprofit enterprises (a few of them successfully!), those are typically not the first two questions to ask. I believe that you need to think through your venture before trying to answer the structure and the capital questions. Figure out your value proposition, your motivation, and your definition of success. If you have a good handle on these issues, your path to launching and funding your social enterprise will be much clearer. You'll also be ready to talk to an attorney who can help you with the process of setting up an organization that meets your objectives. Lo...

Social Entrepreneurs Must Achieve Not Survive SSIR Opinion & Analysis Every week, I read about another social entrepreneur contemplating closing down business due to the recession. Imagine a world where that could be good news. In fact, imagine a world where on the same day a social entrepreneur launched their organization, they closed it down. Farfetched? Maybe not. We've all been to a fund-raising dinner where the executive director wraps up his speech by boldly saying, "Our mission is to put ourselves out of business!" The emotional audience jumps up and applauds. The leader basks in the praise. But what if a business owner really did that—intentionally? In his book The 7 Habits of Highly Successfully People, Stephen Covey says to "plan with the end in mind." When I trained as a FranklinCovey coach, I learned an exercise that carried the point: We all had to write about our own funerals: Who was there? What was said? It so...

Ponzi Schemes for Beginners The Baseline Scenario By James Kwak On the theory that the best defense is a good offense, Rick Perry has been insisting to anyone who will listen that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. Probably hundreds of people have already explained why it isn't, but I think it's important to be clear about why Rick Perry thinks it is—or, rather, why his political advisers think he can get away with it. A Ponzi scheme, classically, is one where you promise high returns to investors but you have no way of actually generating those returns; instead, you plan to pay off old investors by getting new money from new investors. Social Security is obviously not a Ponzi scheme for at least two basic reasons. First, there's no fraud involved: all of Social Security's finances are right out in the open for anyone who cares to look, in the annual report of the trustees of the Social Security trust funds. Second, a Ponzi scheme by constr...

The State of Performance Assessment, 10 Years Later The CEP Blog A decade ago, I started my job at CEP and we launched a study on performance assessment at large foundations. It's not as if we were the first to think the question of whether a foundation was achieving its desired results was important. The earliest major American philanthropists cared deeply about results and some foundations, like Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, had been putting major resources into evaluation for decades. But what was lacking, at that time, was a look across the large foundations to understand both practices and attitudes when it came to performance assessment.  So we undertook that study with limited resources — $345,000 in grants from the Atlantic Philanthropies, Packard, and Surdna –  and a small staff (three of us worked on the project, and that was CEP's sole effort in its first year).  We conducted a broad-based survey of CEOs and a serie...