Tue • May 19th, 2009 • by Tom Nees • Comments 4
While reading The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, by Jacqueline Novogratz, referenced in a previous blog, it occurred to me that there are two kinds of leaders: entrepreneurial and institutional. Entrepreneurial leaders create something out of nothing. Institutional leaders guide existing organizations.
In her appeal and support for entrepreneurial leaders to end global poverty Novogratz understands that there are few if any enterprises or organizations in poor countries to train and employ people. To survive in these areas people must create sustainable wealth through their own ingenuity.
In developed countries like the US it’s different. Most people find work in established businesses and organizations. We don’t need to create new companies to provide employment, however, the current economic crisis may change that. The President talks about the need to create jobs to end the recession. I wonder who is going to do that.
Leadership in developed cultures is primarily institutional. Institutional leaders are expected to protect the values and worth of a business, organization or government agency even as they are expected to help it advance and grow. They are accountable to stockholders, voters, members, and boards. They must sublimate their own ideas to the consensus of a larger group to which they are accountable.
Entrepreneurial leaders are different. In a developed economy or culture entrepreneurs are the mavericks who strike out on their own to start a new business, or a new church for that matter. While the word entrepreneur refers primarily to business, and in fact is the creative force driving capitalism, we now recognize the important role of social entrepreneurs like Novogratz, who create and support new organizations to serve the common good as well as the economy.
I know the difference, having spent about half of my career as an institutional leader and half as a social entrepreneur. While there are some who can move back and forth, most leaders are better suited for either entrepreneurial or institutional activity.
The problem of course for entrepreneurs is that new enterprises become institutions. Mavericks become mainstream. The only way to preserve an organization is to institutionalize it.
The corresponding problem for institutions is that without entrepreneurs a business or organization loses its creative edge and eventually its customers or members.
In my executive coaching it is fairly easy to see the difference from both self-assessments and feedback from those closest to their leaders.
Entrepreneurs tolerate uncertainty, take calculated risks, are independent, and are not deterred by failure. Successful institutional leaders are patient with process, listen well, don’t like surprises or unintended consequences and are required to manage, if not avoid risk.
These are not mutually exclusive qualities. Institutional leaders are needed to conserve values and guarantee stability in business and public sector institutions. Entrepreneurs are needed to implement new ideas, challenge the status quo, and open doors for new opportunities.
Successful entrepreneurs complement their creative instincts with accountability to structures without which nothing survives. Good institutional leaders learn how to encourage new ideas and manage change.
Tue • May 12th, 2009 • by Tom Nees • Comments 2
In her new book, The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, Jacqueline Novogratz describes how entrepreneurial leaders are key to ending global poverty.
In 1987, as a young twenty-five year old helping establish a mircofinance institution for women in Kigali, Rwanda she noticed a boy wearing what had once been her childhood blue sweater–thus the title. After donating her sweater to Goodwill it was sent to Africa. The unlikely coincidence of seeing a boy in Africa wearing a sweater that had once been hers became a metaphor for how we’re all connected and how our actions, however incidental can affect others for good.
While serving with UNICEF prior to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda–during which over 800,000 people were killed in three months–she helped a group of women start a bakery. After the genocide she returned to find and interview the women survivors she knew–both victims and victimizers. In these tragic stories Novogratz struggles to understand and explain the capacity for unspeakable evil as well as incredible willingness to forgive among the women she knew.
In the late ’90’s while at the Rockefeller Foundation she started the “Next Generation Leadership” program. I was pleased when Rita Bright, described here as “a tall, thin, formidable African American community leader from Washington, DC,” was selected to join the first group of twenty-four next generation leaders on a journey to South Africa.
As Novogratz was surprised to see her blue sweater in Africa, I too was surprised in 1977 to meet Rita Bright in what I thought was an empty, uninhabitable, Washington, DC, apartment building. She was then a young homeless mother of two small children. In time Rita became the extraordinary community leader that Novogratz discovered and supported as a “Next Generation Leader.” Unfortunately Rita died from cancer in 2005.
Novogratz is convinced that the answer to global poverty will come from entrepreneurs like Rita within poor communities and developing countries. She quotes Rita Bright, who I watched convince some of her inner-city friends to invest in “Big Wash” the only laundromat in the neighborhood:
“Of course,” she would add when describing the small business, “everyone needs a hand to get started. There is no embarrassment in using grants to train people and even to put the initial investment into these neighborhood businesses. Just give people a way to walk so that eventually they can run, and then you’ll see them dance. Some of them will fly.”
Convinced that a new strategy to end global poverty is needed, she started the Acumen Fund in 2001, described on the fly-leaf as “a nonprofit, venture capital firm for the poor that invests in sustainable enterprises bringing healthcare, safe water, alternative energy, and housing to low-income people in the developing world.”
The Acumen Fund provides what she calls “patient capitalism,” to carefully selected programs in developing countries, taking calculated risks with local leaders who have demonstrated the capacity to start and lead enterprises with the potential to end poverty for large populations.
“We can end poverty,” she writes, “if we start by looking at all human beings as part of a single global community that recognizes that everyone deserves a chance to build a life worth living.”
Mon • May 4th, 2009 • by Tom Nees • Comments 6
Nearly every week I’m invited to join someone’s social network–MySpace, Facebook, Linkedin seem to be the most popular ones, but there are others. I’ve agreed to “friend” with a few people I know but I haven’t decided whether or not to initiate contacts and create my own online social network.
Like a lot of leaders my age I’m caught between two communication worlds. It’s not about using computers to e-mail and browse Web sites. Nearly everyone does that. Although it is reported that retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter doesn’t have a computer in his office–which means he doesn’t e-mail or browse Web sites at work, at least. There aren’t many like him anymore.
As reported by Jim Hoagland in his recent Washington Post op-ed column, “A President Goes Friending,” President Obama is evidently not a Facebook friend nor will he be “twittering” — a way of sending a constant stream of very brief “what I am doing right now” messages to anyone, in fact everyone who may be interested. However, according to Macon Phillips, the 30-year old “Internet specialist in charge of the White House’s new-media office,” the White House itself is now twittering the President’s message along with texting, blogging, streaming video and YouTube.
Whether or not leaders should go “friending” on social networks is the issue now. This is more than using new technology. It’s about old and new school ways of communication.
Hoagland, like me, is wary of “the intrusion of these newfangled devices.” “My reaction,” he confesses, “no doubt resembles that of a blacksmith at the turn of the century catching his first thrilling, then horrifying, glimpse of a motorcar.”
In a book that proved to be prophetic, “Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics, Morley Winograd and Michael Hais predicted that the the party that figured out how to use social networking to communicate with the young millennials–the oldest of whom are now in college–would win the election and likely remain in power for a generation.
Hoagland quotes a young women in the French government who observes that younger leaders are abandoning “the tradition media” or the “media filter” i.e., newspapers, magazines, TV, etc., to “twit/tweet, blog, telecommunicate and otherwise engage directly with their constituents.”
She warns that old school leaders may be “slumbering peacefully while their consumers turn to digital communication for entertainment and information.” She offered Hoagland examples of how it was “better for her to use Facebook to answer political attacks rather than ‘the traditional media’ to get out a response.”
Old school communication is formal and filtered. If they can, old school leaders avoid constant and direct communication. They prefer to make pronouncements rather than engage in conversation. They are uncomfortable if not threatened when questioned or challenged. They are frustrated when the voice of a few digital critics become “viral,” spreading like a pandemic throughout the online world. However, if they want to get their message out there, leaders, like the President may need a a new-media specialist.
“A wave of social networking is sweeping over us,” writes John Kelly, Ph.D, who teaches the use of social networking for small businesses for the SBA. “Just when you thought you had the online world figured out” he writes, “a new technology comes along to disrupt your efforts.” (Ironically his article is not online. I’ll be glad to e-mail a scanned copy upon request.)
Even churches are using Facebook and twitter to connect to their clients and members. In his recent e-newsletter my friend Pastor Rob Prince invites his members to follow his hourly posts at. He has 633 Facebook “friends”–and wants more. In these times when church members may come and go without visiting with or even knowing one another, social networking may be an advantage if not a necessity for church leaders.
I admit to being a bit old school. Although I browse the Internet for news, I still enjoy newspapers and I like to watch TV news–although I don’t care for much on the cable channels. I still think that the benefit of e-mail is that I can respond on my time rather instantly with a Blackberry or iPhone (which I don’t have).
The same used to be true with voice mail. But now, like everyone else I answer immediately–although I’m trying to avoid doing so while driving. A cell phone that doesn’t receive and send e-mail, browse the Internet and store pictures and music is really retro. And I haven’t yet followed my grandkids for whom constant text-messaging has all but replaced e-mail and phone conversations.
In this global village everyone is changing and everyone is connected. Perhaps social networking, or “friending.” as Hoagland described it, doesn’t create a need as much as respond to a need we have to stay connected.