This blog's been moved

I was getting really tired of the look of my website so I asked a friend to help me update it. It's not built using Word Press and I've migrated the contents of this blog to my website:

http://www.rdroyce.com

See you there....

Bob

The Good Life

As we think about how to help build sustainable economies in depressed areas of the world, it's important to consider our personal biases toward things like work. This file from Free Range Studios is a caricature of idealistic extremes, to be sure, but it's enjoyable to watch and makes an important point...creating wealth for its own sake rarely satisfies.

A Company for BAM Practitioners to Watch

One of the goals for those starting Kingdom businesses is to model God's love in the workplace. One of the key decisions to make involves what wage to pay workers. Is it a good witness to run a factory and pay the prevailing wage? Sure, you'll pay your workers for all the time worked, provide them humane working conditions and treat them with dignity. But what if the average wage paid by other factories in the area isn't enough to provide a decent standard of living? For that matter, how will you determine what constitutes and "decent standard of living"?

Once you determine a good wage, then the challenge is maintaining a competitive edge. In the US, where access to quality to workers is often constrained, companies like Starbucks and Zingerman's have found that providing above average compensation packages (compared to their competition) lowers turn-over and provides a better customer experience. This in turns helps them maintain premium pricing and maintain profitability. It's no panacea but it is an effective strategy.


The New York Times today writes about an apparel company that is seeking to determine if this will work in a third-world country like the Dominican Republic—
An Apparel Factory Defies Stereotypes, but Can It Thrive? - NYTimes.com. Will this work in a country where workers are plentiful? In China, we're starting to see a shift as demographics works against the mighty dragon as workers, now increasingly in short supply, get more selective. So factory owners are starting to look elsewhere for cheap labor (see the recent NYT article on Bangladesh moving in on China.

Is it possible that the answer is not to "look for the cheapest labor" but to build a competitive advantage through building a loyal, loving workforce?

Knights Apparel is running the experiment and I will surely be routing for them.

Business Is Our Mission

Business Is Our Mission is a good article from Inside Work about the good, bad and ugly of BAM. I'm reminded of something Mark Russell points out in his book, The Missional Entrepreneur, about the dangers of "Business as Cover": The undercover missionary thinks people will assume they are a missionary if and when someone begins to suspect they aren't a real business person. Mark's research in Thailand, however, found that people were more likely to suspect that the business was a cover for drug or sex trafficking.

Designing for delight (Giles Colborne)

Here's a nice slide show on what it takes to delight your customers....Designing for delight (Giles Colborne)

thanks to Dan Klyn for pointing it out to me...

The economics of social progress

On McKinsey's "What Matters" blog, Iqbal Quadir, founder of the Grameen phone company writes an excellent article on the interplay between profit and social enterprise. Among other topics he discusses why charging for a service (v. giving it away) provides a better foundation for scaling the ability to help people than giving it away. He also shares some lessons learned about pricing and the need to hold firm to pricing strategies that allow a service to become profitable, even though it may limit the near-term social benefit. In the long run, the prices drop as the service scales, thus bringing economic benefit on a much broader scale than could achieved otherwise.

A Conservative Definition of Social Justice

I just listened to an interesting talk that Michael Novak gave to The Heritage Foundation called "Social Justice Is Not What You Think It Is." He points out that the origin of the term dates back to an Italian Jesuit priest named Luigi Taparelli (1793-1862) who struggled with how to deal with the shift from a predominantly agrarian society to one which included urbanization.

Novak makes a point of distinguishing between the English etymology of equality, which emphasized the qualitative aspect, from the French etymology which stems from egalite, and focus on quantitative equivalence. We do not all deserve the same thing quantitatively, argues Novak. For example, those who put in more effort toward a task deserve the greater reward. But we do deserve an reward of relative equivalence, regardless of who we were before we started the task, say upper class v. lower class.

Arguing from the perspective that individual rights are the best way to achieve the common good (v. socialist reliance on government), Novak describes it, social justice, properly understood, is a virtue, a habit that people internalize and learn. A capacity to organize and associate yourself with others to accomplish extra familia ends, for the good of others outside your immediate context, be it the community at large, your state, or even other parts of the world.

It's a long lecture, but interesting.

Cronyism

During the dot.com boom I worked for an eCommerce company that, like so many others, was going through it's share of difficulties. Toward the end we were playing a good game of management roulette, as the folks in the valley tried to figure out what to do with our group.

With each new "top dog" came a few tag alongs. Some of them were quite sharp, even sharper than the man they followed, but at least one of them was a complete fish out of water. We'll call him "Tim". I'm sure Tim was quite competent in the role he had when he was the client of our new VP, "Jay", but he was woefully unprepared for his new leadership role on the other side of the table as a consultant. These two Dilbert's tell the story masterfully:

Business as Mission and Scale

Something I’ve noticed as I read through the literature on “Business as Mission” is that most of the efforts are focused on a relatively small scale. There is nothing wrong with starting small, but there almost seems to be a “common wisdom” that starting out small is the only way to go.

While I won’t argue the value of proof-of-concept efforts, there are times when small won’t cut it. Certain ideas need to start out at a scale that necessarily involves a great deal of risk. A good example is the Grameen Phone company started by Iqbal Quadir and discussed in his TED talk below:

Patient Capital: A Third Way to Think About Aid

For the past year I’ve been thinking about ways to use my entrepreneurial skills to help the international communities I work through the Vineyard. The ideas around “patient capital” that Jacqueline Novogratz proposes seem right on the money, so to speak.

Plants that clean the air

I’ve had a post-it note hanging around my desk for a while now with a list of plants that in combination supposedly clean the air of indoor pollution. I jotted it down from a TED talk. I’m posting it now so I can throw the note away. All quantities are per person. All plants are pre:

(4) Areca Palms--shoulder high (Chrysalidocarpus lutescens) take it outdoors every 3 months

(6-8) Mother-in-Law plants at least waist high (Sansevieria trifasciata)...called a bedroom plant because it converts CO2 into oxygen at night

(1) Money plant (Epipremnum aureum) removes formaldehyde

Here’s the video:

MacJournal

I’m writing this entry with new software, MacJournal, I just downloaded from MacHeist. It promises to be a whizzy new way to organize my thoughts, create, write, journal, etc. I’ve been using a Mac for over 25 years now and I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for this kind of software. Remember HyperCard? I loved it. Learned it. Helped create a HyperCard users group. Then there was MORE, still the ultimate outlining tool (OminOutliner is more powerful, but I still miss the simple elegance of MORE).

This tool promises to let me organize and then post to my blog, which seems like a good way to motivate me to blog more since I can write drafts and keep them organized without having to log into blogger....we’ll see.