There are many fledgling businesses that have laudable intent and shaky commercial foundations.  

This is a problem because, in an ideal world, the businesses that stand for values we share should also be able to sustain themselves as businesses. That’s the key premise underneath social entrepreneurship and conscious capitalism.

Purpose-driven organizations need compelling values, but they also need coherent business models. 

People want to buy products that support values they believe in. To meet this consumer need, some businesses now make their values visible in their products and services, and sell them to customers who share those very values. 

But what happens when the values are more popular than the products, as with Holstee and their Holstee Manifesto? What kind of business can you create then?

This problem of organizations with compelling values that can’t seem to make a business out of them came to mind when a friend shared a Washington Post article about a company called Holstee.  Holstee is experiencing a somewhat dramatic version of this problem.

Holstee has a company values statement that people are crazy about and a business model that is underwhelming.

Who is Holstee?

Holstee is a Brooklyn-based, mostly e-commerce business that sells clothing and accessories described as “products with a conscience.” These products include upcycled wallets, t-shirts, messenger bags, and similar lifestyle items.

By designing and curating with a conscience, Holstee offers a place for mindful shoppers to find meaningful products.

However, Holstee doesn’t seem to support itself by selling these lifestyle products. Instead, Holstee supports itself by selling its actual values — The Holstee Manifesto — in the form of a poster.

The Holstee Manifesto

The Holstee Manifesto is the Holstee founders’ life vision put into words.  It’s been typeset and printed on high-quality paper stock, and is sold on the Holstee website.

The Holstee Manifesto is Holstee’s most popular product.

So far, the Manifesto has been viewed over 500 million times and translated into 12 languages. There are Flickr groups, Facebook conversations, and blog post after blog post focused on how inspiring the Holstee manifesto is. Holstee sold over 11,00 posters in 2011, at $25 a pop, and posters accounted for half of Holstee’s revenue in Nov. of 2011.

Holstee “isn’t a Manifesto Company”

In an interview in Inc. magazine, the founders explain that

“We’re not a manifesto company, whatever that would be. The success of the posters helped us bootstrap, but at the end of the day, we’re about products with a unique story that are designed with a conscience.”

I’d take those words at face value, if it wasn’t for Holstee’s second most popular product.²

Holstee’s “Lifecycle” video sets the Manifesto to evocative images and music. Released only three months ago (Nov 2011), the Lifecycle video has been viewed almost 900,000 times to date, and has inspired its own Tumblr.

Clearly, Holstee is putting time, money, creative energy, and not a little bit of love into sharing their Manifesto. Why, then, aren’t they a manifesto company?

Is Holstee a Manifesto Company?

If half of your revenue, the majority of your units sold, and 99% of your public’s awareness can be attributed to the manifesto you sell, aren’t you a manifesto company?

And, given the hundreds of companies that sell ethically-sourced, free trade, biodegradable t-shirts, isn’t there something neat about being the only one also selling a Manifesto?

In the words of Holstee’s founders,

We wrote a manifesto but we never wrote a business plan.

If that’s true, what does that tell the founders about what really matters to them, as a business?

Is there a business behind the values statement?

The 50 million and 900,000 views that the Manifesto is generating are telling Holstee that there is demand for the values in their Manifesto to be articulated, shared, and made visible.

But while the millions of views are good public relations, they aren’t helping Holstee they way(s) they could be, since   these page views aren’t making Holstee any money.

I don’t know how much non-manifesto merchandise Holstee is selling, but using sales from the Manifesto to bootstrap their non-manifesto product business suggests that the products are not selling enough to sustain the business on their own.¹

• Why does Holstee see their Manifesto as a short-term way to provide start-up capital (i. e., as bootstrapping) but not as a source of ongoing, growing revenue?
• Why hasn’t Holstee “productized” and monetized the Manifesto further?
• Why can’t people buy the Manifesto on mugs and mousepads?

Holstee is leaving a lot of money on the table.

When the posters of your values statement outsell your intended product line, you’ve got a business problem and a business opportunity. 

The market is telling Holstee something.

The market is telling Holstee that their values are more desired than their current products. And, the market is telling Holstee that it’s missing an opportunity to meet consumers’ needs and to build themselves a sustainable business by promoting the values in their manifesto.

Right now, Holstee doesn’t seem to have a business model that fully supports their values. They need to rethink their busiess plan, and they need to ask themselves what kind of business they are, and what kind of business they want to be.

A Lifestyle Products Business?

If Holstee wants to be a Brooklyn-based purveyor of clothing and accessories “with a conscience”, they might focus on developing a product mix that conveys their values more prominently.

A Life Inspiration Business?

If Holstee wants to be a Brooklyn-based organization devoted to inspiring individuals’ hopes and dreams for a meaningful life, they might look for different ways to convey the actual words of their Manifesto.

Can’t Holstee capitalize on people’s desire for inspiration? Look at all the “Keep Calm and ….” merchandise — all purchased by people who want a reminder of what’s important to them.

Maybe what consumers want is the most streamlined exchange possible, where they literally buy the meaning itself, so that the item on which the words are placed is largely irrelevant.

There’s nothing wrong with mousepads and mugs with inspiring words on them. Words printed on various everyday items aren’t any less noble or less impressive than t-shirts. They can all be made “with a conscience”.

What should Holstee do to match its business model and its values?

Should Holstee develop the organization’s capacity to translate their values into products so that the products are more meaningful?

Or, is it time for Holstee to pivot, and change their business model so that they are selling the values directly through words and images?

Either way, don’t you think that Holstee should do more with their Manifesto?

¹ I’m interpreting and opining based on publicly available information. There may be important details I don’t know about that would reshape the conversation. If so, I’d love to learn about them. Email me at cvharquail at authentic organizations dot com.
² Measured by page views.
Also, I hear from mutual friends that the Holstee founders are lovely people, which you’d expect given the ideas in the manifesto. 

See also:
Why Your Company Should Have A Social Mission, by Olivia Khalili at CauseCapitalism.com
Communities of Commerce: Where the Marketplace is also the Meaning Place
Their Need or Your Ability: Why does your organization exist?
Make Distinctiveness Matter by Linking It To Organizational Purpose

Images: © Holstee and AllPosters

Hat tip: I was introduced to Holstee by @BrainPicker. I’ve been to their site to see what I could buy to support them, and I bought a poster that’s now on our refrigerator.

Networks of people and organizations are usually either “markets” or “communities”.

It bothers us that networks fit one or the other model of working together, because we envision something more –something both market and community –  in one network.

We are often disappointed when markets don’t exhibit a commitment to any values other than maximizing profits. And, while we treasure communities where we create collective meaning and build relationships, we often shy away from using these relationships to help each other make a living. We ask too much of the market format, and expect too little from the community format.

It’s become easier to see how these two different models, the market focused on economic transactions and the community focused on meaning & social interchange, diverge in both form and feeling.

Ebusiness and social technologies have made it easier for us to buy and sell based on prices alone. At the same time, they’ve made it easier for us to build strong and rich networks of interpersonal and collective relationships that sustain us socially.

In online markets, the ease of finding a lower price or quicker delivery has led us to dis-intermediate the buyer-seller social relationships we relied on before. We’ve learned to sacrifice the comfort, the security, the qualitative connection, and any interpersonal meaning we found in these commercial exchanges in favor of reduced search costs, lower prices, and increased economic efficiency.

Online communities, facilitated by social technologies, have created more meaning for us, as we’ve been able to find and interact with people who are like us (or unlike us in desirable ways), who have similar interests, values, and goals, who can recognize and affirm who we are, and with whom we can pursue a shared social purpose.

Although we often draw on online communities for social support, learning, and collaboration, we have sometimes shied away from using them to sell or buy or earn money. We worry about burdening our relationships with something as crass as pricing or payments, since we fear that these will change the nature of our interactions and deprive the community of its innocence – or its nobility.

These concerns and these hesitations are appropriate, since markets aren’t supposed to be about creating meaning, and communities aren’t supposed to be about extracting excess rents. Markets and Communities are different models for working together.

But what about our vision of markets where relationships matter and communities where we can make a living while we explicitly pursue values beyond profits?

Enter the Community of Commerce.

As I’ve been researching online eMarketplaces like eBay and Etsy, I’ve identified that while the dominant model is a marketplace that’s all about efficiency and economic exchange, an emerging model is a marketplace that combines the exchange of goods and services with the exchange of social meaning. This combination of economic and social exchange is intentional, motivational, and wickedly effective.

Instead of seeing this model as some sort of ‘not-free’, values- constrained market, let’s give it its own category. Let’s call this model a Community of Commerce.

Defining a Community of Commerce

A community of commerce is a network of organizations and individuals that buy, sell, and exchange goods and services within a collectively-defined community culture, a culture that is based on articulated, shared, more-than-economic values.

Back in 2000, Stacy Bressler & Charles Grantham published a book “Communities of Commerce: Building Internet business communities to accelerate growth, minimize risk, and increase customer loyalty.” Their thesis was that businesses should learn how to transcend geography so that they could identify and connect with strategically relevant business partners. Bressler & Grantham’s motivating contrast was between off-line and online business relationships; they used the terms “communities of commerce” and “online business communities” interchangeably.

I want to expand the definition of “communities of commerce” to focus on how the tensions, tradeoffs and opportunities of a commercial network that puts community first will differ in economically and socially important ways. Trying to stack a network for exchanging meaning on top of a network of economic exchange won’t work – it’s not like we can simply add “meaningplace” to “marketplace” and call it a coherent business model.

In the next few weeks, I’ll post my efforts to define what’s distinctive about a community of commerce, to explain how it’s related to other progressive business models, and to begin to unfold the tensions and opportunities that arise when buying & selling are inseparable from and integral to the mutual exchange of meaning.

I’d love your thoughts about the concept and especially your suggestions for defining it.

See also:

Don’t Tell Esty That Authenticity Is Getting “Old” — The Social Dynamic Between Crafters and Buyers is Timeless
Purpose is the Killer App: Why Organizations Need Social Business Tools
7 Ways That Social Business Advice is Wrong for Your Organization
Insights about Authenticity from the Open Community Book Tour

Image: Indian Garden Flowers Some rights reserved by EssjayNZ

What’s up with the word “new” in the phrase “meaning is the new motivator”?

From all corners of the interwebz conversation about ‘business’, I see mention of this idea that meaning at work is something new, something that we have just begun to desire.

Seriously. It seems to come as a surprise, or as a new development, that maximizing shareholder value isn’t motivating to most employees. Wow. Where have these people been since, oh, the dawn of the industrial revolution?

Folks have been talking about meaning at work, and looking for meaning at work, long before this recent ‘crisis of meaning’.  

True, we’ve used different terms over time.

• We’ve talked about alienation and estrangement to describe being cut off from meaningful work.

• We’ve talked about commitment and engagement, as attitudes towards organizations that ought to have meaning but usually don’t.

• We’ve talked about “leadership” as the process of creating meaning, even if only through charisma, from the top of the organization’s food chain.

• And, we’ve talked about vision and mission, knowing that meaning was in there, somewhere, among all the BHAGs.

There is nothing ‘new’ about the desire for meaning at work.

Just yesterday, Luis Suarez wrote a great post about meaning, in which he shared a vlog from Roger Martin, Dean at Rotman School, about “The Crisis of Meaning in the Millennial Workforce“. Luis unpacks why any of us, knowledge workers especially, might feel a lack of meaning. He clarifies that meaning is an issue for every generation of workers, and that each of us needs to do something about refocusing business so that it meets human, social needs. (Read his whole post, it’s great.)

So my question is not whether we need meaning. The question is:

Why is our desire for meaning positioned this way?

Why do so many (like Dan Pink) position “meaning” as something “new”?

• Are we trying to avoid recognizing that meaning is something we’ve always wanted, but perhaps never felt permitted to ask for in polite business company?

Why do so many (like Roger Martin) position “meaning” as something others desire, but not us? Or that we desire for others, but not for ourselves?

• Are we talking about “Millenials” and “their” needs for meaning so that we can take care of ‘them’ while avoiding taking responsibility for ourselves?

• Are we trying to look ‘objective’ so that we don’t look demanding, or ungrateful? Do we have to make meaning a ‘business problem’ so that we can take meaning seriously?

I recognize that for many, it’s become a “crisis of meaning” because there is so little left to promise workers, in terms of job security, career development, gain-sharing, and ownership rights. Maybe after all these other kinds of ‘motivations’ have been eroded by the twin beasts of corporate profit-taking and work intensification, there is nothing left that we can truly count on to take our minds of the paycheck, and so we turn to meaning.

In good times and bad times, people have always wanted meaningful work. People have always wanted – and still want–to work in organizations that serve a larger purpose, where individual and collective efforts create meaningful products, meaningful services, and meaningful experiences.

Why do we treat this as a surprising truth?

See also:
The Pursuit of (Organizational) Purpose by Deb Lavoy

Social Media for Social Change — Inside the Organization?
Is your organization flourishing or withering?
How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning

What will it really take to get organizations to adopt social media tools inside the enterprise?

Mere numbers won’t compel us, so don’t count on ROI. The shiny object syndrome won’t hold our attention, so back off with the bells and whistles. And, please, don’t work on us with peer pressure. We’re above trying to keep up with the herd.

Want to drive social tool adoption? Give us a compelling use case. Even better,

Give us a Killer App.

Needs drive successful technology adoption.

No technology gets adopted unless we think we need it. The more obviously a tool helps us solve a pressing business/organizational issue, the more enthusiastically we’ll adopt the tool. Consider, for example, how enthusiastically social listening technologies have been adopted by organizations who are uptight about managing their public reputations.

But what’s even better than a specific, pressing business need for driving adoption is a “killer app”.  A killer app is an “irrevocable marriage between a technology and its application“. It’s that one, great, thing that we never really imagined we’d be able to do, and so we can’t resist it when the technology appears that helps us do it.

Show us how social media can help us achieve our collective purpose, and you’ll show us the Killer App.

Purpose as the Killer App

Every organization has a purpose. Every organization needs its purpose, to simply exist.

Even when an organization’s purpose is unclear, under-communicated, or misunderstood, an organization drives towards its purpose. Because our need for purpose is so great, we long for tools that might help us clarify, communicate and understand our collective purpose.

In addition to communicating our purpose, we also want to move towards it. Tangibly, deliberately, assuredly.

Thus, we long for tools that will propel us towards our collective purpose, that will make achieving our purpose easier and more likely.  As soon as someone can explain clearly and comprehensively how enterprise social media can support our collective purpose, we’ll be driven – impelled even — to adopt social media throughout our organizations.

Why Purpose is Important

An organization’s purpose is the inspirational, non-instrumental glue that binds us to an organization and to each other in that organization. As Simon Sinek describes it, shared purpose is what inspires us to to work with each other and to give of ourselves to the (organizational) collective.

Yesterday morning, I had the chance to hear Simon describe the role of purpose for individuals and organizations.  Simon’s book “Start With Why” is a ‘must read’, because of  the way that Simon has taken the ancient and evergreen wisdom about the role of purpose and shaped it with a simple, relevant, and compelling framework.

His admonition, “Start With Why” makes it easy for folks to see again why purpose is so critical to an organization’s success.

Linking Purpose and Social Media

Simon’s talk was sponsored by Open Text, a social collaboration software vendor. [From what I can see from the outside,] Open Text is aiming to distinguish itself from other social collaboration software vendors by addressing the question of “Why” social collaboration tools matter.

Deb Lavoy and her team at Open Text are trying to excavate the link between purpose and internal social media. Of course, they’d like to sell more social collaboration systems (they are a software vendor after all). But Lavoy and her team have a more comprehensive goal– they want to influence the big picture of how we think about social media and why it’s useful.

What I like about Open Text’s approach is not (just) the marketing savvy that it suggests, but rather that they are elevating the conversation about adoption by focusing us on some profound and basic organizational wisdom.

[Note: Image is from Open Text]

Lavoy and her team are organizing a series of presentations across the US that will feature speakers who, from one direction or another, are working to link social media technology, collaboration, and organizational purpose.

(You can find the schedule for the Open Text Social Workplace series, and sign up to attend a (free) talk, at their website.)

Each of these presentations should help us understand, bit by bit, how social media can make a difference in organizations.

How exactly does Social Media support Purpose?

Why should your organization adopt social collaboration tools? Because these tools will help your group, team, and organization achieve your collective purpose.

How exactly will that happen? We’re starting to figure that out. And honestly, we haven’t gotten very far.

Building the case that purpose is amplified, strengthened and supported in unique ways by social media will take many small insights. Insights, for example, like recognizing that

(1) any time a user explains a task, goal or tool online,
(2) s/he creates new meaning
(3) that can be captured, aggregated and shared by social media, and
(4) thus added to the organization’s active store of self-interpretation.

Yeah, I know that’s kind of complicated, but it is also real.

This micro-creation of meaning is one of many ways that social media-mediated activity is helping us see and support purpose-oriented behavior.

If we know anything about successful technology adoption, it is that a compelling use case really matters.

If there is no direct promise that a tool will add value, people will resist learning how to use it.  They won’t figure out how to integrate the tools into their work flow, and they’ll fail to experience even the basic benefits of the tool. Instead, they’ll use social tools like your granddad uses AOL — with the dial-up modem, and with all the frustration, constraint and resistance that entails.

Why should we let social media tools die that death, when they could instead be used to help organizations flourish?

Building the Case for Social Media-Supported Purpose

Because every organization and organization member longs for collective meaning and purpose, I believe that organizational purpose could be the killer app for enterprise social media.

I want to see social media adopted as part of a larger strategy of engagement in purpose, and not just for reasons of task efficiency and collaboration effectiveness.

Along with Deb Lavoy, Anne Marie McEwan, and many others, we’ll chip away at it until we excavate the links between social technology and organizational purpose. Together, we’ll build the super-powered use case that is organizational purpose.

In the meantime, we’ll all continue the conversation about “being more social” inside the organization. While we continue to recognize and reinforce how social media tools support tasks, we’ll need to learn to recognize how social media tools support meaning.

The more we (re)learn about how social media helps us be more human and helps our organizations be more people-centric, the more we’ll learn about how social media can support collective purpose.  And, the more we embrace the idea that it’s purpose and not effectiveness that makes organizations sustainably successful, the more we’ll learn about how to clarify purpose and how to understand our local work tasks as part of a larger, meaningful, collective project.

Instead of being bass-ackwards, and adapting the organization to be “more social” in response to the new tools, let’s use the new tools to build the bigger picture for each other.

Let’s use the tools to amplify and accelerate our purpose-oriented interactions, so that our work together is more meaningful.

See also:
The Pursuit of (Organizational) Purpose by Deb Lavoy

How Social Media Create Organizational Meaning
How to Design Social Business Systems For Engaged, Social Organizations

Enterprise Collaboration Adoption Strategies – 10 Key Steps and Best Practices by Karthik Chakkarapan

Does it really matter if an organization is “distinctive”?

When an organization’s distinctiveness (identity) is linked with the organization’s purpose (greater social goal), the organization’s unique qualities provide the unique resources needed to achieve that purpose.

Organizational Distinctiveness is more than Positioning

Managers often dismiss the concept of organizational “distinctiveness”, thinking that distinctiveness is only relevant to “positioning” in the marketplace. Valuing distinctiveness in the marketplace isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete.

Distinctiveness is important inside the organization, because distinctiveness is half of what makes collective work meaningful.

Distinctiveness: How does “who we are” really matter?

Collectively, we are who we are. We have enduring, distinctive characteristics that create our collective organizational self-definition. That self-definition can resolve a generic existential crisis about “who we are”, but it doesn’t necessarily give ‘who we are’ a greater meaning.

What can give ‘who we are’ a greater meaning is the organization’s purpose. When the organizations’ distinctive features, talents, skills, positions, history, and members are linked to a collective purpose, the organization’s distinctiveness becomes meaningful.

Defining Organizational Purpose

Every organization was created to achieve some purpose. Some organizations define their purpose in narrow, rather generic ways, seeing their purpose as “making a profit” or “producing a service efficiently”.

But purpose is really something beyond the organization’s generic goals — a purpose is how the organization aims to contribute to the larger world, in a qualitative way.

For example, while all financial institutions want to make money, the purpose of CFCU Community Credit Union is to encourage thrift, savings and the wise use of credit, so that members can establish financial well-being. The purpose of Etsy, beyond making money for itself and for its member vendors, is to help reconnect makers with buyers, so that artisans and users can affirm and share each other’s creativity.

Purpose is how the organization’s collective activity can add qualitative value to members and to society.

The Problem with Purpose: Why “us”?

The problem with purpose, though, is often that there is no well-articulated reason why a particular organization ought to take on that purpose.

Why should CFCU, and not some other organization, help people establish financial well being? Why should Etsy help artists and customers affirm each others’ creativity? Can’t artists enter competitions to get affirmation? Can’t customers buy branded products to affirm their good taste?

Distinctiveness answers the question of “Why us?”

Distinctiveness explains why we, and not some other organization, should pursue this purpose — because “who we are” makes us better qualified than any other organization to pursue this purpose.

Because we are who we are, we as an organization have the talent, the ability, the qualities necessary, to pursue this purpose. We can do it better than others, achieve what others cannot, because of who we are.

Distinctive qualities are innate strengths waiting to be used. So, while any other organization might have the time, the money, and the determination to pursue this purpose, only our organization can contribute the skills, talents, values, and members who can contribute what this purpose really needs.

Why did Etsy set its purpose to support creativity? Because Etsy is an artful, creative company, full of crafters, artisans, artists, creatives, aesthetes. They can create this kind of support because they know (themselves) what is needed by their community.

Purpose makes distinctiveness useful; distinctiveness makes purpose achievable.

Linking our organizational distinctiveness to our organizational purpose helps us broaden, deepen and amplify our contributions to that purpose.

Organizational distinctiveness can lead to competitive advantage for the same reason that distinctiveness can help organizations achieve their larger purpose – the advantage comes from a link between what the organization has to offer (its unique qualities) and what is needed to achieve the purpose.

For both organizations and individuals, when “who you are” is linked to “what you’re trying to contribute to this world”, your work is meaningful. Work is meaningful because it draws on something you uniquely have to offer, and contributes to something that uniquely needs what you have to offer.

–  By itself, your organization’s defining features are interesting but not necessarily relevant.

— By itself, your organization’s purpose may be noble but not necessarily achievable.

Linked together, your organization’s distinctiveness and purpose serve each other, making your work and your organization more meaningful

See also:

Beyond Positioning: Establishing Authentic Optimal Distinctiveness
Their Need or Your Ability: Why does your organization exist?
Can an organization be too different?: The Strategic Value of Optimal Distinctiveness
B Corporation Identity: An Opportunity for Organizational Authenticity

Images from Naccarato on Flickr

How can your organization claim to be making the world better, when your business model depends on making the world worse?

This question about corporate social responsibility efforts has bugged me for decades — pretty much since I learned what capitalism was.

The question came up again for me Tuesday during the conversation at the hopping Social Media Week 11 NYC event Let Them Eat Tweets: Online Organizing for Real World Change. The conversation centered on the panelists’ experiences with using social media (and online engagement in general) to influence offline/real world behavior towards change.

The conversation didn’t conclude with a definitive answer, and I’ve found no third position between pragmatism and idealism. But I do have a new perspective on the problem/solution that is somewhat comforting, that I want to share and get your thoughts on.

“Social Change” can be driven by many players — not all of them are players with a simple, inherently positive impact on the world.

In an ideal world, no organization would create more damage than it could correct, use more resources than it could renew, or influence the world in anything but a net positive way. In an ideal world, organizations would not feel the conflict between the business they are in and the social good they want to support in the world.

In the real world, we find many organizations taking from society with one hand, and giving back to society with the other. [Note that not all organizations in this position are for-profit businesses. However...] Many corporations have this kind of relationship between their business and their corporate social responsibility efforts. When your organization is in this position, it has a rather compromised role in social change.

The Let Them Eat Tweets panel had representatives from five very kinds of organizations, each with its own change agency role. The panelists included a social media-for-good consulting firm principle, a political performance artist, a non-profit’s social media marketer, a corporation’s public relations/outreach manager, and a global governmental communications/public affairs director.

Each of the panelists had a different perspective on the value of corporate involvement in social change– seeing corporations as clients, as enemies, as funder-philanthropists, as direct and positive forces, and as one of many partners in a global effort. The audience participants also ranged from pro-corporate to anti-business, with some of us straddling that divide on a daily basis.

Raising the Challenge

A participant challenged the corporate representative, from MTV, with a sincere question (which I paraphrase):

How could MTV, a corporation that thrived on increasing consumerism, superficial celebrity, hyper-sexualization, etc. claim to be doing any real ‘good’ in the world with their social media campaigns against relationship violence, sexually-transmitted diseases testing, and rocking the vote?

In essence the participant asked– How can you claim to be making the world better, when your business model depends on making the world worse?

That’s the kind of question that usually either stops the conversation dead or starts a fight. The participant audience moved to take sides, but the MTV representative stepped in to keep the conversation open. He acknowledged the participant’s position as one worth discussing and not dismissing, and he asked the participant to consider whether his characterization (taken perhaps at one moment in time, or built on a simplified perception of the organization) really reflected “the richness of MTVs programming and activism”. So far, so good. He went on to explain that MTV was really making a difference — a measurable difference — in young adults’ social behavior. MTV’s social media-based change initiatives were achieving real results. MTV was using online social media to influence offline behavior for social good.

I’m not quite sure what was said next, because I got too busy writing down my own thoughts. [You can watch the session online here.] I have so ‘been there’ myself, asking organization members how they can reconcile the damage they do in and with their businesses with the contributions they make, and how they can tip the balance towards the positive side.

We believe that the best kinds of CSR are related to the identity of the organization – Good CSR extends the values of the organization, benefits from the organization’s core competencies, and/or supports and serves the organization’s customers. This is CSR that is “aligned” and “authentic”.

We also wish that want organizations to just focus their CSR on cleaning up the problems that they themselves create. Sometimes, corporations  can and will blend CSR and ‘process improvement’ because it ultimately helps the bottom line. Then, it’s a win-win-win. The CSR fixes the system so that the damage that the organization itself creates is reduced, or eliminated. This is efficient, sensible, and ideal.

Most of the time, though, we can’t get organizations to do this, and we don’t really try to. We don’t think we can convince corporations to promote social change that directly conflicts with their business model. We’re pragmatic.

Really, who are we kidding to think that oil companies will help us reduce our dependence on oil?

If we put all our energies towards trying to get corporations to bite the hands they feed on, change will take a really long time, because so few organizations will be willing to do this. So, with regard to MTV, as long as Viacom’s business is sustained by advertising, we’re unlikely to get a senior employee of MTV to decide to put MTV’s CSR efforts into reducing consumerism.

Does that mean that MTV’s efforts are hypocritical? Or inauthentic? Or worthy of our disdain?

I don’t think an organization’s efforts are hypocritical, even when they focus on fixing problems they aren’t causing, if they are fixing problems where they can uniquely make a difference.

In this particular case, MTV has the voice, the attention, the engagement, and the tools to reach their audience and to influence their audiences’ behavior. And, in this case, the corporation is using these capacities for good.

I don’t think an organization’s efforts are inauthentic, even when they focus on fixing problems they aren’t causing, if they are addressing the same social issues inside their organization as they are outside with their audience.

At MTV, for example, their CSR could be authentic if they held employee workshops on cyberbullying. And, MTV could send employees information about sexual health, encourage everyone to get tested for STDs, and give them everyone who earned one a Foursquare badge.

[I didn't get details from the MTV rep, but he did tell me that they push their initiatives inside MTV to their own employees as well as to their audience.]

Anticipating the mention of “the real world” and the value of a pragmatic approach, the audience participant quoted Henry David Thoreau:

For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.

That’s a powerful image, and it does describe the real world ratio of pragmatic/incremental vs. idealistic/profound social change approaches. We know that striking at the root is more efficient, and if we could get every organization to change its business model to eliminate the damage that it causes, we’d do that.

At the same time, though, I’ve spent enough time in my garden to know that if you hack away at the leaves of an invasive plant for long enough, with purpose, intention and precision, you can eventually kill it prune it into a size and shape that adds to the garden rather than damages the garden.

Pragmatic can seem boring. Mine isn’t a very heroic image, all of us out there with our hedge clippers whacking away at invasive branches. But pragmatic action, purposeful, deliberate and precise, actually can — and will– make a difference.

See also:
Authentic CSR: Should Dawn publicize its involvement in Oiled Bird Rescue?
Balancing Profit and Purpose at Whole Foods: Red Fish Blue Fish
When Will “Social Business” Become Social Change Business?
MAC’s Apology for Juarez Makeup Line: Effective and Authentic
Want Authenticity? Design Homophobia Out of the Organization

I’m taking part in the virtual book tour and are doing to explore concepts from . Maddie and Lindy, along with their colleague Jamie Notter, have long been some of my favorite bloggers.

“Even though” they write about communications strategies, and focus on a very specific type of organization (associations), their ideas are big, broadly applicable, and eminently practical. I appreciate their deep sensitivity to the organizational and leadership challenges of communications, especially when applied to social media tools. So when Maddie and Lindy put their ideas together in a book, and set up a virtual book tour to promote their ideas, I was only too happy to sign on.

Knowing that this post would be one of the last in a long line of reviews (all of them positive, it turns out) I wanted to ask them questions that not only pertained directly to authenticity and organizations of all kinds, but also to ask them questions that they might not have already answered.  Below, Maddie graciously answered my questions … even the completely softball opening question of:

“Why “Open Community“?”

Maddie Grant: We come from the association industry and for many of us “membership” people, community is old hat. It’s what we do. It’s central to our work.

And yet, for some reason (actually a lot of reasons) what we know about community isn’t always translating well to building community online. Lindy and I have talked to thousands of association executives who have voiced their frustrations about the social web–from the overabundance of tools and the disorderly experimentation of staff and members, to the lack of organizational support and the unwieldy processes for monitoring and managing social media, and that’s just the beginning. It’s easy to get bogged down in the newness and the detail, and miss the bigger picture–not the 10,000-foot bigger picture, but the “just high enough to make practical sense” bigger picture.

So we started writing the book, and the idea that kept popping up is the concept of Open Community. Here’s the gist: Your Open Community is your people who are bonded by what your organization represents and care enough to talk to each other (hopefully about you!) online.

Surprising Reactions and New insights

cv: All of the reviews of the book have been enthusiastic and positive. Certainly, you knew your book would address a ‘pain point’ or fill a need for association staffers and/or members, and the positive response to the book confirms that you’re offering associations something they feel they need. As you’ve read the reviews yourselves and talked to people who’ve read the book, which reactions have surprised you? Where there any points you took for granted (or thought were kind of banal) that resonated very strongly with readers? What new insights did you have about Open Community as you listened to readers?

Maddie Grant:  Actually, we wrote (and promoted) the book very consciously as a “conversation starter” and every “big idea” in the book is meant to be something people can riff off of and build a bigger conversation around. So while we were more excited than surprised that i t has actually worked that way and sparked some great conversations, we were also amazed at the creativity of some readers in sharing their thoughts. Here’s an example – and filmed a little video spot talking about what resonated with them.

On the downside, we’re looking for case studies from associations “living” the concepts in the book–and we’re sure they are out there–but everyone feels that they are behind the curve right now. So it looks like our industry may need this book even more than we thought, to help push things forward and help these organizations become more “social” and more open.

Aligning Actions and Purpose, and Conveying Meaning

cv: When I talk with organizations and their members, I focus on two issues–one is aligning actions with purpose, and the other is finding what’s most meaningful about the organization/business for members/employees and the organization’s external stakeholders. When you think about the insights and recommendations in Open Community, which single bit of advice do you think is most relevant to aligning actions and purpose? How about for helping associations and organizations communicate what’s most meaningful?

Maddie Grant:  Great question. In a wide sense, the entire book is about conveying the meaning of the organization. You can’t successfully connect with your community online without being able to identify why that matters purpose and what you are trying to achieve. Maybe you’re trying to advance an industry or profession–every association mentions that in their mission. Or maybe you’re trying to achieve something more tactical, like reaching out to younger stakeholders or reinforcing an advocacy campaign.

And as for our single bit of advice: choose clarity over control. We define clarity over control as “a leadership concept in which the clear articulation of an organization’s most important priorities, universally understood by all stakeholders at all levels of the organization, de-emphasizes the need for centralized control over every detail of the organization’s activities.” We call it “the key to leading the way and sharing control.” In it’s simplest form, it means being able to define for everyone in an organization (staff and members) how online activity advances the mission of the organization. If you can do that, then you’re allowing not only your staff, but also your members and other stakeholders to share and collaborate in the work of the organization in
a strategic way.

cv: In the last several months, there have been several books trying to explain and help us anticipate how social media will push organizations to change, and how organizations might embrace social media to transform themselves and their relationships with their stakeholders. I’m thinking of books like Charlene Li’s , Tony Bingham & Marcia Conner’s , by Beth Kanter, Allison Fine, & Randi Zuckerberg, and The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith. Each of these books is focused on its own niche (leadership, learning, nonprofits, and social change, respectively) but all of them address the link between social media and serving a community.

Recognizing that you’re focused on associations, what insights from Open Community do you think apply to any organization and to every organization that wants an online presence?

Maddie Grant:  There are many lessons in the book for any kind of business. We actually feel that many associations have a huge advantage that they have yet to leverage–they have a built-in community within their membership. Association communities are people who gather in real life and talk about industry issues and spread the word or volunteer their time for the good of the order. The book is about helping associations translate that to building community online as well as offline. Many other kinds of companies and businesses are actually looking at membership-type models to build customer loyalty. And even for those that haven’t defined their business model in that way, similar lessons apply because successful use of social media tools has everything to do with building relationships between people. For-profit companies may not have built-in communities, but the smart ones are aware that the power of social media lies in the growth of networks around brands and organizations.

So specifically, there are lessons in the book that are absolutely relevant to any organization: lessons about building internal capacity (process and structures) for successful social media management; about how to manage the relationship between public outposts (like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) and your homebase website; about recognizing and rewarding champions; about new skill sets for becoming a social organization; and more. The ultimate lesson in the book is that building community online is about people, not about technology or tools.

Read this book!

CV: My own view of Open Community is that it hits the issues square in the center, and offers actionable advice for managers who want to use social media to cohere their stakeholders around a sense of shared purpose.

I’d recommend this book to practicing managers, but I also think it would be worth a read by academics. Although Open Community isn’t an academic book about organizational theory per se, the insights and suggestions are well-informed. I can imagine management professors reading this and getting a double whammy– actionable advice to offer students, and an orientation to what’s really going on in actual organizations run by real managers who care about what they do and the people they do it for. I’d also assign this book to BBA, MBA and ExecEd students, because Maddie & Lindy reinforce all the messages we want students to hear about communicating and leading– in a very real-wold way. While Open Community will orient any manager to the key issues of social media, it really is a primer on the leadership challenge of creating community- online and offline.

More on SocialFish:
Mobile apps are a waste of time for associations, by Lindy Dreyer
Do you have a philosophical commitment to becoming social?, by Maddie Grant
Social Organizations Are Inclusive, by Jamie Notter

[Disclaimer: I liked this book enough to buy my own copy; I didn't get a free book in exchange for a post. I'd have read Open Community anyway, and appreciated it just as much. ]

What would Facebook be like if it were designed by women?

In my earlier post, I proposed that Facebook would look, feel and function differently if it had been designed by “women”.

[What I actually was writing about what what Facebook might look like if it had been designed by Feminists-- but I used "women" in the title to enhance SEO. Sometimes we make tradeoffs, and write headlines that prioritize discoverability over precision.]

Distinguishing Between Women and Feminists

Clarifying how a facebook designed for women is different from a facebook designed by feminists is an important place to begin the conversation, because so many people struggle to distinguish between “women” and “feminists/feminism”.

“Women” is a social category, based on a person’s gender self-definition. When we talk about “Women” we’re talking about a social category with predictable, empirically verifiable, modal preferences. We can measure what women as a group prefer, and we can design to appeal to these preferences.

“Feminists” is a social category, based on a person’s political orientation. Many women advocate feminism and many feminists are women. Some feminists are men, and some feminists choose to define themselves without using the terms like man or woman. Feminist have values they want to ‘build in’ to products, services and organizations.

When it comes down to distinguishing between women and feminists, we need to separate marketing and politics.

Marketing to Women

Designing something “for women” is a marketing challenge. Products designed for women are intended to appeal to women by reflecting the preferences of women as a social group.

If you want to get lots of women to like, buy, use your product, you identify empirically what kinds of features “women” prefer, you design your product to have these features, and viola, you’ve got a product “for Women”.

Feminist Design

Feminist design of a product is a political action. Products designed by feminists are intended to change power relationships and advance social change, on behalf of women and men.

Facebook was not and is not designed “for women”. It is not designed in ways that reflect what women prefer in terms of the tool’s appearance, functionality, and raison d’etre.

A facebook designed “for Women” might have begun with some research into how women might want to create, sustain and recreate social relationships in an online forum. That research might have included what kinds of visual appearance they’d like the site to have, as well as what kinds of functions they’d like the site to enable, and what different ways they’d like their social relationships categorized, organized and represented.

Women would have been asked:

• What do you want to be able to share, see and do with your ‘friends’? (Would we even call them “friends”?)
• How do you understand the variety of your relationships?
• How can relationships best be presented graphically/visually and over time?

Maybe Facebook for women would have been pink, with flowery text and pictures of cats; maybe not. Maybe a facebook designed by women would display the romantic relationship status of each user; maybe it would have displayed each person’s answer to the question “If I could make the world a better place, I would ________.”

Facebook for women might have had:

• Ways to evoke and express emotion
• Ways to personalize the look and feel to make it more ‘us’
• Ways to rate men on how supportive and mature they are (just kidding)

Who knows — no one seems to have asked women what they might prefer to find on Facebook, either in terms of appearance or functionality.

Facebook Designed by Feminists:  Feminist HCI

A Facebook desinged by Feminists would be a much different ‘product’.

I am not an expert in Feminist HCI (Human Computer Interface) so I’ll just give you the general, layfeminist /layperson’s view:

There is a feminist approach to software design, a feminist model of social community, a feminist political and economic ideology, a feminist technology movement, and a feminist social movement. All of these are engaged and reflected in feminist design.

As a movement, feminism focuses on changing power relationships to bring about social, economic, and ecological justice. (While feminism initially focused on changing gender relations, the movement and ideology has expanded dramatically. For an introduction to feminism, please go to Feminism 101.)

A social network platform designed by feminists would aim to facilitate egalitarian and inclusive social relationships, distribute authority and responsibility, encourage collaboration, honor individual agency and self-definition, and more. A Feminist Social Network Platform would “give the user a tool to express her choice and the truth of her existence”.

A feminist social network would not be a ‘product’ to be sold to users, but would instead be a service that was supported by users. We tend to forget that Facebook is a product because we don’t pay anything to use it– as far qas we know. But, we users generate a great deal of profit for Facebook not only by looking at profiles and feeds, but also by creating content ourselves.

Some additional ideas?

A ‘facebook’ designed by feminists:

• Would show relationships between people as more flexible and dynamic, represented more like these twitter tools than like a hierarchy. (thanks Ryan!)
• Would involve users in the creation process, perhaps not as FLOSS experts but certainly as experts in what they want.
• Would put privacy decisions in the hands of each user.
• Would not own people’s data or people’s content. It would not aim to profit from this data and content without an explicit profit sharing agreement.
• Would not sell people’s private information to companies that want to market to those people, without the explicit, ongoing, informed consent of those users.
• Would not be privately owned by individual shareholders, although it might be privately owned by members or by a for-purpose organization.
• Would be created and sustained through feminist design processes and feminist ‘management’ (a topic for another post).
• Would be socially, economically, politically inclusive.
• Would allow for privacy and identity protections related to political action.
• Would from the very start have embraced accessibility issues for people with vision-related and other ability challenges.



• Would have default settings that are inclusive and self-presentation choices that are more varied.
• Would have TOS and regulations about what is and is not allowed that did not reinforce sexism and racism.

Feminists would approach the project with a political goal in mind. The overall intent of the platform might be ” general social networking”, just as with the current Facebook. but the driving interest might have been for creating friendships, affinity groups and social movements, not checking out chicks to evaluate whether you want to date them.

A feminist social network would be designed on open-source software (as Facebook is), as a political value driven choice, not (only) because open source is less expensive, more malleable and often more reliable than proprietary software resources.

The processes through which a feminist Facebook would be created would also be different– feminists would approach the very project of building a platform very differently from the way that Facebook was designed.

As Jon and other commenters have mentioned, there are some alternatives out there– some alive, some defunct, some in alpha, some in wireframes — that are trying to do things differently. Not many of these are explicitly feminist designed, but some like Diaspora have political and economic justice as a driving value.

Where do we go from here?

I’m excited by the thoughtfulness and complexity of the comments shared after the last post, and I will take them up in future posts. Thank you all so much for these insights. From my research, it looks like the conversation about values and technology is confined within expert tech communities, and I think it needs to come further out into the mainstream social media conversation. Any suggestions about how to do this? I’m open….

The general point to remember is that any piece of technology reflects implicit assumptions of the people/ business that designed it, along with the explicit design / commercial goals of the product. We often miss this, because we take for granted the male-ness of our dominant approach to technology. And, we take for granted that profit motives will dominate what is included and excluded from a product — unless we set different priorities.

These last few weeks there’s been a great conversation about whether social networks can facilitate advocacy and social change. The answer is obvious, although more complex than some make it seem.

No technology is neutral. Every technology reflects values and a political stance towards the social world. Many technologies can be co-opted so that they facilitate unintended purposes. Truly revolutionary technology has social justice and liberation built in.

Facebook is changing our world, that’s for sure. But is it truly revolutionary? Not the way a social network designed by feminists would be.

I look forward to continuing this conversation!

See Also:

Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog
The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted

Jessi Schoner, a researcher at University of Minnesota’s eWorkPlace and a reader, sent me an interesting article about Whole Food’s efforts to nudge customers towards more sustainable choices of seafood.

Whole Foods … is launching the first in-store color-coded sustainable seafood rating program this week. … The system relies on three colors–green (“best choice”), yellow (“good alternative”), and red (“avoid”)–to alert customers about overfished species. … all red-listed seafood will be cut from store shelves by 2012.

Jessi honed right in on two important insights from the short article.

As Jessi explains:

I’m not the biggest Whole Foods fan, but this new color-coding system followed by a product phase-out really impresses me.

If Whole Foods overnight just pulled their red-listed seafood from the shelves, some customers would undoubtedly start shopping elsewhere to continue to buy the products they can no longer get from Whole Foods.

But by socially conditioning their customers with this color-coding system for several months before phasing out the products, Whole Foods is trying to get buy-in from the customer by encouraging them to make more sustainable, alternative choices. Customers may learn to enjoy more sustainable seafood choices before the unsustainable choices go away.

I give Whole Foods lot of credit for trying to promote more sustainable behaviors, but I’m even more impressed with how this decision also seems like the best “business” decision.

Whole Foods is trying to get customers to buy someTHING else instead of someWHERE else.

It’s a win for the customers, who can explore new products with better information during the color-coding phase. It’s a win for sustainability because it can help reduce demand for over-fished, sensitive species.

And, it’s a win for Whole Foods. Whole Foods won’t lose as many customers when it eliminate code red seafood from their product line, since it will have taught customers which more sustainable fish to buy. Whole Foods may even gain customers by demonstrating a concern for sustainability while creating sensible action steps.

Balancing Profit and Purpose

Whole Foods’ effort seems to strike a good balance between a “for purpose” mission to promote sustainable food sources and a “for profit” strategy to be the supermarket fish-seller of choice.

It’s also terrific that Whole Foods’ initiative recognizes how people learn and helps them learn. It may even help Whole Foods and its suppliers build capacity and expertise in “blue fish” as they help to build demand for sustainable seafood.

Looks like a win-win-win.

Thanks for sharing, Jessi.

See also:
Can a for-profit business organization that also pursues a social purpose be authentic?
Honey is really bee vomit: Why we should label “NonProfit” Organizations “For-Purpose” Organizations
Authentic Food Organizations: Why I love my CSA

Organizations are organic things — they are born, they die, they suffer and they thrive. But very few organizations flourish.

Organizations that flourish are rare creatures.

We find them where business goals are tied to larger purpose, where larger purpose is linked to community needs, and where individuals’ authentic selves are nourished by and engaged in the collective enterprise.

The opposite of a flourishing organization is a withering organization.

Many organizations that we assume are doing well are, in fact, withering.

A majority of organizations are just getting by. They hit their profit or service targets, they hire and retire members, they serve customers, and they do this all adequately. But, in the service of short term goals and/or selfish missions, these organizations are sapping themselves and their stakeholders dry.

These organizations are a net energy drain on their stakeholders. They take rather than contribute to the net value of the systems they are part of.

These organizations are withering.

We fight organizational withering, but we don’t promote organizational flourishing.

Organization leaders, advocates and members spend a lot of energy trying to prevent withering. We try to make organizations ‘better’ by addressing specific dimensions of improvement. We advocate and work towards everything from employee engagement to diversity to sustainability to enterprise 2.0.

The problems addressed by each one of these initiatives are root causes of organizational withering. Fixing, improving, changing and even transforming the organization on any one of these dimensions does make an organization genuinely better.

But ‘better’ isn’t the same as flourishing.

These single-issue change initiatives, and those of us who advocate for them, work as though “better” is our goal, and not as though organizational flourishing is our goal. I’m not sure whether this is because flourishing is just something we don’t let ourselves consider, or whether it’s because we’re so focused and so invested in the one particular issue that calls to us and feels like “our” work.

What Flourishing Requires

To be sure, getting an organization to flourish requires that we work on each of these important change dimensions:

Flourishing requires engagement.
Flourishing requires sustainability.
Flourishing requires leadership.
Flourishing requires diversity.
Flourishing requires employees with full, balanced lives.
Flourishing requires connections to causes that matter.
Flourishing requires products and services that meet real community needs.

Flourishing requires coordination and connection.

Most of all, flourishing requires coordinated, other-aware participation, from all of us who are advocates and agents of organizational change.

The success of the initiatives we each care about depends on us recognizing how that one dimension is connected to and depends on all these other initiatives. And, organizational flourishing requires that we deal with each of these initiatives in their relationships with other initiatives.

Each of us who advocates some dimension of organizational change needs to recognize, acknowledge, support and link to the organizational change efforts on other dimensions. We need to be aware of other initiatives, and coordinate our change efforts to include the initiatives important to others.

Flourishing requires a multi-pronged, networked change strategy.

To get to flourishing, we don’t have to abandon our commitment to a particular change initiative– we simply need to adjust how we approach our own initiative.

Oh, and think bigger too.

I realize that this is what some might call a tall order — too complicated, too complex, too ambitious. You’re right, it is complicated, complex and ambitious.

But I don’t really see a sensible alternative. I don’t want to rearrange deckchairs on a sinking ship, or tie up the weakening branches of a withering vine.

More specifically,

• I don’t want to contribute my energy to improving the environmental sustainability of an organization that is exploiting its workforce.
• I don’t want to improve the work-life strategy of any corporation that is taking advantage of the American financial system.
• I don’t want to improve the social learning at an organization that makes fun of LGBTx consumers.
• I don’t want to develop leaders in organizations that are fundamentally selfish.

Do you?

I didn’t think so.

What I do want to do, and what I want you to do with me, is to focus on flourishing.

Our goal should be helping organizations to flourish.

Our strategy should embrace every progressive organizational initiative and work to leverage the connections between them.

Our tactics should center on the initiatives that are dearest to us and where we can make a unique contribution, but always moving to connect with other advocates and ally our initiatives with theirs.

Are we together on this?

Images from Flicker:

Vine on blue from tanakawho
Funny from tanakawho

HT to Akhila Kolisetti (@akhilak, blog: Justice For All) for recommending Paul Rogat Loeb’s book “Soul of a Citizen: Living with conviction in challenging times.” page 283.

See Also:
A Benevolent Perfect Storm for Progressive Organizational Movements
Socialism, Capitalism, 5 Points of Ignorance, and Progressive Organizational Movements