I’m sure this topic has come up before, but I’d like to lay it out again - why don’t governments operate like businesses? It seems really simple theoretically. In business, if a customer is unsatisfied with a particular service or product, they either provide feedback, change the provider or stop purchases. Why can’t the same thing occur in a government setting? Why can’t people act like customers of public services (healthcare, security, education etc). We are, after all paying taxes, which is similar to paying for products or services in the business environment. I guess governments can give multiple excuses like the services they provide are cheaper than usual or that they subsidise a lot things which enables us to live at low costs. But aren’t they doing this with our taxes? If we are not satisfied with the services, can’t we lobby for improvements or other providers? On the downside, if governments do act like businesses, if progressive taxes are implemented should people who pay more taxes be better served? However, I do think there are more benefits than problems with governments adopting a more business-like approach and becoming more accountable for their actions, the same way businesses are at least accountable to their customers and shareholder, if not the rest of society and the environment.

Posted via email from deviantsadvantage’s posterous

A friend of mine recently got into a tiff with another colleague about maintaining the image of a big corporation in the public. The whole issue is essentially about how the media company has to be more careful about how it portrays the corporation during their campaigns and even the most frivolous things matter. If this is not managed carefully, the media company stands to lose the corporation as a client. This leads to something more interesting. We are now more afraid of corporations than governments. We are afraid of the backlash that corporations might unleash simply because of the power they wield. As a result we get really petty in the work environment to manage these issues.

I haven’t written for sometime and I find my aptitude for it deteriorating. All through April and mid-May I was quite tied up with the preparations for our regional business planning workshop for young/ early-stage social entrepreneurs. Bringing together 19 young social entrepreneurs (ages ranging 23 - 33) in Kuala Lumpur (in conjunction with WCIT), Rahul, Simon, Sunit and I got to working with each of the entrepreneurs’ business plans.

We went through everything an entrepreneur needs to think about and plan for during venture implementation - vision, mission, business model, social impact assessment etc. Through my work, I find that there are usually 2 types of social entrepreneurs:

- socially-tipped

A socially-tipped entrepreneur has a very strong social mission but has little or no idea of his/ her business model. Typically, this type of entrepreneur ends up relying on grant support to run the venture. We all know purely grant-based ventures end being chronically undercapitalised and are unable to expand the coverage of their services or products. My passion lies in helping socially-tipped entrepreneurs build their business models which is in essence diversifying their income streams from grant funding. This could include nominal fees, in-kind support, micro-credit packages etc.

- business-strong

These type of entrepreneurs run commercial businesses with strong CSR programs (CSR from traditional perspective). Our interest is to help their ventures optimise the creation of social and/or environmental value without sacrificing the creation of economic value (profits). The goal here is to truly create sustainable/ blended value entities.

After a very energising i-genius event (which I’ll cover in another post) in Phuket a couple of weeks back, I managed to gather some students from the Kaospilots business school in the Netherlands and 2 filmmakers (Mark Chaplin & Sara Haq from Business Unusual) who were attending the igenius event to participate in a workshop or bootcamp of sorts with the local social entrepreneurs whom we’re working with. The workshop was held at the World Bank office in Bangkok.

The event went extraordinarily well as all groups benefited from participating in the workshop. Both the students from Kaospilots and the filmmakers managed to learn more about the efforts in social entrepreneurship and the social entrepreneurs themselves learnt more about how to communicate their ideas and ventures with more clarity.

I discovered something quite interesting during the whole process. Having our local entrepreneurs engage with a 3rd party group like the students and the filmmakers endorsed our teachings which were usually not consumed as quickly as compared to having a 3rd party group present during these interactions. In essence, if you want to convince someone, you need the presence of a so-called independent 3rd party person/ group that can endorse what you’re trying to communicate.