Scofield - The social entrepreneurs handbook : how to start, build, and run a business that improves the world

How to Start, Build, and Run a Business That Improves the World

RUPERT SCOFIELD

Copyright 2011 by Rupert Scofield. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-07-175372-2
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PART 1
RIGHTING THE UNRIGHTABLE WRONG AND FINDING YOUR MISSION POSSIBLE

PART 2
IT TAKES AN ASYLUM

PART 3
MONEY DOES GROW ON TREES, BUT YOU HAVE TO PLANT THEM FIRST

PART 4
NOT ROCKET SCIENCE: STRUCTURE, SYSTEMS, TECHNOLOGY, AND STRATEGY

PART 5
THRIVING AND SURVIVING

How did you do it? The Social Entrepreneurs Handbook is my attempt to answer that question, whether posed by a recent college graduate, a professional midcareer in the private sector, or even a retired person seeking to enter the fascinating and rapidly growing world of social entrepreneurship. Derived from my forty-year career as a social entrepreneur in international development, my promise in this book is to offer practical advice on where and how to find your mission, how to finance it, and how to attract, motivate, and manage the fellow travelers who make the journey with you. By sharing my experiences, I hope to inspire others to follow in my footsteps, while avoiding the many costly mistakes my colleagues and I made on our long road to eventual success. At the same time, I hope to show you that screwing up is a useful and even necessary part of this learning process, which, I guarantee, never ends.

As we will learn in this book, the modern nonprofit must adopt many of the same strategies, policies, and best practices employed by successful enterprises in the for-profit world, but not at the cost of its soul. To achieve this balance, it must draw also on human resources from the commercial world, successfully assimilating these into the nonprofit culture. As my own experience with the creation and management of FINCA International, a global microfinance network currently serving more than 750,000 clients in twenty-one of the poorest nations on earth, demonstrates, this process, while necessary, is fraught with risk, for both the organization and the people trying to govern and manage it.

I keep a copy of Don Quixote, in the original castellano, in my bathroom. It weighs about five pounds, and I get through it at the rate of about a page per day. One reason is that one of my favorite authors, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, said that no person could consider himself or herself educated unless he or she had read it. The second reason is that I wanted to remind myself while I wrote this that all missions are A Possible Dream.

Far more than the fleeting satisfaction derived from completing a work like this, it is the act of creating it that brings true satisfaction. I take this step now, in contradiction to pages and pages of preaching about the importance of results and deadlines, to remind myself of that fact. Often I found myself stumped in the middle of a section, unsure as to what the meaning or lesson was of the experience I was relating. I would find myself believing I had completed the section, only to be haunted by a deep, vague feeling of dissatisfaction and a lurking suspicion that I had shortchanged both myself and the reader. Then hours, sometimes days, later the deeper significance of the experience would come to me. Indeed, the title of the final chapter came to me when I was beginning a walk up in Maine on a beautiful August morning. I had been looking for something that adequately summed up my experience of the past thirty-five years, spent in more than fifty nations on this small world. When I came to the top of the drive, in my minds eye I saw them gathered there: humanitarians at the gate.