Monday, March 05, 2007

A More Powerful Path - Social Capitalism - Social Entrepreneurship


Changing the way we think about change--and bringing business into the act.

Business changes the world--at every moment, in myriad ways, for good and ill. Decisions in boardrooms or on factory floors set in motion both staggering progress and far-reaching disasters: Microsoft tweaks its software and rearranges the virtual desktops of millions of people, shaping how they work every day. BP apparently shrugs off maintenance, and oil pours from a corroded pipeline into Prudhoe Bay. Wal-Mart shifts its gaze, just slightly, and drives organic produce to folks whose income once limited them to preservative-laden processed food.

But unlike the chaos-theory butterfly, business is not an uncalculating force of nature. It can behave with intention. Indeed, we have left the era in which business leaders were expected to treat their companies as mute, dumb giants, merely swinging pickaxes in a profit quarry. We are waking to the idea that if business inevitably shapes the future, it has a responsibility to choose what that future will be.

See full Article.