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Sharing My Presentation On Introducing Blogging To Social Entrepreneurs and Non-Profits

Thanks to Mark Lewis for inviting me to talk at the Crescent on organizational blogging for social entrepreneurs and non-profits. Attached is the presentation in Powerpoint format and PDF format. Only the Powerpoint format (when viewed in slide show mode) will enable the reader to follow the hyperlinks to the web (for the full-blown article or blog post).

I get a real charge out educating folks and touching people's lives. I also get a charge out of thinking about non-profits (esp. having served in the past on the board as a financial offcer for a non-profit in the child care space). While I'm sure my boss (Stefan) deep down wants me to sell stuff , I'm at a point in my career where I'm focused on helping people and leaving the next-level of a legacy. Stefan can fire me when I don't meet my numbers and operating goals though.

Note that this was version 1.0 of the presentation, and I'm hoping to adapt it to other contexts and speaking venues. Some key things I realize that I need to do:

I am committed to helping the group increase their level of knowledge of blogging and/or potential uses in their particular sector. I am also willing to help more generally in certain non-profit endeavors independent of blogging, provided that I can find a way to contribute in a way that complements with my other efforts. For anyone that is interested, I can help introduce them to blogging communities, blogs in a particular area of interest for them, church blogging, newsreaders (so you can efficiently read 1000+ blogs a day like Scoble), or other items I talked about.

Steve Shu

More On Virtual Teams And Collaboration

Ken Thompson has added some additional thoughts to the virtual teaming topic (which is a highly-related topic and undercurrent to the work I am doing at 21Publish with respect to blogging communities). His point about exploring opportunites for sponsors and donors in the non-profit sector is at the back of my mind at all times, especially when I learn of non-profit endeavors such as this one (I've mentioned SAHRI before in the evidence-based medicine space).

The Tao Of Getting Information Technology (IT) Deployments To Stick

Biren recently posed a question to me about how to get technology initiatives to stick based on my experience as a management consultant, user, and technology manager.

Although I always believe that from an execution perspective one should strive for the keep it simple stupid (KISS) principle, describing the Tao (i.e., mastery required) to reach the nirvana state of "IT acceptance" in an organization requires some foundation.

An organization achieves IT acceptance when a habit or addiction with respect to both process and technology has been reached. A habit is created when an organization knows what to do, wants to do something, and knows how to do it. Commitment is frequently started off by getting the organization to collaboratively develop the requirements for the IT initiative as opposed to having an IT project handed down to them.

For IT projects, more often than not, a primary challenge is addressing the want aspect of the habit formation process. Plain an simple. If the system does not serve or incent the end user in some way, there is a high probability that the technology will not take. People have to get some benefit by using the system. Too often I have heard operating managers talk about black hole systems where they feed data in, and mysteriously, headquarters is the only one that cares and uses the data. Big warning flags going up in my book.

To address the want aspect of things you must create movement. Here I find the pecking order of the carrot, the stick, the Chinese professor, and the Jedi mind trick to be key. Two of these techniques are often referred to in change management consulting - I added the other two as off-center techniques:

• The Carrot - This is using a positive incentive system. Show people the end goal and lead them toward victory. "If we can all get on this system, we can outflank the competition."
• The Stick - This is using a negative incentive system. Scare them. "If we don't do this, we'll all likely lose our jobs."
• The Chinese Professor - My Mandarin professor was a first generation Chinese. When I didn't practice enough in the language laboratory, he'd look at me sternly and say, "Why have you disappointed me Xu Bing Hou". There would be long silence for effect, and the guilt would drive me to excel the next time around.
• The Jedi mind trick - Here's a bit of a catch-all for framing techniques that stem from organizational behavior and psychology. A bit too detailed to go into here (although I will point to a recent post of mine that draws from broader field of organizational behavior). Suffice it to say, while I do not like to correlate these methods with the notion of using tricks or being manipulative, I will say that if you better understand how yourself and other people process information, all that all one is really trying to do is to engage people the way they want to be engaged.

Carrots tend to work best in my book, but others probably have different experiences.

The final aspect beyond getting a habit and creating movement is tracking initial movement. This is a crucial subdomain of the project management discipline and not taught enough in the field. Since this post is getting long, I will say there a three elements here that are particularly relevant. These are:

1. Having a project kickoff meeting
2. Driving and piloting a program (and hand picking winners early on)
3. Monitoring results regularly and more frequently early on.

Anyway, that's my Tao.

Giving Executive Roundtable Talk On Organizational Blogging For Social Entrepreneurs And Non-Profits

I've been invited to give an executive roundtable talk (30 minutes plus 10 for Q&A) at the Crescent in Dallas about organizational blogging and blogging communities for social entrepreneurs and non-profits. I may eventually leverage some of this stuff for a more extensive mini-course or seminar in business school settings. The audience is unlikely to know much about blogging.  Here's my rough thoughts on title and outline so far:

• Title - "An Introduction to Organizational Blogging and Blogging Communities for Social Entrepreneurs and Non-Profits"
• Outline
  1. What's the opportunity?
  2. What's the technology and medium about?
     • Blogs
     • Blog communities
     • Pertinent technologies surrounding blogs (pseudo-stack)
     • Macroeconomic dynamics
  3. Musings on challenges in social entrepreneurship and non-profit settings
  4. How real social entrepreneurs are using blogging
  5. How barriers can be overcome using blogging
  6. Q&A, open discussion, & potential opportunities

Thoughts and feedback? Note that I eventually plan to post this presentation for others to benefit from.

The Difference Between A Community Blog And A Blogging Community

When I first joined the 21Publish team, there was a good amount of terminology that I needed to adjust to. I am still adjusting to it and trying to figure out how our customers perceive us. Some of the problems can be attributed to the proliferation of blog buzzwords ...

In any case, one of the most common misunderstandings I find in the market is regarding the notion of community blogs versus blogging communities (also sometimes known as "group blogs" or "multi-user blogs").

Community blogs are predominantly websites where many authors can post journal entries on a single space and where people can respond by commenting on posts to the community blog.

Blogging communities are collections of individual blogs (potentially tens, hundreds, or thousands) tied together by a larger common value or theme. Conversations can occur on the individual blogs, between the blogs, on a common messageboard that binds the invidudal blogs together in a community, or across other blogs in the blogosphere.

Blogging community services, a niche that 21Publish occupies, specialize in providing value-add services that encourage community interaction and the channeling of hot information within the community. Example value-added features include:

I hope that this post has helped to clarify the difference between community blogs and blogging communities. My next goal will be to try to better understand how people view 21Publish. Although I view the following terms as describing what 21Publish enables, having multiple terms may confuse people:

Confusion may also be created by the fact that many of the individual blogging platforms may the terminology above in a slightly different way (mostly to reflect co-authoring capabilities).

Any preferences?

Revisiting The Dutch Uncle And My First Blog Post Ever

This post has been reproduced from my other blog.

At my old blog last year, I recounted a story about losing a management consulting deal. Some key snips setting the context for the Dutch Uncle (emphasis added):

• Today I lost a freelance consulting deal to another consultant. Of course I'm disappointed, but once a deal is lost, it is lost ...
• I think the most important things to do after a lost deal are to identify learnings with respect to your company's product offering and sales processes and to preserve prospect relationships ...
• Now I am not going to go into all of my learnings here, however, I think it is useful to consider a concept I learned in Ford Harding's book, "Rain Making: The Professional's Guide to Attracting New Clients". You need to ask as many people as possible (client prospects included) to be straight-up with you. No silverlining. Why did I lose the deal? This is the concept of getting the prospect to talk to you like a Dutch uncle. To quote a passage from Harding's book, "The person who talks to you like a Dutch uncle does it for your own good ... At its worst ... [problems are] like a cheating spouse; friends know but don't tell you about it. "

Well, as it turns out, I actually won the deal. The client prospect came back. That's the happy story for Friday.

To change gears a bit, I actually started blogging probably back in 2003. I had one post up there for about a year on a Blogger account which I eventually deleted. I like to think that I won the deal above in part because what was embodied in my first blog post ever. The essence of what was there was (to my recollection):

• my personal mission statement as a business development professional
• my utmost goal to help people and not to sell to them
• my commitment to safeguard one's confidential and competitive information as a business partner
• my goal to even help you find an alternative source for your problem if my company's solution was not a good fit.

It probably went on and on for a bit, but you get the idea.

In Search Of My Social Entrepreneurship

Social Entrepreneurship. This is a term I have never heard of before until last month. I must be living in a shell. I'm still not quite sure what the term "social entrepreneur" means, but I believe it is a fairly widely used term that refers to adopting entrepreneurial behaviors in non-profit organizations.

Here's some other definitions when Googling the web:

• "The job of a social entrepreneur is to recognize when a part of society is stuck and to provide new ways to get it unstuck. He or she finds what is not working and solves the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution and persuading entire societies to take new leaps. Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry." (source: Ashoka)
• Social entrepreneurship "Describes an approach to a social issue.  It is not a field of discipline that can be learned in academia ... More related to leadership than to management." (source: The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship)

Now there are a number of business schools (e.g., Harvard, Yale, Columbia, NYU Stern, Stanford ... don't currently see my alma mater Chicago or locally SMU off-the-cuff) and capital market players (e.g., venture firms) that seem to play in social entrepreneurship area.

Here's an interesting snip about RISE, a project launched in 2002 at the Columbia Business School:

RISE deepens learning opportunities for students and practitioners by focusing on key issues in current practice of social enterprise, social investing and social venturing. RISE concentrates on people working where the lines of previously distinct nonprofit and for-profit sectors start to blur ...

RISE studies the growing practice of building profit and nonprofit ventures that aim to achieve social and financial impact through their products, services and other business practices, and the entities that fund them. RISE explores issues of nonprofit organizations building capacity and using business practices to sustain their growth, as well as issues for for-profit companies trying to achieve social impacts as well as financial returns. RISE works collaboratively with investment funds around the country as well as foundations, other universities and intermediary groups to define, explore and report on key issues of interest to this developing field.

When I begin to think about some of my micro experiences with non-profits, as well as the more macro economics surrounding the space where:

• approximately half of the workers in non-profits are employed
• half are unpaid volunteers non-profit sector is approximately 7% of the the United States GDP (note: numbers not confirmed)

... well it makes me pause to think about how non-profits can leverage up to use technologies and improve work communication and collaboration, especially since direct control of resources is not as easy as it is in for-profits. eGroups and the like may be the ways of the past. Affordable community publishing, blogging communities and the like (such as the ones developing here, here, and experimented with here by Doug) provide just a preview of good things to come. The people working the communities I've cited are visionaries and leaders.

When Collaboration And Leadership Are More Important In Non-Profits Versus For-Profits

This post is related to non-profits and has been reproduced from my other blog.

Ventures or new organizational initiatives, whether in the profit or non-profit sector, face tough mortality rates early on. Luck clearly plays a role in the success of new initiatives, but I find that many times it has to do with a combination of tackling too many items, lacking organizational skills or resources, and not working out important issues of collaboration and leadership.

Non-profits bear a bigger brunt in my opinion:

• People tend to be naturally (and rightfully) more altruistic in non-profit endeavors -  This creates a large appetite, but it must be tapered with some discipline and a devil's advocate mentality to say that "we should first bite off a smaller goal".
• Non-profits may have greater tendencies to lack optimum organizational structures - As I mentioned in a prior post outlining how MBAs can apply skills in a non-profit environment, many non-profits I've seen have more diverse demographics than corporations. This is great, but it may also mean that a non-profit is getting contributed (pro-bono) support where one can't control the quality or goals of the resource as one would with an employee of a commercial entity. Non-profits may also lack resources in the way of $$ or specialized help on-staff.
• Non-profits may lack collaboration mechanisms more widely used in the high-tech space - Some of the team members may be working virtually from the organization (e.g., if contributed pro-bono work). Given that virtual teams have "amplified collaboration needs" (term coined here by Arienna Foley), it is worthwhile to figure out how to get the people to actively collaborate and get quick wins. Some bootstrap tools that may help in the greater effort of getting the team to work together include things like free conference calling (www.freeconferencecall.com), instant organizational intranet (note whitepaper PDF file)  and communication platform (e.g., using free configuration of 21Publish group publishing service), and Skype (free voice over IP, e.g., for international team members).

In any case, I hope that these items and pointers above may help give some ideas to those working for non-profits. This post was motivated by a portion of a broader discussion I had with Dr. Saraiya regarding  the South Asian Health Research Institute (SAHRI). Dr. Saraiya asked me to write down some of my thoughts in starting a new endeavor.

Integrating 21Publish Blogs & Non-21Publish Blogs

In discussions with people considering using the 21Publish as their group blogging service of choice, common questions that come up include how to integrate existing, non-21Publish blogs into a 21Publish community. Several ways come to the top of my mind:

There are other options that I see as well (e.g., for layering stacked 21Publish communities on top of one another). I don't have a good example of this one yet, but one can imagine loosely coupled communities. The concept here could be likened to that of university-level alumni relations versus regional alumni groups. These types of communities can be implemented different ways using 21Publish (and group features of the platform), but I could see some benefits to implementing the communities as separate portals in their own right.

Reflecting On The Dunbar Number

As I've started to put myself in the shoes of customers and prospective customers of 21Publish, I not only try to absorb the technology environment people are facing but also try to consider the culture and organizational processes that they follow and/or want to implement. To be frank, sometimes it can be overwhelming to talk with people of all walks of life from fishing to K-12 education to Southeast Asian Health initiatives, but I find the discussions fascinating and humbling too.

One aspect that I have been trying to keep in the back of my mind during these discussions is this. For those that have read Malcolm Gladwell's book, "The Tipping Point", you may recall loose references to optimum community sizes of 150. Now as you may recall, 21Publish launched a free pricing plan configuration that covers 100 users. Is that the right number? Who knows? But I will say that registrations have ramped up fast since we introduced this. I hope that we are adding value.

I have found it interesting to revisit some of the theories behind the Dunbar Number. Christopher Allen has an incredible (but older) post about the Dunbar Number. Here's a select snip from Christopher's post (but you should really read the whole thing if you can):

I also like the matrix of mean group size vs. neocortex ratio done by the Boston Consulting Group. Little did I know that they had monkey frameworks to complement the infamous farm animal-growth share matrix of the stars, cash cow, dog, and problem child or (?) ...

Personal Experience: How MBAs and Non-Profits Can Profit From One Another

This post is related to non-profits and has been reproduced from a post in March 2005 from my other blog.

Prior to my move to Dallas last year, I spent three years (voluntary work) in the capacity of the finance officer on the board of a non-profit organization (that provided child care). My experience at the non-profit was post-MBA and post management consulting with PRTM. I got a lot out of the experience, and I was honored to be able to contribute to the organization.

What I got out of it:

• I found that non-profit boards tend to be more diverse than corporate boards - the experience forced me to learn how to minimize MBA jargon talk and the like.
• The board size was much larger and decoupled than one might find with boards of many corporate organizations (twelve people versus three to five) - the experience forced me to continue to refine facilitation skills because large boards can be cumbersome.
• It was often easier to connect finance with both the human policy and vision of the organization - governance at the board-level directly affected children and families (some of which are very disadvantaged [e.g., single moms, low income]), and it was gratifying to get the organization to points of commitment and resolve.
• I learned to appreciate the need for a separate operating board versus a fund raising board (something more typical of non-profit organizations).

There many things that one can bring to table for non-profits. As examples of some MBA concepts that I applied:

• Operations background - Assume that many manufacturing facilities operate at a normal load of 70% utilization. Now consider an organization like a child care organization that is make or break based on child enrollment numbers and where the budgeted numbers for the organization require breakeven to be 95% of capacity. Does this raise a warning flag that a correction is needed somewhere?
• Operations and competitive strategy - Suppose there are long waiting lists (queues) for the two-year old rooms in the facility and that capacity in the surrounding, competitive facilities is scarce. What does this like say about the price sensitivity of the market (i.e., how much the organization can raise enrollment prices)? Probably one can raise prices more than one thinks.
  
• Marketing - Other organizations are marketing lower prices yet they hide the fact that their coverage hours are shorter. How does your organization want to position itself in the market from a competitive viewpoint, and what concrete tactical things could be improved to make sure that people are educated about comparing apples to apples? Perhaps the organization should market itself as value-based, full-service and draw out the differences in a nice chart.
• Finance and Controller - When the financial situation gets tough, it becomes easy to want to take out small things (like water coolers), but where the dollar impact is small. Attack the problem from a different angle - first attack the problem from a "required hurdle perspective" as opposed to "a triage perspective". Use MBA spreadsheet, multimedia projector, and meeting facilitation skills to get the group on the same page as to how many dollars actually need to be cut out of the budget to affect the monthly enrollment fee for each family. Then come back and triage the budget at the line-level.
• Board governance - Non-profit boards can frequently benefit from practices used at the board-level in for-profit companies. Things like knowing about by-laws, employment laws, handling conflict of interest, etc. in the commercial sector can be adapted to the non-profit world.

For what it's worth, I would highly recommend that MBAs look for ways to apply their skills to non-profit organizations to whatever extent they can. Some business schools like Yale have reputations for being strong in the non-profit sector, but straight-up MBAs are also good. The relationship with non-profit boards can be as little or as much as you want in many cases. The upside is good for all parties involved. You can't always find that in the commercial sector.

Getting Online With My 21Publish Blog

Welcome!

For those of you just getting to this blog, I view this as one part of my training to eat my own dog food. That is, as the COO of 21Publish, I need to be an active user of the 21Publish product on multiple levels. This blog represents my incarnation as an individual blog user affiliated with 21Publish. I currently plan to cover topics here surrounding blogging communities, group blogging, social networking, and non-profits. I may cross-post at my other blog as well.

As additional background, this blog does not demonstrate use of the 21Publish product in its full glory. To elaborate a bit, with the 21Publish service, one can establish an entire blogging community or a group blog. See the following picture: