Social Business- from practical point of view

My last post touched upon issues related to social business and microfounds. As I mentioned, these are the issues that recently have been keeping my mind busy :) Althought I read about these concepts, have seen films about it I have never actually seen and experienced this idea in practice. I hoped to do so while in India, but working for TCS kept me busy pretty much all day, all evening and sometimes during a part of the night.
However now, being in Bogota, Colombia I decided to finally give it a try and get engaged with an NGO that is helping people by 'teaching them how to fish instead of giving them fish to eat'. After an extensive reseach (btw, do you know that there are many companies that charge foreginers for volunteering? Yes, you need to pay if you want to work for free and contribute..how crazy is that?)I found Ahmsa (http://www.ahmsa.org/?lang=en), met with people who volunteer with this organisation and yesterday I got an amazing opportunity to see their work.
To do so we travelled to very South of Bogota where according to some of my friends is not smart to be once it gets dark.After around half an hour I found myself in one of the poorest parts of Bogota. Judging on the information that many local people spread about this area I was expecting at least armed gangs strolling the streets...to my surprise what I saw was a normal life: guys hanging around, couples romancing, kids playing in the streets, women gossiping in front of their houses. Don;t missunderstand me- I'm not naive to think that there is no violence and very heavy social problems over there, but what I want to start with is that demonising such places, spreading the 'red alert' sort of thinking of part A and part B of society leads to hudge exagurations and deepens division in society leading to extremelly dangerous social exclusion...

Having said this, I finally had a chance to see how this sort of NGO work. I visited for example the textiles company where people produce items of clothing. What organisation helps them with is financial support for machines that tailors need to do their job, training, getting vendors and ideas on how to improve the process to make it more productive, to employ more people and increase thei incomes. This help may involve for example writting professions business proposal for a clothing company to get their interest and sing a contract that will bring more job fr people and improve their lifes. The other business is an internet caffee run by very young boys who wante to do something different in their neighbourhood. Ahmsa helped them to get the computers, to get experts who would teach them how to use and maintan them ec...These are only few exaples of how social business works to help people sustain themselves. I hope to get involved with the organisation and should this happen I will share more ideas that I find inspiring.

“How am I and how do I change the world?”

Recently a friend told me about a workshop (called “How am I and how do I change the world?”) at the Hub Winter School in Sao Paulo (Brazil) on a topic called “Ontology of Language”, which basically says that we, as human beings, are constituted by the language and through the language. We give sense to the world; interpret the reality and ourselves based on our language. Our history is supposed to be told, spoken – and as a story, we can reinterpret it.

Professionals are coming out in the market as ontological coaches to help people understand how they build interpretations about their existence and how it affects their way of being. Each one has a “unique” combination of culture, history, knowledge, characteristics that influence who we are and how we see the world. As a consequence, how we relate to others and to ourselves will be based on that.


How do we interpret our world? How do we see ourselves? How do we communicate what we see? Am I effective in communicating what I see and what I am to others? How do I judge things and people? What are my beliefs and how they limit or expand my understanding of the world?

If we are going in circles in our lives with the same stories or problems, maybe it is a good opportunity to take on these cases and through them understand our mindsets and limitations, in order to amplify our perceptions.

The Ontology of Language also believes that by being aware and effective in our communication, we cooperate better and as a group or an organization, we leverage on our impact. For a reference, the work developed by Marta Magnus (ontological coach in Brazil):

• How do I observe the world? How does it open or close possibilities of action to me?
• What are my main obstacles to learn and how that affects my life?
• How do I listen to others and what is the impact of it in my relationships and life results?
• How do I approach and behave in front of different situations of conflict, unforeseen situations? Am I effective?
• Which are the necessary elements to build and reinforce our confidence, understanding it to be a basic emotion for coordinating our actions?

Social Business Model

The topic I’d like to mention today is not related to HRM, but I find it very interesting and in a line of objectives of our blog :)

In Poland there’s an annual competition organised for students in collaboration with big corporation, NGOs and governmental organisations. Representatives of these institutions prepare case studies from various areas such as finance, IT, HR, marketing and others. Students who propose the most interesting solutions to the problems presented in case studies can be offered an internship in one of these institutions and ,depending on the performance during this internship, they may be also offered a permanent employment. Recently there has been a new subject area introduced to this competition called ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’. I believe that the notion of CSR has gained a big popularity in recent years and now majority of people how take at least minimal interest in issues related to business must have come across it.

I personally heard about CSR for the first time around 4 years ago when working in AIESEC I was a part of the team responsible for organising conference about it. The main objective was to spread this business idea among students and increase awareness about CSR among entrepreneurs. At that time I was really excited about CSR and thought of it as of a ‘human face’ of corporations. However recently, having a bit deeper insight into this concept I came to realize that like 90-100% of companies’ activities CSR is also profit-reassuring initiative. In countries such as USA or UK a company that does not brag about their sustainable processes, environment concerns, employee engagement ec.. take a financial risk in two aspects: Primarily because rich consumers when having a choice between a product which is known to be produced in sweat shops in Bangladesh or a product developed in a collaboration with local communities are more likely to choose the second one. Second of all for an employer branding reasons; recruiters are aware that the generation of todays’ 20 something year old employees do care more about working for fair employer.

Now, how is the contents I mentioned in the beginning relevant? This year’s CSR case study was to invent a CSR strategy for company X. Main objectives of the task was to indicate was would be the business advantage (profit advantage) from implementing it. And that made me wonder….s there a third way? Is there a way for the company to actively help to address societal, environmental and other problems that such idea deprived of profit-making objectives is an utopia? Then I came across of Social Business. The short film attached to this post gives a basic introduction to this concept.

The discussion I would like to being is related to the questions: should corporations engage in social business or rather give money to organisation that specialise in this and (are supposed to) have a better KNOW-HOW? And if social business is a good idea than what has to be considered while implementing such strategy? Recently I read an report from the conference organised by Harvard Business School about these issues. Once study regarding micro founds in India was an excellent example of how a good initiative can bring about side effects when various context surrounding it are not considered. But about this I will elaborate next time :)

Link to the film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C3XQ3BTd4o