JERR'S JOURNAL: MY ADVENTURES IN SOCIAL ENTERPRISE
Individual downloads of all 44 essays

OF ROMEO, JULIET AND SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS

(March 15, 2011) I didn’t know . . . I was 16 and woefully ignorant about world literature. Well, there was Julius Caesar. We did that in tenth grade. Didn’t every high schooler in the 1950s? But we never got to King Lear or Hamlet or, god help us, Romeo and Juliet.

The Catholic Church didn’t have much to say to us about teenage lust. Davy Crockett and Marshall Dillon were just fine, thank you.

CHANNELING PROF. BROWN

(May 9, 2011) Prof. Huntington Brown taught me this lesson during my sophomore year at the University of Minnesota in the spring of 1964 . . . He was an elderly English professor with abundant white hair and a bristling white mustache. Tall and stooped, he seemed to hover over the classroom.”

OF PREDATORS AND PREY

(June 20, 2011) Our guide wasn’t about to brook any nonsense. We were ready to depart from Thornhill Safari Lodge for a late afternoon/early evening plunge into South Africa’s Kruger National Park two months ago. Nine of us were perched in a three-tiered Land Rover without a roof. “Do NOT get out of the Land Rover at any time,’ he thundered. ‘And do NOT stand up.” The wild animals we were about to stalk with our cameras had long ago become comfortable sharing their turf with Land Rovers and their seated passengers. But Reckson wanted to be sure we understood the stakes.”

THE MAN WITH THE DOUBLE LIFE

(July 20, 2011) I see him every four or five weeks. Took a while to find him. I had the same barber for 35 years, then the headhunters came after my wife and we wound up in Dallas. The first Texas barber I tried put me through an assembly line of hair washers, hair rinsers, hair cutters, hair trimmers and hair blowers, then turned me loose. Never went back. The next guy did fine, but retired after six months. The third one took the entire 35 minutes we spent together complaining about her boss. So when I finally found Marv I latched onto him . . . “

TEACHING GEORGE TO COUNT

(August 20, 2011) The legendary John DuRand (1934-2008) started Minnesota Diversified Industries (MDI) in 1968 with $100, a circular saw and a sewing machine. He had 14 employees between the ages of 18 and 24, all of them developmentally disabled. When he retired in 1997, MDI had become a $68.5 million nonprofit business employing more than 1,000 people of all ages, 600 of them with developmental challenges John often claimed it was possible to break down any task to the point where even the most severely disabled individual could be productive. I once asked him how he learned to do that – and he took me back to something that happened during the early years of MDI. He told me about teaching George to count.

A CAUTIONARY TALE... IN FIVE ACTS

(October 5, 2011) Anton Chekhov and I wrote a play together 15 years ago. I know, I know, he’d been dead by then for more than 90 years, but wait for it, okay? This past summer my wife and I attended a performance of Chekhov’s last and greatest play, The Cherry Orchard, starring Zoë Wanamaker and a stellar supporting cast at the National Theatre in London. It was a live production — but we weren’t in England. We were nearly 5,000 miles away, in a suburb of Dallas. Saved us a lot on airfare . . . We were able to attend the play because two years ago the National Theatre boldly introduced a new way to bring drama to the masses worldwide.

WAY TO GO KID

(December 5, 2011) Shortly before she died earlier this year, Russia’s legendary social activist Olga Alexeeva sadly observed that too many people are trying “to save the world in 45 minutes.”

She was talking about wealthy philanthropists, but her words apply to social entrepreneurs as well. People are suffering – and we want to help them YESTERDAY! But it takes time for social enterprises to put down roots and begin to thrive. And I know there are moments when each of you wonders whether you will EVER make a difference.

So let’s find a way to replenish ourselves. Let’s look away from the forest for a while and walk among the trees, stop obsessing about the big picture. Let’s concentrate instead on the impact we have on the people around us – our families, our friends, our employees, our casual acquaintances.

HOW DOES IT LOOK NOW?

(January 12, 2012) One of my favorite social entrepreneurs lived more than 500 years ago . . . and his career is filled with ingenious strategies for meeting customer demands . . . When you enter the Galleria dell ‘Accademia in Florence, you turn left and pass through a doorway, then glance down a large room to your right. When I did that three years ago I began to cry . . . I simply do not understand, and I will never understand, why one work of art will move me and another will not. Why do I always weep at the first movement of Mozart’s Prague Symphony? Why am I entranced by Monet’s Terrace at the Seaside, Sainte Address and Van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Crows? And why did the sight of Michelangelo’s David bring me to tears when I first glimpsed it from 50 yards away? I was 22 when I discovered Florence and the David, but in 1967 I had only a wisp of artistic sensibility. I knew the statue was special, but I didn’t know why, either intellectually or emotionally. The only thing I remembered, for years, was its height — 17 feet from base to crown.

IT'S ALWAYS THE LITTLE THINGS

(February 8, 2012) My grandfather lived to be nearly 103. Or it might have been 102. We were never quite sure. All we knew was he crossed the “Little Water” (the Black Sea) and then the “Big Water” (the Atlantic Ocean) at the age of 11 He was at various points in his life a farmer, an entrepreneur, a pinochle savant, a lay leader in his church . . . And a bootlegger. Which would have worked out fine except for the smudge of coal on his brother Joe’s nose.

RIGHT OUT OF A JOHN WAYNE MOVIE

(March 12, 2012) When I was about eight or nine, I hoarded comic books. Didn’t we all? War stories, alien invations, romantic adventures, superheroes, westerns . . . Of the hundreds I devoured, two left lasting impressions. One had such a horrific ending that any plot based on mistaken identity infuriates me even today and scarred me for years. But the other absolutely inspired me, and still does.

BLINDSIDED

(April 12, 2012) Social entrepreneurs frequently have no idea where their toughest competition will come from — or what emerging forces will affect their competitive position. I watched it happen to one of the most heralded social enterprises of the 1990s.

THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE

(May 17, 2012) More than one nonprofit or social enterprise Board member has approached me after a briefing session or retreat, perplexed by the same topic. Their questions frequently come down to this: What is the difference between vision and mission — and why is the difference so important? Some organizations have both a vision statement and a mission statement. Some have only one statement and try to cover the waterfront. But most make a fundamental mistake: They think their vision statement should be about themselves.

THE RIGHT LEADER AT THE RIGHT TIME

(June 19, 2012) In 1975, two friends and I decided we had a great idea for a business. We sold our homes in Minnesota, stuffed everything we owned into a U-Haul truck and a couple of ancient cars, and headed for San Francisco. As our departure date loomed, we became increasingly jazzed, feeding off each other in an ever-soaring circle of excitement. Meanwhile, a third friend watched as we disappeared into fantasy land. She’d already successfully launched two businesses herself, so she knew what lay ahead. While we were becoming more and more dazzled by our prospects, here’s what she was doing: Rolling her eyes.

ACHING TO CHANGE THE WORLD

(July 17, 2012) Sometimes anticipation is almost unbearable. The young people I see around me every time I teach a class or give a speech about social enterprise are palpably vibrating, aching to change the world . . . I know that hunger. I felt it once, long ago, with all the passion of youth . . . and the other night I felt it again when the intoxicating music of The Doors erupted from my speakers shortly after midnight.

GLOSSOPHOBIA

(September 20, 2012) If you’re afraid to speak in front of an audience, you aren’t alone. In an online interview with WebMD, assistant professor of communication studies Paul L. Witt of Texas Christian University says that for most people public speaking is “even scarier than rattlesnakes. The idea of making a presentation is the number one fear reported by people in the United States.” But, hey, anybody who starts a social enterprise or winds up leading one has to give speeches. It’s just part of the package. And here’s even worse news: Witt and his research team found that anxiety strikes almost every time we present our ideas in front of other people. It doesn’t have to be a formal speech. “Any time people make verbal remarks that need to be clear and persuasive,” he said, “we find widespread reports of stage fright and nervousness.” It’s called glossophobia, from the Greek glōssa, meaning tongue, and phobos, meaning fear or dread.

FINDING THE RIGHT PARTNER

(August 16, 2012) September 1947: Two couples sit down for a friendly game of bridge . . . and 40 years later they rise from the table after 790 sessions. Playing cards came naturally to my parents, as it did to me years later (I “majored” in bridge during my first year in college — and hid my grades from my parents). Mom and Dad courted by playing three-handed pinochle with Mom’s father in a tiny North Dakota town during the mid-1930s. Dad helped manage the local bank and when my grandfather spotted him walking up Main Street every day after closing he immediately called for his cards and his daughter.

THE HEART AND SOUL OF A SOCIAL ENTERPRISE

(October 18, 2012) How will you be remembered? That question is much on my mind these days. I’ve just returned from celebrating my 50th high school reunion in Minneapolis . . . and I spent nearly a week in August tramping around cemetery plots in southern Minnesota.

. . . . As I prepared to leave for the 50th, I received an e-mail from one of my classmates. She’d been attempting to track everybody down and invite them to the three events we’d planned over a long weekend. There were only 57 students in our class and as I read down the list she sent me, two words jumped off the page: “Deceased” (eight people). “Missing” (five others). And I wondered: How are those 13 people remembered? Is it the way they’d hoped?

FOUR DIFFERENT TYPES OF EMPLOYEES

(November 15, 2012) Teamwork is essential to the success of any successful social enterprise, and the people who study organizational development have known for years that healthy organizations must concentrate simultaneously on four interlocking tasks: Productivity, process, employee satisfaction, and shared goals. But that also means each company must have four different types of employees on its team. For the sake of convenience, let’s give them names and describe their roles.

SOCIAL ENTERPRISE BORN IN SCANDAL

(December 12, 2012) Many Americans are wondering whether Gen. David Petraeus can redeem himself. One of the most admired men in the United States — leader of the country’s military efforts in Iran and Afghanistan and, more recently, head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), he pursued an extramarital affair and it ruined his career. The story broke in early November and he resigned from the CIA November 9. Fifty years ago, in a different nation, another man’s behavior created a scandal that convulsed his entire country — and brought down the government. Yet he went on to build one of the most successful social enterprises in the world and, in the words of British newspaper columnist Simon Heffer, carried out “the most spectacular act of atonement in the history of our public life since Henry II abased himself after the murder of Thomas à Becket — and about the most spectacular act of redemption, too.” This is his story.

THE WRONG PERSPECTIVE

(January 17, 2013) Bob Cousy was an NBA All-Star 13 times, Most Valuable Player in 1957, and field general for six NBA championships. He was named to the league’s 25th and 35th Anniversary teams and in 1996 to its 50th Anniversary All-Time Team, one of only four players selected for all three teams. So you would think Bob Cousy had few regrets about his playing days.

THE INCINERATORS AT DACHAU

(February 21, 2013) I was one of the first three men in my platoon to qualify on the rifle range. Me! An English major from the suburbs. How the hell did that happen? Yeah, I was book smart, all right, but I wasn’t life smart, and the war in Vietnam spooked me.

So I joined the Army Reserves to escape from the draft. I went through basic training at Ft. Leonard Wood in the spring of ‘67 — and by the time I’d finished I’d become a crack shot and a conscientious objector. But I had a cushy job as company clerk at Ft. Snelling two days a month, and I’d heard horror stories about “weekend warriors” refusing to bear arms, so I vacillated.

Then, three months later, everything changed as I stared into the blackened depths of the incinerators at Dachau.

LESSONS FROM A HOLLYWOOD MOVIE

(March 19, 2013) Actor William Hurt starred in a 1991 movie called The Doctor, freely based on Dr. Edward Rosenbaum’s 1988 book A Taste of My Own Medicine. He plays Jack McKee, an arrogant, prominent heart surgeon with a terrible bedside manner who seems to have it all — he’s successful, he’s rich, and he’s supremely self-confident . . . until he’s diagnosed with throat cancer. Suddenly his world is overturned: He becomes the patient, not the doctor. He becomes the customer.

ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST

(April 18, 2013) The headlines and analyses filled the business pages last week: “A slow motion train wreck anyone should have seen coming” (The Wall Street Journal), “worries mounting about the company’s future” (CNN), “too much change too quickly” Forbes), “visionary’s blind spot” (The Dallas Morning News) . . .

* * * * *

Retail giant J. C. Penney fired CEO Ron Johnson just 17 months after luring him away from Apple. . . . When the announcement came out . . . The Dallas Morning News quickly assembled an “Ouster Hall of Fame” from various wire services that featured six other people who’d also been quickly axed from the top job at major corporations. The reasons differed . . . but their strategic mistakes offer cautionary tales for social enterprises large and small.

KEEPING IT SIMPLE

(May 16, 2013) We need to tell our stories more effectively. Far too many of us surround our core services and products with bells and whistles that either distract or exhaust our stakeholders. We ramble and embellish and tap-dance — and by the time we finish, everyone’s drifted away. We need to strip away unnecessary words and images and find a way to tell powerful, emotional stories that open hearts and wallets. But before we can even decide what story to tell, we must answer four questions.

THE FOUR FACES OF THE FUTURE

(August 19, 2013) No matter how large or small, old or young your social enterprise might be, change is a constant. Right now, something is dying and something else is emerging. One way to keep track of the changes is to gaze in four directions at once, as Terry Deal, Allan Kennedy and Carol Pine recommended a few years ago during their pioneering work investigating corporate cultures and the “cycle of change”.

THE FOUR MONKEYS

(September 16, 2013) The culture of a traditional nonprofit, no matter how innovative, is vastly different from the culture of an entrepreneurial nonprofit. Entrepreneurs have a higher tolerance for risk, a greater appreciation of margins, an eagerness to compete. Traditional nonprofits distrust the capital markets, prefer collaboration to competition, and underestimate the productive capabilities of their disadvantaged employees. They watch other nonprofits become increasingly sustainable or self-sufficient, but are unwilling to emulate their practices. Instead, they criticize.

SOCIAL ENTERPRISE LESSONS FROM THE POPE

(October 14, 2013) Jerr can you type the excerpt that should go here please? I can not find it on the old website.

IF YOU TRY SOMETIMES, YOU JUST MIGHT FIND

(November 14, 2013) Are you a perfectionist? On balance, that’s not a bad thing . . . it’s served me well . . . But it took me many years — and a lot of disappointments — to realize how dangerous that mentality can be at times. It’s a double-edged sword . . . and it worries me when social enterprise CEOs and senior managers fail to guard against the down side. * * * * * It was 1965 and time for Paul Simon to end his partnership with Art Garfunkel. Again. They’d been together off and on since 1955. When they released their first single in 1957 they were known as Tom & Jerry.

WE CAN ALL USE A PROD NOW AND THEN

(December 16, 2013) “You walk out of the classroom and you see people dying around you . . .” He was seven when the British retreated from his homeland, received his doctorate at Vanderbilt in 1971, and eventually became head of the economics department at Chittigong University in Bangladesh. But as he moved through the city and the surrounding countryside, he began to suspect there was something terribly wrong with the theories he was teaching.

YOU CAN'T CONTROL THEM

(January 14, 2014) We were in our mid-20s, wandering homeward during the summer of 1970 after two years with the Peace Corps in India. We’d already spent two months exploring Israel, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany and France . . . and now we were in London, our last stop before heading back to the U.S. and the rest of our lives. It was a pleasant early evening. Gerry and I and a woman friend were wandering down Piccadilly when one of the ubiquitous pub signs caught our eye.

NO SMALL DREAMS

(February 17, 2014) During the spring of 1965, I became editor of a suburban Minneapolis newspaper and began writing a weekly column. A few months later I decided to feature my three youngest siblings.

I asked them what they would do if I gave them $100 and told them they had to spend it.

Here’s what they said.

THE FOG INDEX

(March 17, 2014 Try reading the following sentence out loud, seven times. Each time you speak it, emphasize just one of the words, a different one each time: “I never said she stole my money.” Seven different meanings, right? But at least you were able to use vocal inflections to make sure people knew what you meant. In a written document, it’s not always that easy. Most writers would solve the problem by italicizing one of the seven words. But that’s kid stuff. How do you make sure your writing is easy to understand, on a consistent basis?

THE PRINCE WAS BORED

(May 19, 2014) The U.S. government sent Michael Dowling and four others on a goodwill tour of India shortly after WWI. They were welcomed by most, but not by everybody. On this particular day, the ruler of one of India’s more than 500 princely states had reluctantly given them an audience in a mammoth room that had a dirt floor and half a dozen wide cement steps leading up to the Prince’s throne. Dowling and his friends were seated on the floor in metal folding chairs, staring up at the Prince, who wasn’t really listening to anything they were trying to say. He was conversing with his advisers and only occasionally glanced down at the Americans. Michael Dowling knew he had to do something or the entire visit would be pointless.

DECADES AHEAD OF HIS TIME

(June 19, 2014) He was a maverick . . . and when he began hectoring fellow CEOs about the marriage of social needs and business opportunities, most of them snorted and turned away. Bill Norris was decades ahead of his time. Social enterprise today is an important strategy for nonprofits, small businesses, government policy-makers and — yes — major corporations. By the time Norris died at age 95 in 2006 after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease, almost everything he’d attempted to do was being done successfully by others — although few recalled or even knew about the ground he’d broken.

THE FIRST QUESTION ANY SOCIAL ENTERPRISE SHOULD BE ASKING

(July 19, 2014) I once spent three days working with The Shreveport-Bossier Rescue Mission, a safe haven for indigent men who needed a place to stay and nourishing food for up to seven days. The CEO asked me to meet with his entire Board and staff, help them understand social enterprise, and then facilitate a closing discussion about the shelter’s strategic direction. The first question I asked during the discussion came right from Peter Drucker’s playbook. In his seminal work The Practice of Management, he wrote that because the question “is so rarely asked – at least in a clear and sharp form — and (is) so rarely given adequate study and thought, (it) is perhaps the most important single cause of business failure.” The question: “What business are you in?” Shouldn’t be that hard to answer, should it? Well . . .

HERE COMES THE NEXT WAVE!

(August 21, 2014) As I write this, Israel and the Palestinians are at war in Gaza, ISIS is sweeping across Iraq, Boko Haram is terrifying Nigerians, Syrians are tearing their nation apart, and Vladimir Putin is raising fears of a war in Ukraine and another cold war with the West.

Yet, this weekend (August 8-11), high school students from 16 countries are gathering in Moscow for the 12th annual SAGE World Cup. Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Ndaba Mandela, is scheduled to be the keynote speaker.

I celebrated my 60th birthday Christmas Eve 2004.

Seven months later the doctors told me I had prostate cancer.

WE KEEP OUR DISTANCE, TOO OFTEN

(September 18, 2014) I have witnessed the aftermath of horror at Dachau and I’ve read about the evils of Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Boko Haram and others. I’ve seen scarifying poverty in India, Africa and America’s inner cities.

But nothing has horrified me more in recent years than the book Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West. It tells the story of the only known prisoner born in a North Korean labor camp who’s ever managed to escape — but, more than that, it describes an environment in the camps (and in North Korea as a whole) that is truly almost beyond my comprehension. A world of isolation, brainwashing and dehumanized men, women and children.

Shin Dong-hyuk was raised in a slave labor camp where almost all prisoners remain for their entire lives without possibility of release. His parents were prisoners allowed to sleep together a few nights a year as a reward for good work. He lived with his mother until he was 12, rarely saw his father. North Korean officials and camp guards told him his parents had committed crimes against the state and if he failed to work hard or disobeyed the guards he’d be punished or killed.

FINDING NEW ROUTES TO OLD DESTINATIONS

(October 23, 2014) Three stories . . . about a violin, a diamond, and a box of gloves . . . Deeply embedded beneath all the heroes and haloes of the social enterprise world are the anonymous, ingenious operations people, the ones who make things go. The everyday miracle workers. Because there is no right way to do things when the situation changes — there is only the way that works.

HOLDING BACK THE FUTURE

(November 20, 2014) I’ve been thinking about walls these days . . . About Ying Sheng, Allen Octavian Hume and Nikita Khrushchev . . . Thousands of years apart in time and space, but all with the same, impossible desire.

SILENT NIGHT

(December 19, 2014) My college roommate Steve Prokasky stayed in the closet until his late 20s…., For more than a decade he’d led a double life. I had no clue what was going on — and I lived with him! He told me years later he once ran into one of our mutual college friends at a leather bar in downtown Minneapolis: They saw each other, but immediately shied away and never mentioned it to each other again — it was too risky to bring their hidden lives into the open.

THE MOMENT OF TRUTH

(February 19, 2015) You start your social enterprise with $1,000 of your own money. You’re 33, living in a garage with no bathroom and no heat, earning less than $10,000 a year.

Eight years later you’re a few minutes away from selling the company. The buyers are waiting in the next room, the documents have been vetted, your partner’s ready to celebrate.

And why not? You and your partner will each receive $60 million.

THEY MATTER

(March 26, 2015) It seemed like such a simple idea. Pick ten pop songs that inspire people who are seeking social justice. Right. Then I started scrolling through my iTunes cache, asking friends for suggestions, jotting down song titles, and chasing after performances on YouTube.

THEN HE FIRED THEM ALL

(May 21, 2015) It’s impossible for me to be objective about John DuRand (1934-2008), We spent so much time together over the years and shared so much . . . But I can tell you his story . . . I met him in the mid-1980s. By that point he’d already established himself as one of the pioneers in the field of employment opportunities for people who were developmentally disabled – and had coined the phrase “affirmative business.” But his journey began more than two decades earlier.

JUST SIT DOWN AND
TAKE THE FIRST BITE

(June 18, 2015) During the next quarter century, until he retired in 1997, John DuRand continued to re-invent the world of work for people with disabilities and disadvantages – and especially emphasized the importance of four key principles:

Operating as a business and generating profits
Employing a “blended” workforce
Using non-disabled employees as role models
Giving employees the opportunity to fail

Author's Note

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JERR'S JOURNAL: MY ADVENTURES IN SOCIAL ENTERPRISE Individual downloads of all 44 essays