By Elizabeth Schaeffer Brown
If you want it done right, you've got to do it yourself. That's why entrepreneurs struggle with delegating important responsibilities -- too much is at stake, especially when starting something new. There is no room for error. Nonetheless, a resilient, mature organization incorporates many talents in meeting goals everyone cares about.
In this area, socially responsible organizations and businesses have a distinct advantage. Taking on a big problem like extreme poverty not only inspires, but calls for a global perspective. For entrepreneurs struggling with scale, reframing your operations is a useful exercise. Real solutions will help your organization grow through changes, even prosper in your absence. Here are four important lessons.
Prepare for when you’re gone
Consider Kate Spade & Company’s on purpose initiative in Masoro, Rwanda. More than a decade later, Rwanda is still recovering from the social and economic damage wrought by the 1994 genocide. Responding to calls for investment, Kate Spade & Company began considering how the brand could structure a program to stimulate the local economy, yet the initiative was not to be a charity. It became evident that jobs and training were needed to work toward true independence. Viability meant imagining what was needed to create a Rwandan manufacturing partner and helping identify the path to standing on their own in the future.
Valuable training requires real jobs. Profitable businesses grow. Kate Spade’s return on investment would drive demand for new services, support higher skilled workers and, in turn, propel the business community to greater independence. If a business plan that aspires to a diminishing proportion of the economy seems odd, keep in mind that it is better to have a small piece of a big pie than a big piece of a small one. Or, even more accurately, not trying to do and own everything is how you achieve the biggest goals -- goals with the greatest benefit for everyone in the end.
Help others help you
Successful leaders know that mastering collaboration around shared goals is how stuff gets done. Magalie Dresse, founder of the Haitian-based Caribbean Craft, is a resourceful social innovator. After discovering that many of her employees were illiterate, she organized a group consisting of a Haitian educational nonprofit (PRODEV), the Clinton Foundation, and West Elm. Together, they developed and funded a literacy program for her employees.
For a focused entrepreneur like Dresse, who built a business around paper-mâché products derived from recycled materials, launching a literacy program might seem like a potential distraction. Instead, by considering the bigger picture, she not only transformed the lives of her staff, but increased her business’s capacity. Workers could now read work orders, manage documentation and order materials. By investing in basic skills, a new level of professionalism and scale emerged. The implications of literacy, of course, do not end at work. Educated parents teach their children. This particular investment represents a generational ripple effect, which helps improve the Haitian economy overall.
Work from the general to the particular
Of course, to see the benefit of collaboration on a global scale, we need only look at the positive changes the Internet has brought. Indeed, the business and educational opportunities of the Internet is part of the reason why some of the poorest places in the world have begun to recover.
Projects for All, a nonprofit that brings Internet access to neighborhoods in Africa, helps communities plan, support, fund and build their own Internet infrastructure. Working with open source technologies, unique solutions are developed to meet the needs of each community. This might include business, health and educational applications. Across continents and cultures, tech professionals, students, academics and community leaders are connecting to contribute to open source technologies that are ultimately used by Projects for All. In the end, however, the local community remains in control. This focus is essential. It assures the technology remains useful and meaningful, and, subsequently, is fully embraced. Despite naysayers warning that computers placed in impoverished communities would be stolen overnight, the infrastructure is not only being maintained, but expanding.
If collaboration is not efficient, you’re doing it wrong
We are living in the most connected age in human history. The opportunity to work together and solve problems is unprecedented. Crowdfunding, micro-donations and open source learning are all interesting developments. Some companies are also working hard on a new generation of tools.
Collaboration Quests, whose motto is “social networking with a purpose,” is a social network that facilitates improvement projects around the world. The network enlists universities, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and businesses to contribute collaborative wisdom. Although governments and NGOs already embrace collaboration, it isn’t always efficient. The same might be said of corporations and their proclivity for meetings. Given that improvement projects often involve international collaboration, from both the private and public sectors, poor collaboration can drive up costs and even lead to failure.
Consider a case of collaboration without the Internet. Want to build a waste recycling center or telecommunications hub in Haiti? Rest assured that research has been conducted independently by many organizations, yet the aggregate wisdom of this investment does not accrue. It vanishes into obscurity. Furthermore, the more organizations collaborate, the more information is lost. For example, a business might have expertise with a particular technology and an NGO understands the community. The knowledge that brings the two together (the practical, legal, and cultural factors) might be vital, but peripheral to the primary commitments of each. As a result, important details tend not to be well preserved or shared. This can lead to friction and even collapse.
In this scenario, collaboration is precarious and expensive. Collaboration Quests’ vision is to leverage the strengths of the Internet to solve this problem. After all, the purpose of working together is to share burdens, not increase them. Most importantly, however, is the notion that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts when it comes to collaboration.
Embrace tools that will not only keep your process efficient, but capture everything. Remember the goal is something bigger than any one contributor. That’s why you’re collaborating, remember? So pay attention to the details even if you suspect they may not pertain to you. There’s no other way of achieving success bigger than you are.
Elizabeth Schaeffer Brown represents a brand development vanguard uniting global, technological, and social concerns and is currently a founder of Uncommon Union.
