Hitting the Road

I promised a long time ago that I would post about my new (well, at least new at the time) job. Of course, I’ve been completely remiss in doing so (I’m almost a year into the job at this point!) but in order to explain why I am on a plane enroute to India right now I need to back up a few steps...

So, flashback a year ago to when I was a consultant, traveling from one client site to another, creating what seemed like never-ending powerpoint slides and wishing that I could be more passionate about what I was doing. I’m one of those people that believes that you spend enough time at your office that you should be enjoying it, be stimulated and challenged by it and feel like at the end of the day you are making a positive impact on the people around you and, ideally, the world! To me a job is not just a job; it's what you think is interesting and important enough to devote your skills and time to.

Needless to say, consulting was a good experience but not what I wanted to dedicate my career to. So, after years of talking about it, Brad and I finally decided to move back down to NC and I started to look for new jobs. Soon enough I found myself talking to some folks at the business school at Duke in a group called the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE). Suddenly, there was a light at the end of the tunnel and a job that I could get excited about!

So, what is social entrepreneurship? In a nutshell, it is about using innovative, entrepreneurial thinking and business skills to create solutions to social issues. Social entrepreneurs can be found within nonprofits, for-profits or hybrids. In other words, the business model doesn't define a social entrepreneur; what does define them is their intent (focus on accomplishing social goals, not just financial) and their innovative solutions that draw on the best thinking in both the business and nonprofit worlds to develop strategies that maximize their social impact.

As David Bornstein noted in How to Change the World, "What business entrepreneurs are to the economy, social entrepreneurs are to social change. They are the driven, creative individuals who question the status quo, exploit new opportunities, refuse to give up, and remake the world for the better."

So, that is what CASE works on – creating new research and thinking around the topic of social entrepreneurship; studying organizations to understand what works and what doesn’t, and developing programs for the students that are going through business school and learning skills like accounting, marketing and strategy that we hope they will one day put to use in the social sector.

I was brought in to help with the running of the Center. Operational and strategic planning; marketing; fundraising; partnership development – basically all the functions that help the Center to run. I also do some work with the students, in particular helping run a course called the Global Consulting Practicum (GCP).

So, that brings me to why I am heading off to India. The GCP is a course that CASE runs in which MBAs learn about social entrepreneurship and also consulting skills. The students are divided in to teams of 4-6 students who are matched with a social entrepreneur in a developing country. This year, we have 4 teams working with “clients” in India; 4 teams in South Africa and 3 teams in Belize. The student teams work closely with their client on a topic of strategic importance to the client – they work from Durham most of the course and then over their Spring Break, they travel to the country where their client is located and work on the ground with that client organization. It's a great opportunity for the students to get real hands-on experience ... consulting skills, international experience, and understanding how the things they are learning in textbooks actually related to real social problems.

So, this morning 61 students, 3 faculty and 3 staff members (me included!) headed off to India, South Africa and Belize. Should be an interesting 2 weeks!