Today was the SE conference at Harvard Business School, and it's amazing how many people are willing and eager to spend their Sunday learning about social enterprise. The first keynote began at 8:45am sharp, and the auditorium was packed. There were about 1000 attendees, mostly students from Harvard Business School, the Kennedy School, Fletcher, etc.
Actually, the first keynote was really a panel, with two keynote speakers. At what point, I keep wondering, did "keynote" cease to mean "the #1 speaker" and start to mean "one of the five people tied for #1 speaker"? But both were very good - two women who had started successful health-related social enterprises. I was particularly intrigued by Victoria Hale, who started One World Health, a non-profit pharmaceutical research company that focuses on diseases that affect low-income populations. Once I read a case about GlaxoSmithkline, and learned that it used to be a non-profit - which in many ways seemed to be a superior model. After all, many people: 1) believe phama companies are evil, and 2) spend their weekends and their spare change creating funds for research on cancer, multiple sclerosis, etc. Rather than trying constantly to appease profit-seeking shareholders, if pharma companies could better tap into all that good will... how powerful would THAT be?
The first panel I attended was stellar, partly thanks to a great moderator who skillfully gathered questions, summarized points, and directed these at the right time to the right people. The subject was "Making People Care" - a topic I'm particularly interested in because of the book proposal I've been crafting, which is about creating more mainstream awareness and action around CSR issues.
At lunchtime, the Pitch for Change competition was interesting as always. My personal favorite was Beyond Orders, a concept put forward by a student who has served himself in the armed forces, and who noticed that soldiers are in an excellent position to understand what the community in Iraq (or Afghanistan, or wherever) really needs - and to request it from a public that really wants to help but doesn't know what to do. Essentially, he has started a website on which any enlisted soldier can post a request for school supplies or other aid, and any member of the public can view that request and fulfill it through the same care-package system that sends baked-goods and greeting cards to soldiers every day. I thought it was brilliant. Such a direct impact, and so efficient in terms of getting exactly what is needed to exactly where it's needed - but perhaps not enough of a big-picture and long-term-change angle for the committee. They went instead with a plan that I would describe as open-source car design, in which the proposed enterprise would design light-weight (and fuel-efficient) chassis and sell them to car manufacturers, in a radical departure from how the industry is currently run.
The afternoon keynote (a third!) was... well... I'm from Boston, OK? And he's deputy mayor of New York City. And he spent almost the entire hour talking about how NYC is the greatest place on earth and everyone should go live there. So, 'nuff said. Go Sox.
And downhill from there... my afternoon panel on "Top-Down or Bottom-Up?" devolved into an incomprehensible exchange of pontifications and bad questions, mostly due to poor moderating. I'm supposed to moderate my first panel in a few days, so this realization terrifies me, but I will try my best to learn from it!
In the end, I highly recommend the conference to anyone thinking about going next year. Compared to others, it's also very affordable - somewhere in the ballpark of $70. And it comes with a great bag of fair trade coffee, bath products, snacks, and other free stuff.
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