Autopilot by Elliot P.

As an entrepreneur with a growing business it is easy to spend your entire day focusing your time and energy toward moving the needle – whatever your measures of success might be. Along these lines it is easy to forget that in order to effectively link your strategy with execution, you must always be thinking about building a culture that will facilitate effectiveness, and not just mindlessly managing the next deliverable from your list of key initiatives.

Let’s be clear: Mindlessness is not a failing of cognition per se, but rather a failing of attention leading to a restricted flow or worse still, the capturing of misinformation. Sound familiar? It should, as this phenomenon diminishes our effectiveness as managers, parents, friends, and learners. If you think this concept is frivolous, think about the consequences of inattention during an important negotiation. Presence counts, and should be developed among managers and staff continually.

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One of the biggest challenges faced by non-profit and charitable organizations is finding volunteers to help them to do the work to achieve their goals. Recognizing this, many non-profit organizations have shifted a significant portion of their time and effort to develop strategies to recruit, retain and motivate volunteers versus the traditional focus of trying to figure out ways to get more funding. The quest is challenging and few organizations can legitimately claim they have a proven mechanism to engage and retain volunteers. Well, except for one: the Framework Foundation, an organization that spurs volunteerism — not for itself, but for the benefit of other organizations — might just have the perfect solution.

Anil Patel, the Executive Director of the Framework Foundation, has created an innovative program called the Timeraiser. This annual event has proven wildly successful in encouraging people to donate their time to worthy volunteer opportunities. If you are skeptical, read on, but also check it out for yourself as the event will be held in Toronto’s famed Distillery District Fermenting Cellar on Saturday, April 5th, 2008. Doors open at 7pm.

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No respect!

It just took me ages to write a simple article for this blog, which talks about the recent deal between Eli Lilly Lilly and Co. and one of our leading tenants, Transition Therapeutics.

It wasn’t the terms of the deals that were tripping me up. Transition signed a licensing and collaboration pact with Eli Lilly and Co. where Lilly will acquire exclusive worldwide rights to its gastrin-based therapies program for the treatment of diabetes. The deal terms gave Transition a $7 million upfront payment, and a potential $130 million in development and sales milestones, as well as royalties on sales of gastrin-based therapies if any product is successfully commercialized.

Not bad, right? So what was holding back my creative juices to write the article?

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George Bernard Shaw:
“…All progress depends on the
unreasonable man”

If you are anything like me, you loathe household duties. But they have to get done, so I try to use the time as constructively as possible by listening to podcasts (you don’t need a fancy player, just a computer with an internet connection and some speakers).

Recently, Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast interviewed John Elkington, Founder and Chief Entrepreneur of SustainAbility and author of The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World, along with Social Entrepreneurship Summit speaker and Managing Director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, Pamela Hartigan. The two distill their observations about what makes a highly effective social entrepreneur tick, and how other business leaders can learn a few things along the way.

During this interview, they tether out three traits of social entrepreneurs.

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