The Responsible Entrepreneur

"Individuals, acting on deeply held beliefs and passion, are boldly imagining and bringing into existence a different world... Whether you're a business entrepreneur, a social entrepreneur, an investment entrepreneur, or an academic, artistic, or civil servant entrepreneur, devour this important and wise book."—From the Foreword by John Fullerton Responsible entrepreneurs are a special breed, seeking to transform industries and even society itself. They challenge and refine cultural assumptions, laws, regulations, and even the processes of governance. This requires them to do and think far beyond what is usually required of business leaders. The Responsible Entrepreneur offers a blueprint for this new kind of business leadership, describing the means by which any entrepreneur can pursue a higher order of work. In it, Carol Sanford, one of the most trusted names in responsible business development, brings her vast expertise in helping executives and corporations to the entrepreneur looking to launch and scale a venture. She maps this journey through four archetypes: The Realizing Entrepreneur: Industry Game-Changer The Reconnection Entrepreneur: Society Game-Changer The Reciprocity Entrepreneur: Culture Game-Changer The Regenerative Entrepreneur: Governance Game-Changer By understanding the archetype most aligned with their goals, entrepreneurs will learn how to grow their business into a powerful platform that can leverage change, and even change the foundations that create our most pressing problems and issues. To illustrate these principles in action, The Responsible Entrepreneur features case studies based on long-term work and in-depth interviews with Google Innovation Labs, Indigenous Designs (the primary supplier for Eileen Fisher), FishPeople (who supply Costco and Google with gourmet seafood entrees), and many more. For entrepreneurs seeking to pursue world-changing results, or impact investors looking to align their capital with their values, The Responsible Entrepreneur provides the frameworks to build a business and to evaluate and direct investments to create the greatest benefit for all stakeholders. For anyone who wants to make a difference in the way businesses affect the world, The Responsible Entrepreneur lays out ways to make that aspiration focused and doable.

Using inspiring stories about his own experience and fascinating accounts of entrepreneurs throughout the world, Craig Hall explodes the myths of entrepreneurship -- myths like: an entrepreneur's only concern is making money; or nice guys finish last; or the greater the risk, the greater the reward; or that entrepreneurship is the way to get rich quick -- just to mention a few.

"Individuals, acting on deeply held beliefs and passion, are boldly imagining and bringing into existence a different world... Whether you're a business entrepreneur, a social entrepreneur, an investment entrepreneur, or an academic, artistic, or civil servant entrepreneur, devour this important and wise book." - From the Foreword by John Fullerton Responsible entrepreneurs are a special breed, seeking to transform industries and even society itself. They challenge and refine cultural assumptions, laws, regulations, and even the processes of governance. This requires them to do and think far beyond what is usually required of business leaders. The Responsible Entrepreneur offers a blueprint for this new kind of business leadership, describing the means by which any entrepreneur can pursue a higher order of work. In it, Carol Sanford, one of the most trusted names in responsible business development, brings her vast expertise in helping executives and corporations to the entrepreneur looking to launch and scale a venture. She maps this journey through four archetypes: The Realizing Entrepreneur: Industry Game-Changer The Reconnection Entrepreneur: Society Game-Changer The Reciprocity Entrepreneur: Culture Game-Changer The Regenerative Entrepreneur: Governance Game-Changer By understanding the archetype most aligned with their goals, entrepreneurs will learn how to grow their business into a powerful platform that can leverage change, and even change the foundations that create our most pressing problems and issues. To illustrate these principles in action, The Responsible Entrepreneur features case studies based on long-term work and in-depth interviews with Google Innovation Labs, Indigenous Designs (the primary supplier for Eileen Fisher), FishPeople (who supply Costco and Google with gourmet seafood entrees), and many more. For entrepreneurs seeking to pursue world-changing results, or impact investors looking to align their capital with their values, The Responsible Entrepreneur provides the frameworks to build a business and to evaluate and direct investments to create the greatest benefit for all stakeholders. For anyone who wants to make a difference in the way businesses affect the world, The Responsible Entrepreneur lays out ways to make that aspiration focused and doable.

This book provides professionals, as well as students, with the understanding that Social Entrepreneurship and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are now core business principles for sustainably. It encourages social entrepreneurs in their role as forerunners, in creating new business models that develop, facilitate or implement constructive solutions to social, cultural and environmental issues. At the same time, this book views corporate social responsibility as a means of challenging existing entities to realize and modify prior unsustainable and predatory business models; and to increase social, cultural and environmental accountability. By linking these two concepts, this book prompts a paradigmatic awakening, whereby the foundational driver of business creation and management no longer rests on profit maximization, but on improvement of the quality of life for society.

"When most people think of corporate responsibility, they are focusing on a business's effect on and relationship to stakeholders. A Responsible Business sees stakeholders as full partners and meaningful instruments for the evolution of healthier communities and more successful businesses." —from the Introduction The Responsible Business offers a new and strategic approach to doing business that holistically integrates responsibility into all aspects of an organization, allowing for returns at every level, business and social. This book goes beyond the often well intentioned but limited attempts at sustainability to present a framework that allows organizations to bring responsibility into everything they do and re-imagine success. From innovation, product development, and production processes to business management, strategic planning, and shareholder development, the author shows how being a Responsible Business is a practical skill that can be applied day-to-day at every level of the business. No longer just the role of a department or the job of CSR professionals, successful responsibility and business efforts start at the business level, are then taken to the corporate level, and are finally applied throughout the organization. The Responsible Business outlines a framework for building a responsibility and consciousness infrastructure that applies a living systems view to the business and inspires all of its stakeholders, including shareholders. Throughout the book, illustrated by examples from technology to manufacturing, large and small, public and private, Sanford demonstrates how to make responsibility integral to all aspects of a business as an engine for innovation, profitability, and purpose. Praise for The Responsible Business "This is a very significant book. It makes it clear that businesses have a single boss with five interrelated aspects. The stories are among the crispest, most evocative case histories I have seen. The book is for any corporate leader trying to do the impossible: create a business that recreates the world." —Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief, strategy + business, and author, The Age of Heretics "Carol Sanford offers us a proven, practical, and systems-based approach that integrates five stakeholder groups into a business system working as an integral whole. Essential reading for leaders wanting a system framework for sustainability and business success!" —Otto Scharmer, MIT Sloan senior lecturer; author, Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges; and coauthor, Presence "The Responsible Business challenges many assumptions corporate leaders, investment advisors, and sustainability experts have long taken for granted. It provides a road map that can help innovative businesses think about how to be truly transformational." —Sam Ford, Fast Company expert blogger and director, Peppercom "The powerful concepts in The Responsible Business have changed the process of sustainable development and how communities truly thrive. Indeed, these proven approaches will be the roadmap to truly achieve the deepest level of living communities." —Bill Reed, founding member of LEED System and coauthor, The Integrative Design Guide to Green Building "Critical for re-imagining the future of business. Rarely a day goes by that I do not call on this way of thinking and looking at the world. It is useful for taking on the big business decisions that so many of us face every day." —Chad Holliday, chairman, Bank of America

Entrepreneurship is the capability to be an entrepreneur. Beyond that idea is an ideology that a person's business actions result in industrial growth or technical advances, making that person a leader in the economic world. The contributors to this latest volume in the Praxiology Series, now available in paperback, are united in claiming that resourcefulness is a characteristic of people who take effective action, and that effectiveness is dependent on good, ethical purposes. The wide-angle definition of entrepreneurship presented in this volume demands that people and organizations engage in more than simple self-interest, but also display awareness of the prospects for wider growth and advances resulting from their decisions. In a period of financial crisis caused by irresponsible behavior by eminent would-be "entrepreneurs" the significance of this perspective should be evident. The editors claim that growth, not stagnation, advantage, not decline, are irreversible traits of business activity. This is why the very concept of entrepreneurship calls for values and responsibility-even more than in the past. The contributors develop the idea of entrepreneurship from both theoretical approaches religious and practical, or applied perspectives. This inter- and multidisciplinary approach offers readers a chance to rebuild trust in entrepreneurship.

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

An exploration of the interplay between social responsibility, entrepreneurship and the common good which is organized into four sections: business and the common good; educating responsible entrepreneurs; corporate social responsibility (CSR) challenges and the common good; and CSR and entrepreneurship in emerging economies