In my live seminars, I love drawing upon the work of Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordstrom and their first Funky Business book .

My favourite quote which provides a platform to build from is this one:

It’s so true. Every word of it.

And if, as they say, normal does equal nothing, then it seems obvious that abnormal equals something.

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Call it ‘pushing the envelope’. Or perhaps ‘being on the edge’. Whatever you call it, it’s cool to be identified as a ‘trend’.

And so we feel good that Embedded Generosity – another label for B1G1 transaction-based giving – recently made number 8 on the Trendwatch Top Ten Trends for 2010

It’s not surprising either. All of us have at some level noticed the additional

consciousness around giving back. As I’ve written elsewhere, giving is a HUGE wave – one that is larger than any trend I’ve seen in my business life.

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You know how it is when ideas hit you – it’s kind of like a ‘KAPOW!!!’ moment.

I had one yesterday.

It’s been brewing for a while and like all ‘interesting’ ideas, it’s so simple and obvious you wonder why it took you so long to get it. So here it is:

Take for example the oft-heard phrase ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’. It’s used so often we don’t even think of the potential turn-off effect it has.

For example, imagine a conference being held in your city. It has the theme of Corporate Social Responsibility. And imagine too you’re a so-called ‘small-to-medium scale-enterprise’ or SME.

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Every day I’m in the gym early in the morning. And I find it tough whether it’s 25 minutes at level 6 on the stepper or 40 minutes on the treadmill at a 15 incline. Then there’s the ‘core’ exercises afterwards. Sweaty. Puffing. And tough.

But I’m fortunate to share the gym with Buy1GIVE1 (B1G1) founder Masami Sato. Yesterday she asked me to take a look at my face.

‘Is it hurting?’ she said.

‘Your face looks like it’s in pain and it always does even when you start exercising. Why not try smiling and see what happens,’ she said.

We’ll get back to that in a moment.

Because after the gym yesterday I caught up with some reading. In the Chronicle of Philanthropy I learnt of a survey that ‘verified’ that sad photos of kids in fund-raising campaigns raise more money from donors that happy faces. I find that probably true but sad if you know what I mean.

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Just a few weeks ago, I had the real pleasure of meeting Professor Nicholas Negroponte. He is, of course, most well known for his breakthrough ‘Being Digital’ book, his work at MIT Media Lab and, most recently, his breakthrough One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative.

Negroponte is a truly warm human being. And he has that special professorial wisdom of asking better questions to get breakthrough answers– it’s that process that led him to create OLPC. And how interesting is it that the largest selling machines right now are NetBooks, muscling in on the market created by OLPC.

And although his questions are searching, his statements carry great power too.

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Yesterday I wrote a blog about a dream I had about President Obama. I related how I’d envisage him taking a stand and imploring business to take a stand.

And today I realised that the President had already said essentially what I’d been dreaming about (more on that in a moment).

And then just a few moments ago I downloaded the latest update on the progress we as ‘the world’ are making on the UN Millennium Goals set down and finally agreed upon in 2002. It’s NOT a pretty picture.

In the foreword to the report, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon writes: 

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Over the weekend I had an email conversation with Vicki Slade, the B1G1 Business Ambassador in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Vicki was what I’d call ‘pumped’ – see what you think based on this initial email from Vicki:

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A few nights ago, I dreamt about Obama making a speech – a very special speech. And I remember now what got me into that dream. Before I went to bed I read a piece that made me say, ‘I wish I’d been game enough to say that’.

The piece I’d read was a post on the Huffington Post from Harvard Professor Clayton M. Christensen with additional input from the folks at New Profit Inc

What really got me was this quote from the Christensen article in the Huffington Post article .

‘Hence, rather than capital flowing to social initiatives that are most effective, much of it goes to failing non-profits with suboptimal impact or whose footprint is limited and will not scale. Retailer John Wannamaker once famously quipped that ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don't know which half. This is true in spades for philanthropic spending.’

And in a funny kind of a way, that’s what I was trying to get at in my blog post last week .

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Just yesterday I wrote a piece for the July issue of the B1G1 newsletter.

I called it ‘Yikes: the giving is disappearing’. And it told the story of how, like the honeybee vanishing, giving is going down worldwide (with the exception of parts of the Asian region).

Yet something else is going up – yes, you guessed it – the number of charities is booming! Last year alone the IRS in the US registered 1000 new charities per week!

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It's really interesting how things come into your life in groups isn't it. You know what I mean - this happens and then some related thing happens and we go 'what a coincidence' or 'dah dah dah dah' in that scary movie tone of voice.

Well, today that sequence happened to me. Just 24 hours agoI got to meet with the wonderful Jack Sim. Jack is the founder of the WTO - no, not the World Trade Organisation but the World TOILET Organisation .

  Jack is amazing - his life is toilets (or more correctly the lack of them and the impact that has on our world). Typically he's doing media

 One lovely things about being involved with B1G1 is that people 'get' it. And that usually happens in a heartbeat.

That's particularly true when people meet the founder of B1G1, Masami Sato.And last week, lots of people in Malaysia had the opportunity to do that.

Masami was on a sponsored visit to the capital, Kuala Lumpur as part of a tour to promote not just B1G1 but the upcoming 'Live and Inspire' tour she's headlining with Dr. Patch Adams.

Masami made the newspapers and the air waves as well as appearances at Live and Inspire sponsors Starbucks and MPH Bookstores. Here

The Australian Business Awards  for 2009 were announced over the weekend.

And at B1G1 we’re thrilled that one of our B1G1 Partners, Affinity Maker , has been honoured with the award in the Innovation category.

We’re not surprised that the judges of this quite prestigious award have honoured Robin Power and his team at Affinity Maker. They’ve done wonderful things for us in B1G1.

Specifically they’ve helped manage and define B1G1’s move into the Corporate marketplace. Until just a few months ago, B1G1’s focus was almost exclusively on the SME (small-t-medium-scale-enterprise)

Here I am on Flight SQ 245 out of Singapore to Brisbane, Australia.

And in meeting after meeting last week in Singapore I really started toget how wonderfully important this 4-word phrase ‘ Less communication –more connection’ really is.

One is about presence – the other is not.

Right now I’m experiencing the presence piece on the Singapore Airlines flight. Singapore Airlines is absolutely my favourite airline. They get ‘connecting’. From the simple use of my name at every possible point to the simple and gracious way they seem to give. This is not a job – it’s an opportunity

Several times a week it seems we have the question asked, “so when we give, what do we get?’

The question is rarely asked precisely that way. More often than not it comes out like this: ‘so when I give through B1G1 , does it impact my sales; do more people buy from me?’

And perhaps not surprisingly with my marketing background I sometimes want to scream ‘of course!’ I’m eager to tell people about the impact giving has in all sorts of ways. I want to quote the stories of B1G1 businesses. I want to talk about how giving develops much more ‘connection’. And I know the Duke University study backwards (the study that showed as much as a 74% ‘uptick’ in the sales of products directly linked through transaction-based giving).

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Sure we love what we do at Buy1GIVE1 (B1G1).

And when we see the results of what we do we get even more passionate about the journey we're on. Importantly, it's a shared journey too - none of what you're about to read could have happened without the businesses in 14 countries around the world who have so enthusiastically emabraced the magic of B1G1 transaction-based giving.

It's a world where every transaction makes a difference every second, every day and in every way.