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.

• Read More »

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.

• Read More »

Most weekends I try to get started on at least one book. Some I can start and then get back to over the course of a few weeks. Others I've just got to keep reading.

This weekend I got one in the 'other' category. I'd actually had the book for 4 weeks but hadn’t read the inside flap properly. Had I done that, I would have been writing about the book 4 weeks ago.

The reason? It's brilliant: probably THE best book on Social BUSINESS Entrepreneurship and so-called 'Conscious Capitalism' I’ve yet read.

• Read More »

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: 

• Read More »

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:

• Read More »

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 .

• Read More »

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

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).

• Read More »

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.