Available for the First Time: The Complete Social Entrepreneur's Playbook Covers all three phases of the start-up to scale-up process, developed with reader feedback from "one of the more unusual ebook...experiments of the year" (ThinReads) Wharton professor Ian C. MacMillan and Dr. James Thompson, director of the Wharton Social Entrepreneurship Program, provide a tough-love approach that significantly increases the likelihood of a successful social enterprise launch in the face of the high-uncertainty conditions typically encountered by social entrepreneurs. MacMillan and Thompson used their own systematic framework to publish The Social Entrepreneur's Playbook. To test the market, they offered the first phase in their start-up method (step 1) as a free ebook. Readers were invited to join The Social Entrepreneur's Advisory Group, and nearly 300 aspiring and active social entrepreneurs shared feedback that helped shape the complete edition of the book, which covers all three steps in the start-up to scale-up process. Based on this crowd-sourced feedback from readers of the free ebook and drawing on the authors' more than 26 years' combined experience developing and studying social enterprises in the field across Africa and in the United States, this new edition provides guidance for each phase: Phase One: Pressure Test Your Start-Up Idea. Based on the free ebook, this expanded section now includes advice on setting revenue and social impact goals, how to navigate the sociopolitical landscape, and how to develop a strong concept statement. In addition, MacMillan and Thompson provide advice on how to identify and test a proposed revenue-generating solution and define and segment your target population. Phase Two: Plan Your Social Enterprise. All new to this edition, this critical phase shows you how to frame and scope the venture, determine what it will take to actually deliver a sustainable enterprise, identify the key assumptions that have been made, and design checkpoints to test those assumptions before making major investments. Phase Three: Launch and Scale Your Social Enterprise. Available for the first time in this edition, you will learn how to effectively launch your enterprise, manage upside potential and downside risk, and strategically scale up. Filled with accessible frameworks and tools, as well as inspiring stories of social entrepreneurs, The Social Entrepreneur's Playbook is a must-read for any aspiring or active social entrepreneur, as well as philanthropists, foundations, and nonprofits interested in doing more good with fewer resources. Includes access to downloadable planning documents, including user-friendly spreadsheets
World-class – one of today's greatest poetry performers.' (Carol Ann Duffy) 'A force of nature.' (Guardian) 'An inspiring figure, an encouraging and democratic spirit, a strong and popular poet and one of the funniest people in Britain.' (Poetry News) 'It's impossible not to like McMillan. If they made him Poet Laureate on Friday, a lot more people would be reading poetry by Monday.' (Sue Arnold, Guardian) 'The verbal gymnastics of a north country Spike Milligan coupled with the comic timing of Eric Morecambe.' (Frome Festival) 'Inching towards the status of a National Treasure.' (Andy Kershaw) 'The John Peel of poetry.' (Alec Finlay)
“This book is a must for any Business Development Manager, Corporate Strategist, R&D Director, and anyone else who is accountable for growth in a corporation. It is an easy read that is practical and not fraught with useless academic theories.” Ron Pierantozzi, Ph.D., CEO of PPT Research and Former Director, Business Development, Air Products & Chemicals, Inc. A Breakthrough Approach to Investing in Business Innovation Most companies analyze investments using tools that bias them against real innovation and lead them to avoid their best opportunities. This book introduces a breakthrough alternative: Opportunity Engineering. Drawing upon recent advances in financial analysis, but without requiring a lot of math, the authors show how to engineer the risk out of uncertain opportunities so you can pursue more high-payoff innovations. You’ll learn how to escape from the “go/no-go vise” and implement more flexible decision-making that considers all the business alternatives, models, and opportunities associated with each project. You’ll learn how to systematically structure high-potential projects to limit downside exposure and boost your potential upside. The authors show how to define the scope of investment opportunities, identify key drivers of potential profits, document assumptions, design out major risks, and tease out key challenges and vulnerabilities. Using these techniques, you can escape the mindset that limits you to low-impact innovations and begin pursuing serious growth opportunities--and make business uncertainty work for you, not against you. Why companies avoid their best opportunities for innovation Getting past risk-averse analysis that snuffs out experimentation and innovation Systematically engineering your opportunities Capturing the upside, slicing out the downside Beyond rigid “go/no-go” decisions How flexible, staged innovation creates more opportunities for delivering value Constructing an engineered growth portfolio of innovation investments Optimizing your mix of core-enhancing investments and high potential “long shots”
If all firms face similar obstacles to profitable growth, how do some companies successfully burst through these barriers, leaving their competitors in the dust? Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan argue that an answer to this question lies in MarketBusters. Best of all, the authors say, opportunities for identifying and executing such moves can be unearthed throughout a company’s existing business platform—if managers know where and how to look for them. The authors practical tools and checklists to help leaders determine the best marketbusting move to use in a given situation. Vivid company examples illustrate the moves in practice, and clear guidelines aid managers in implementing their chosen moves effectively. Driving continuous growth is imperative for every leader in every industry. MarketBusters is the field guide that will help them succeed. MARKET BUSTERS OFFERS: * A Unique Perspective on Growth Opportunities: Big “breakthrough” moves are risky and often unsuccessful. Today’s executives are looking to drive growth off a platform of established markets, with existing customers, and with existing products and offerings. This book shows them how to do that. * A Highly Practical Approach: Actionable, tools-oriented focus of this book will appeal to executives under pressure to show results fast.
Martin Wight (1913-1972) was one of the most original and enigmatic international thinkers of the twentieth century. This new study, drawing upon Wright's published writings and unpublished papers, examines his work on international relations in the light of his wider thought, his religious beliefs, and his understanding of history.
You've been charged with growing your business. Incremental growth can no longer deliver the results you need. You need truly dynamic growth - and you need to achieve it without risking a hugely expensive gamble. How can you encourage innovative new ventures and pursue ambitious growth while minimizing risk? In Discovery-Driven Growth, authors McGrath and MacMillan show how companies can plan and pursue an aggressive growth agenda with confidence. By carefully framing their strategic growth opportunities, testing each project assumption against a series of checkpoints, and creating a culture that acts on evidence and learning instead of blind stumbling, companies can better control their costs, minimize surprises, and know when to disengage from questionable projects--before it's too late. Providing tools that will help you select and better assess the potential of any strategic venture, from new product lines to entirely new businesses, the authors outline a comprehensive process that lets you identify, manage, and leverage your company's full portfolio of opportunities. By reducing up-front costs and eliminating unnecessary risks, you'll be able to avoid missteps and explore more options to create the breakthrough growth that your business requires.
A Blueprint for Building Entrepreneurial Organizations Nobody needs to tell you that in the new economy, managers using conventional strategies are losing out to smart, fast, entrepreneurial competitors who move on ideas others overlook and who confidently act while others dither. Are the managers of leading companies simply doomed to let this happen? Not at all, argue Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan. The fundamental problem is that the tools, training, and conceptual frameworks that work for business-as-usual can't, and don't, work when your main challenge is to bury old business models and aggressively create completely new ones. To succeed, today's strategists need the thought process and discipline that are second nature to successful entrepreneurs. The Entrepreneurial Mindset offers a refreshingly practical blueprint for thinking and acting in environments that are fast-paced, rapidly changing, and highly uncertain. It provides both a guide to energizing the organization to find tomorrow's opportunities and a set of entrepreneurial principles you can use personally to transform the arenas in which you compete. Using lessons drawn from leading entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies, The Entrepreneurial Mindset presents a set of practices for capitalizing on uncertainty and rapid change. Like McGrath and MacMillan's bestselling Harvard Business Review articles, such as "Discovery-Driven Planning," the book provides simple but powerful ways to stop acting by the old rules and start thinking with the discipline of habitual entrepreneurs. The Entrepreneurial Mindset will show you how to: * Eliminate paralyzing uncertainty by creating an entrepreneurial frame that shapes a shared understanding of what is to be accomplished and what would be worthwhile * Create a richly stocked opportunity register in which you mobilize great ideas for redesigning existing products, finding new sources of differentiation, resegmenting existing markets, reconfiguring market spaces, and seizing the huge upside potential of breakthroughs * Build a dynamic portfolio of businesses and options that continuously move your organization toward the future * Execute dynamically your ideas so that you can move fast, with confidence and without undue risk * Develop your own way of leading with an entrepreneurial mindset to create a vibrant entrepreneurial climate within your organization The Entrepreneurial Mindset is about succeeding in an unpredictable world. It will help everyone from independent entrepreneurs to managers of large corporations develop insights that others overlook and act on them to build the truly entrepreneurial organizations of the future.
The Blind Fiddler is a fictional tale inter-weaved with real events in history. It is set during the 1700s mainly in the North-West Highlands of Scotland and is about the history of the Jacobites. We follow a family of MacMillans who live by Loch Arkaig just north of Fort William. They are tenants of Cameron of Lochiel and follow that clan chief in attempts to replace the British monarchy with a Jacobite who they describe as Scotlands rightful king. Our main character Ross MacMillan follows his father Duncans example by fighting with fellow Highland clansmen for this cause. We join him in a number of battles and campaigns ending with that of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, Bonny Prince Charlie who in 1745 travels from France to raise the clans in his fathers cause. After major successes this comes to an end with the tragedy of the battle of Culloden. Ross goes into hiding from the Government troops seeking vengeance against Charlies supporters who they see as both traitors and savages. He becomes blind which encourages him to continue learning to play a fiddle which Cameron of Lochiel had presented to him. It belonged to Sir John Cope who was in charge of the Government troops, who were soundly defeated at Prestonpans, the first major success for Charlies army. Ross becomes a very skilled fiddler. Towards the end of his life we join Ross and his son Colin who encourages him to look back over his time supporting the Jacobites and think about what might have been. The inspiration for the book is explained in the dedication. Ian has researched the fascinating history of the Jacobites and visited most of the battlefields and locations mentioned in The Blind Fiddler.
Ian Duhig’s erudite, compassionate and often wonderfully droll poetry sits at the intersection of the literary and folk traditions, and moves in an easy and masterly fashion between them. While this has lent his verse an enviable musicality and force, it has also written him a visa to places poets rarely venture. In Pandorama, Duhig has mined poems and songs from the work-camps of England’s itinerant navvies, jihadist training-grounds on the Yorkshire moors, football terraces, and meetings of the National Fancy Rat Society – and has painted a far truer picture of Britain’s cultural diversity than most documentary accounts are able to give us. It is also one we would rather not confront. Duhig was always an elegist of great power, but never more so than in the quiet and focused anger with which he memorializes the tragic figure of David Oluwale, a Nigerian immigrant whose appalling racial harassment led to his death. With Pandorama, poetry’s finest social historian has delivered a riveting book, its vision as broad and unsettling as its title suggests. ‘The most original poet of his generation’ Carol Ann Duffy, Guardian ‘His poetry is learned, rude, elegant, sly and funny, mixing gilded images, belly-laughs and esoteric lore about language (including Irish), art, history, politics and children’s word-games’ Ruth Padel, Independent on Sunday
With the rise of the knowledge economy, the knowledge content of goods and services is going up just as their material content is declining. Economic value is increasingly seen to reside in intangible assets, rather than material. This book explores the framework of 'I-Space' - a theoretical approach to the production and distribution of knowledge.
This book is a critical examination of the main ideas regarding disruptive change and startups. It systematically lays out the full set of challenges and tasks one needs to master in order for existing organizations to weather severe change or make a startup successful. Ian Mitroff outlines the protective actions business leaders must take to ensure their continued existence, providing a clear demonstration of the key roles leaders must assume such as Applied Epistemologist, Applied Ethicist, Applied Systems Thinker, Applied Social Psychologist, and Applied Crisis Manager, and how to perform these roles competently. Citing cases such as Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb, this book uniquely analyzes the disrupting agent in emerging industries, which is crucial for success in today’s complex and turbulent world. It will be of value to students, academics, and entrepreneurs looking to develop a new product or service.
This book examines the intersection of mental health and digital technology to make informed decisions about the new options provided by digital technology. It highlights the rise in online therapy and social media and examines the ethical dilemmas involved in online research to suggest that the benefits created far outweigh the possible risks.
This book looks at the humor that artists and editors believed would have appeal in four different countries. Ian Gordon explains how similar humor played out in comic strips across different cultures and humor styles. By examining Skippy and Ginger Meggs, the book shows a good deal of similarities between American and Australian humor while establishing some distinct differences. In examining the French translation of Perry Winkle, the book explores questions of language and culture. By shifting focus to a later period and looking at the American and British comics entitled Dennis the Menace, two very different comics bearing the same name, Kid Comic Strips details both differences in culture and traditions and the importance of the type of reader imagined by the artist.
This is the first book-length study to systematically and theoretically analyse the use and representation of individual body parts in Gothic fiction. Moving between filmic and literary texts and across the body—from the brain, hair and teeth, to hands, skin and the stomach—this book engages in unique readings by foregrounding a diversity of global representations. Building on scholarly work on the ‘Gothic body’ and ‘body horror’, Gothic Dissections in Film and Literature dissects the individual features that comprise the physical human corporeal form in its different functions. This very original and accessible study, which will appeal to a broad range of readers interested in the Gothic, centralises the use (and abuse) of limbs, organs, bones and appendages. It presents a set of unique global examinations; from Brazil, France and South Korea to name a few; that address the materiality of the Gothic body in depth in texts ranging from the nineteenth century to the present; from Nikolai Gogol, Edgar Allan Poe, Roald Dahl and Chuck Palahniuk, to David Cronenberg, Freddy Krueger and The Greasy Strangler.
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