Mr. Harmon Returns from One Place to Another
This thing I’m thinking about.
March 23, 2010
Inbetween everything else I'm doing, I'm writing a little essay about nonprofits and social enterprises and various other kinds of dogood operations, and how we could be better sharing what we're doing with each other. In Hyderabad, there was a lot of talk about scale, and a lot of talk about whether social enterprises should build up one central distribution point to serve a broader and broader area or foster multiple, autonomous-ish distribution points. Hidden in that question is a smaller, potentially more insidious question: are we scaling ourselves or scaling the mission? Is it okay if our organization closes because others took our idea and served more people with it than we could? My bias is probably obvious, but I'm questioning it. The idea of cooperating with no central organization in charge is exciting, and it's cool to see it work. It doesn't always work.
