In 2002, I worked with small producers in a township outside of Cape Town, South Africa to help launch a small business. The official unemployment rate in Cape Town at that time was around 30% and for many of the men and woman I worked with, running their own business was the first job they [...]

Over the past three years, we’ve had a lot of those late-night-over-beers conversations that ended with “wouldn’t it be great if there was a new corporate form built to enable social benefit and shareholder value? Yeah, we should work on that.” I’m not sure how clearly we believed it was a near term possibility, but [...]

Ambiguity is not an option. For any company that seriously intends to harness the power of the marketplace to crack society’s biggest challenges, authenticity—the capacity to do what you say you’ll do—is a core, non-negotiable attribute. And that presents a problem.