Mission, Inc.: The Practitioner's Guide to Social Enterprise (SVN)

Lunch and Walls have found the right balance of lessons learned from their own experiences, those learned by other social entrepreneurs interviewed, and reminders of basic mission-money tensions. They made a terrific key-note presentation at the 2009 Social Enterprise Alliance Summit, and their book provides depth to the observations they shared at the conference.I also appreciate the openness and honesty about their own professional paths and their willingness to connect with readers about the issues discussed in Mission, Inc. This is a fine addition to the body of literature about social enterprise.

This is an excellent book for any professional manager in the for profit or non-profit sector that outlines the fundamental keys to successfully running an enterprise. The authors have personalized the successes and failures of their businesses in a way that makes anyone want to contribute more to a non-profit social enterprise. Please help these uplifting individuals make the planet a better place. You might find this inner joy helps you run your business unit or overall enterprise more profitably and efficiently.

A must read for your social change enterprise! Practical guide to help with the navigation of your mission and your margin. Recommended books: How To Change The World, Caring economics, and Beyond Religion... These books are a great start in developing your social change enterprise!

Mission, Inc is an easy read, helpful and useful for non-profits consideringthe social enterprise route for generating new income.

Very dirty book but its gonna do the job.

Easy to read. Good information. Valuable for anyone considering a social enterprise. Some information might be a bit elementray to a seasoned business person - but hey - always good to have a reminder.

A must for anyone interested in common good initiatives. Leveraging on the bussiness rate of success and merging the social objectives, you harness the best of both for the benefit of everyone.This book is a must in all business schools!

"The next time someone asks whether your mission is more important than your margin, tell her...that you started your business because you had a yearning to change the way the world operates...that the most effective institution impacting the world today is business, and that you are going to use that power for good... Tell him that you run a social enterprise--where mission and margin are *not* an either-or." (pp. 37-38)An interesting collaboration between a former addict who came to socially responsible business for all the wrong reasons and an ordained minster who took the helm of a large, socially conscious bakery--with stories from many other social enterprises, too.Social enterprises, say Lynch and Walls, see their role as adding value to the entire community, not just to stockholders. Their mission and business operations are completely intertwined. And they succeed when they incorporate both business and humanistic principles into all phases: creating a climate where blame is supplanted by responsibility to improve...where there's no room for mediocrity but plenty of room for anyone, from line employee to CEO, to admit mistakes and extract the lessons from them...and where good planning creates sustained growth in both the social mission and the financial metrics.The authors talk a lot about the need to scale up. In their view, successful social enterprises must become big players. Thus, Walls' Greyston Bakery, founded to create jobs for disadvantaged workers and selling to customers like Ben & Jerry's, has staked out a position as the only "nationally branded premium brownie" (p. 151). Here, I disagree. I think there's plenty of room for small, local companies to have big impact; a great example would be organic fair-trade coffee roaster Dean's Beans, in Orange, Massachusetts, which has pushed the entire coffee industry toward sustainability. And I am working, through my books, my syndicated Green And Profitable column, and my speaking, to have big impact while staying small.However, beyond that small disagreement, I find much good advice for CEOs and managers looking to start, grow, and successfully run companies whose social mission is just as integral as their bottom line.

A book that was required for my course