Healthy organizations come in all shapes and sizes.
Today at the Triple Bottom Line Investing Conference in Amsterdam (www.tbli.org), I had a fascinating conversation with Mel Young, President of Homeless World Cup (www.homelessworldcup.org). Their vision is for a healthy, abundant, confident world where everyone has a home, a basic human need. To get there, they use football as a trigger to inspire and energise people who are homeless to change their own lives. By this approach the Homeless World Cup creates better opportunities for people who are currently homeless and excluded and reduces homelessness on a global level. Homeless people, in major cities throughout the world, playing organized football against each other. Mel finds that participants develop a greater sense of belonging, individual worth, and capability to achieve, qualities that carry over beyond the competition…and qualities that attract potential employers. Many participants find employment and ultimately homes after the competition. Others organize themselves and begin micro-businesses that produce products that are sold back into the communities. Their goal: Involve more than 1 million players by 2012. Imagine the potential economic upside! Social entrepreneurship at its best.
The Collision of Cultures and Destruction of Value
Nov/09
“The merger and acquisition market is slowly moving again. The crippling impact of the credit crisis is diminishing. “There is a tilt. We get more work.””(Joris Heerkens, PhiDelphi Corporate Finance, Het Financieele Dagblad, 19 November 2009).
You want to grow our profits, in a sustainable manner. You opt to grow via a ‘buy and build’ strategy. But you know, perhaps firsthand, that making transactions work, and work quickly, is not easy and certainly not a given. As the new realities of the marketplace evolve, companies have a choice either to go back to their old ways of working, or explore doing things differently to take advantage of new market realities. Companies considering an acquisition can benefit from a new way of doing the transaction, focusing on the success of the “wedding” as well as the “marriage,” creating a new culture that amplifies the strengths of the acquired and acquirer.