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Here is a copy of the book, Strategy of Giving free to download and distribute of course! The Strategy of Giving site is packed with lots of goodies. Enjoy!

If I had a dollar for every time I quoted from the book: “It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission,” or warned a friend, “You don’t want to trigger the ‘corporate immune system,’ Bud,” I would be quite a few dollars better off than I am this morning. Of course, it would hardly be as I had billed it then, free advice!

Anyway…

I have been busy researching open source values and various concepts that fly in the face of my traditional upbringing. It is a struggle to reconcile what I have learned in a career spent leveraging competitive advantage with what I know is a better model given a whole new set of circumstances and the proliferation of enabling technologies.

Reading up on The Gift Economy I bumped into Mr. Pinchot again, writing on the very subject in In Context: A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture. Once again what he had to say resonated with me in the same way as when I first picked up Intraprenuering.

In particular, this poignant passage stopped me in my tracks:

A Shift from Capital to Talent

The critical factor controlling success in business is shifting from capital to talent. Employees are no longer interchangeable parts. This is not good for everyone, the undereducated and those whose talents are not now in demand are losing ground. But there is a bright side. Employers must curry the favor of their talented employees who increasingly have an ethical agenda. Employees who can easily find work elsewhere are refusing to work on projects or for companies that offend their values, even if they would be well paid to do so. As this trend increases, as people take a stand for sustainability in choosing their work, even public corporations seeking the favor of bloodless institutional investors will find that sustainable companies have the best future because they have the best talent. In fields where creativity counts, sustainability is a competitive weapon.

This strategy will not work if we are so pure that no realistic level of improvement would meet our standards. It will not work if we sell out for greenwashing instead of instituting real environmentally conscious practices. Biasing the system for sustainability requires some of us to be in the game demanding change.

Frugality and Choice

Our ability to make our talent count for change will often require us to take less for our services than if we were selling to the highest bidder.

One consulting firm I know virtually requires new consultants to use their fine salaries to buy expensive cars and houses. They want them up to their eyeballs in debt so the company can have complete control over them. They want their consultants living in fear of losing their jobs so they don’t ever put ethics ahead of their sales and profits.

Voluntary simplicity is not just polluting less, it is having more to “spend” on integrity at work. If we can live on less, we can turn down unsustainable projects at work just as we do in our choices at home.

Talented people have been making sustainable career choices in increasing numbers. This gives businesses that can provide good work towards good ends a great advantage, and this advantage will grow as the highly environmentally and socially conscious generation in school now becomes important talent to business.

The real game in the business world of the ecological age is running a business or a career so as to make a contribution to the community, the nation, and even to the planet as a whole. True business competence in the ecological age is demonstrated by producing a better product or service for customers and at the same time setting new standards for reducing pollution, for creating habitat, for helping the less fortunate. We cannot play this new game until we move beyond the fear of insolvency and learn to live frugally regardless of financial success.

The old status system is hard on the heart. Living for the larger self through a strategy of frugality and service opens up the heart to the glory of creation all around us. The gift is repaid manyfold.

Wow! How cool is that? You wriggle and writhe trying to articulate something so abstract — or so you think — and there it is, where you least expect to find it!

Thank you, Gifford, you’ve made my day — yet again.

In discussing the strategic potential of CEO transparency Clive Thompson makes this interesting point which should resonate with business bloggers who consider such lofty things to their own advantage:

Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that’s one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.

Why don’t we ditch the tautology “radical transparency” and opt for something that more accurately reflects what really goes on in the C-suites of many corporations? How about “opacity” instead?

At least then we can honestly frame a discussion about about the degrees of filtering that are appropriate for those areas of business which properly belong out of the public domain. We can also begin to examine the dubious motivations for those who choose to adopt “openness” as a means of obscuring the truth, managing reputations that may not withstand the tests of real integrity.

Richard Becker who authors the Copywrite, Ink blog posts a fantastic reply to comments left by “fire-brand” Jason Goldberg on his inaugural posting on RecruitingBloggers.com. For some, Jason Goldberg energized the debate on CEO blogging, albeit polarizing a great many within the fast-growing, lively and precocious Recruitosphere, and beyond.

As an aside, Jason Goldberg has been a favorite topic in many posts on my semi-retired Recruitomatic Blog. I couldn’t make up my mind then whether he is Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde, and I still can’t make up my mind now. Anyway…

A reading of Richard’s post will give anyone who is not familiar with the recent debacle surrounding layoffs at start-up Jobster – and Jason Goldberg’s opaque and inept handling of the situation in real time — will find this an excellent point of entry into what is for me, undoubtedly, one of the most interesting twists in the developing genre of CEO blogs.

There is an object lesson here for those who are prepared to learn from Jason Goldberg’s naivety and Richard’s PR prowess, not least of all, for Jason Goldberg himself.  Richard’s “living case study assessment” is proving to be a growing resource for understanding the related issues of CEO blogging, crisis communication and understanding that sometimes it is better to be thought a fool than to remove all doubt.

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