My experience says there are several reasons that business partnerships are like marriages:

Editor’s Note: Our foundation supported development of two functional CDFIs in Cleveland over the last two years. We have also recently been approved to formalize our microenterprise work in our little county of Ashtabula, Ohio, as a CDFI. That’s why I enjoyed this article and hope it could inspire a reader or two to pursue such a worthy cause. My favorite Muhammed Yunis quote is “poor people usually aren’t poor because their stupid – it’s more often because the system doesn’t allow them a chance to retain the product of their labor.”

Editor’s Note: I recently met Professor Wei-Skillern at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business where she was teaching a class in social enterprise with Rick Aubry of New Foundry Ventures (http://newfoundryventures.org/). Her decades of research on successful nonprofit collaborations highlight key success factors required for collective impact initiatives to succeed.

“Do not depend on the hope of results. When you do the sort of work you have taken on, you must face the fact that your work may apparently be worthless. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate on the value, the rightness and the truth of the work itself.”

Editor’s Note: I worked in an Interpublic Group advertising agency from 1979 to 1987. And so I was on Madison Avenue after the period covered by AMC’s hit show, Mad Men. If you hope this book is about the television show or contains salacious content as the show does, you will be disappointed. It is instead an intelligent review of the period the show covers, often referred to as the “golden age of advertising.” Cracknell himself spent 40 years in the business as a writer and creative director so his words mean more than an observer. If you have interest in the business of advertising, this is a nice history of the business with special focus on the “creative revolution” of the 60’s, the period covered by Don Draper and his colleagues in the TV show. I respect the ad business more than most because when it’s done well, as it was in the two agencies I worked for, it is a valiant and constant struggle between creativity and business discipline. The excerpt below, from the book’s epilogue, reflects my feelings about the current state of the art.

Editor’s Note: An oldie for this month since I’ve had some grey clouds the last few months. Then we spent last week celebrating my son Kevin’s love for his new wife, Chiara, reminding me that “it’s all right.”

Editor’s note: Below you’ll find a link to Kiva.org’s 2011 annual report. Started only in 2005, any person (me included) can go onto this site and “connect” to a third world entrepreneur to whom they wish to lend money which, over time, is paid back. All candidates are the very, very poor and the average loan is about $400. Using this method, they lent almost $100 million in ’11, their sixth year in “social business.” Read the whole report if I’ve piqued your interest. They are amazing.

Finding Your Funding Model” by Peter Kim, Gail Perreault, & William Foster http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/finding_your_funding_model

"You've got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction." Alvin Toffler