But I also said I would put together a proposal for an entrepreneurial coaching service (service (a) above) that could be presented to enlightened governments that can appreciate that this service is urgently needed, and would help governments do their job better. This is an outline of such a proposal, that builds on the business case for my Caring Enterprise Coach business I produced two years ago. Before I convert the bullets to a text proposal, I’d appreciate your thoughts: Who, in what departments of what levels of government in what countries do you think might be most amenable to funding/buying the services of the NECF? How big would a ‘chapter’ of NECF need to be to provide well-rounded services to diverse entrepreneurial start-ups, and how large an area would it serve (my view: the more local and community-based, the better)? How would we credentialize those offering NECF services? What’s missing from the list of needs, benefits, offerings, and business model (ways of recouping costs)? If this is such a good idea, why isn’t someone already doing it (and I don’t mean chambers of commerce and accounting and legal and consulting firms — entrepreneurs need real business advice, not advice on administration and paperwork)? Who (BALLE?) would be logical partners for NECF?

OK, here’s the proposal:

The Need: Why A New Enterprise Coaching Federation is Needed

• A staggering number of baby boomers are being outsourced, offshored, downsized, replaced by cheaper younger workers, early-retired, or are abandoning jobs that offer only exhausting, thankless, personally meaningless work for socially and environmentally irresponsible corporations. Most of these people are ill-equipped to find or create second careers, and most of them will fail to do so, give up, retire permanently, and may have to rely on government assistance for the shortfall in their income.
• A large number of new entrants to the workforce, from high school and university, are unable to find non-menial employment, and are staying longer in school in the often illusory hope that more education will improve their employment prospects, or are taking two or three jobs unconnected to their skills just to make ends meet.
• Underemployment in our society is epidemic: More than half of the workforce describe themselves as significantly underemployed. Their only hope to find meaningful work that allows them to do what they do best is through creating their own enterprises.
• There is virtually no effective training for entrepreneurs who want to start their own businesses, and much of the training that is available is unaffordable. MBA and other academic courses train people how to be middle-managers in large corporations, not how to start their own enterprise. Most notably absent is training on how to start enterprises that will create significant local employment, larger and more sophisticated enterprises than sole proprietorships and ‘mom and pop’ businesses.
• Entrepreneurial training in classrooms doesn’t work: Entrepreneurs need one-on-one, hands-on, customized, just-in-time coaching, from experienced entrepreneurs not academics, to successfully launch and operate a sustainable and effective business.
• The failure rate of entrepreneurial businesses is horrific (only 10% last over five years), and these failures carry with them huge social and economic costs.
• Large corporations, thanks to the economics of offshoring and outsourcing, now destroy more jobs than they create — virtually all net new employment creation in North America is in entrepreneurial businesses.
• Large corporations also destroy local employment and local economies by displacing local enterprises that hire and buy right in the community. Local enterprises need help competing against large corporations in what is an unfair and unequal playing field.
• Large corporations also are not sustainable. They rely heavily on government subsidies and incentives, usually abandon communities when cheaper labour or faster-growing markets are found elsewhere, and offload the social and environmental costs that they produce to the communities that they exploit and then abandon. Entrepreneurs, by contrast, depend on local communities and must be responsive and responsible to them to be sustainable.

The Value Proposition: Benefits of a NECF to Each Stakeholder Group

• Baby boomers and youth entering the workforce will get the coaching they need to assess what kind of business to establish, to research the market thoroughly, and to develop the business skills (not just administrative information) they need to launch and operate their enterprise successfully.
• Governments will be rewarded with lower business failure rates, healthier local economies, employment growth, and a workforce with critical entrepreneurial skills that will keep them self-sufficient and off welfare and unemployment roles for life. They will also no longer have to offer huge subsidies to large corporations to entice them to create (often temporary and uneconomic) employment and local development.
• Retired and semi-retired workers can supplement their incomes, find meaningful work, and transfer the valuable skills and experience they have acquired over a lifetime, by providing their services through NECF.
• Local communities will benefit from a more resilient, entrepreneurial, productive, self-sufficient and happy local workforce, where workers stay in the community, create local jobs, buy from local producers, and hence contribute to the economic prosperity of the community. Local self-sufficiency also means less wear and tear on roads, less automotive pollution, healthier and more dynamic communities with everything in walking-distance, and even lower levels of alienation and crime.

The Offerings: What NECF Will Do

• Provide counseling and coaching to help prospective entrepreneurs identify appropriate businesses for them to create (suitable to their talents and interests, and which meet a genuine need in the community). This could also entail helping downsized workers deal with the ‘grief’ and terror of unemployment, and getting them past the learned helplessness that ‘I could never be an entrepreneur’.
• Provide a ‘matching service’ to help prospective entrepreneurs find business partners whose skills and interests complement theirs, so that larger, more sophisticated entrepreneurial businesses (with an inherently higher likelihood of success) can be created.
• Provide guidance in how to establish a new enterprise. This would go far beyond the superficial administrative, regulatory and paperwork guidance most accountants, lawyers, consultants, chambers of commerce and even government business and economic development offices currently provide — and staffing would necessarily be experienced entrepreneurs who can provide context-specific coaching for the specific type of business the entrepreneur wants to create.
• Provide training in entrepreneurial sustainability. Where many small businesses are just tide-me-over until-the-next-job temporary jobs, or are created with the expectation of selling out for a profit as soon as possible, NECF is dedicated to creating work that lasts. That means smashing a lot of the pervasive myths about entrepreneurship, teaching entrepreneurs about how to do thorough primary and secondary market and other research before launching the business, and teaching entrepreneurs innovation skills and the innovation process so that they can adapt to changing circumstances.
• Providing group networking and training events as appropriate, so that entrepreneurs can build their networks and so that where training does lend itself to group and collaborative activity it can be offered in this format.
• Facilitating peer-to-peer continuous networking among users of NECF services, both within the community and with other NECF chapters, so that not only do entrepreneurs learn from NECF’s experienced staff, they also learn from each other. These networks would be pure peer-to-peer networks, not accessible to the hangers-on and exploitative sellers that plague most existing business networks. The key would be free exchange of knowledge, information and experience, with no ‘selling’ allowed.

The Business Model: How NECF Would Cover Its Costs

• NECF is designed to be a not-for-profit foundation. It would not have any shareholders or other stakeholders whose interest is making a profit from its activities. 
• NECF would recruit (mostly retired or semi-retired) experienced entrepreneurs, not academics, consultants, accountants or lawyers. It would appeal both to the altruism of these entrepreneurs (giving back to the communities that supported them) and the normal zeal of successful businesspeople to talk about and share their success secrets. NECF staff would include both full-time and part-time people, organized in chapters each focused on a local community and knowledgeable about that local community. Staff would be paid a modest, flat rate for their services (perhaps $75/hour). Chapters would be self-organized, with no back-office or administrative overhead.
• Users of NECF services would be ‘charged’ the same $75/hour rate, but all charges would be deferred and forgivable on a successful-efforts basis. In other words, users would pay NECF only when and if they could do so comfortably and acknowledged that they had received substantial value from the services. This discretionary mechanism of user-pay-for-perceived-value will also serve as a definitive measure of the value that NECF is providing.
• In return for the aforementioned benefits, sponsoring governments will pay NECF the $75/hour for all services rendered, write off the interest (from the time the user receives the NECF services to the time they can afford to pay for them), and write off the costs that users can never afford to, or (for whatever reason) determine they did not get value from. These write-offs should be considered an extremely modest and focused investment in workforce education, employment creation and local economic development.
• Group networking and training events would provide ‘profit’ to the extent the coach:entrepreneur ratio was greater than the usual 1:1, and these ‘profits’ would be either returned to sponsoring governments or used to fund other approved NECF activities.
• It is to be expected that the peer-to-peer continuous networking activities that NECF facilitates will provide deep and long-lasting value and relationships for entrepreneurs. This will allow the charging of annual network dues, the proceeds of which could alsobe either returned to sponsoring governments or used to fund other approved NECF activities.
• Finally, some entrepreneurs may be so grateful for the ‘hand-up’ they received from NECF that they may want to become sponsors in their own right. As a foundation, such sponsorships will be accepted with pride and acknowledged as indication of the value that the foundation provides. It is not inconceivable that some NECF chapters might become entirely self-funded by such private sponsorships and donations, to the pointthat no government sponsorship or funding is needed.

Well, that’s all I have so far. What do you think?

PS: We’re hosting the big annual neighbourhood party tomorrow, so Links for the Week will be on Sunday.

The first part of my upcoming book The Natural Enterprise is about finding meaningful (for you) work. It’s essentially about finding or creating work that is at the ‘sweet spot’ where your Gift (what you do uniquely well), your Passion (what you love doing) and your Purpose (what is needed) intersect — area 3 on the graphic above. My agent and publisher, not surprisingly, are hopeful that I will find my own second career in that sweet spot before the book is published (we all need to practice what we preach).

So the onset of my ulcerative colitis last month had me quite concerned. One of the first things I did was to give up my innovation consulting practice, which I had initially hoped would be in the sweet spot but which turned out to be in area 2 on the graphic (i.e. unappreciated) — and produced far more stress than was good for me. I had initially thought that in order to find unstressful work I would have to settle for (another) area 5 job — something I’m good at, and in high demand, but probably something I wouldn’t be passionate about.

But then I realized I was thinking about this all wrong. If my Gift and my Passion are shifting (from really ambitious, exciting work to more modest, local, fun work), the answer isn’t to give up on finding the sweet spot, but rather to (a) redefine the type of work I am searching for, (b) research and assess the need for that kind of work, and (c) find work partners, people to make a living with, whose Gifts and Passions are complementary to my own and who, in partnership with me, could allow us all to fulfill our purpose while collectively meeting a currently unmet need.

My Genius (where my Gift and Passion overlap) is imagining possibilities — coming up with novel, creative answers to challenging problems, answers that no one else has, or would be likely to, come up with. I also have some Gifts that I am not particularly passionate about (research, analysis, intelligence-gathering, and applying my experience, learning and other people’s stories to solve business problems) and some Passions that I am not particularly gifted in (creating sustainable intentional communities, facilitating P2P information exchanges, and developing personal sustainable living programs). For me, meaningful work might well include those Gifts I am not particularly passionate about (provided that isn’t all it includes), and ideally would allow me to learn about, develop and try out some of the Passions that I am not currently very gifted in. So, for example, my business partners might be very good at creating sustainable intentional communities, and that might be part of our collective Natural Enterprise’s mandate, offering me the opportunity to participate in this type of activity without getting over my head.

My Purpose (what I’m meant/destined/on Earth to do) is fomenting (provoking) change. Recently my thinking on this has been shifting as well, as a result of my research on complex adaptive systems. My Purpose may now be more catalyzing Let-Self-Change, coaching people individually and in groups to understand how to understand and allow themselves (individually and collectively in groups) to adapt to and accommodate ever-changing social and environmental systems, rather than trying to futilely impose change on these complex, uncontrollable, unpredictable systems.

Finding the sweet spot all comes down to the iterative, complex challenge of finding the ideal partners for your enterprise — those whose skills and interests complement your own, and which allow each partner to exercise his/her Gift and Passion and fulfill his/her Purpose while collectively meeting a currently unmet need. In my experience, sole proprietorship, trying to do everything in your enterprise yourself, is not the way to go — it is unnecessarily tedious, risky, exhausting and stressful. Much better to share the load with people you love to work with.

This is an iterative process — it will evolve depending on who I partner with and what they have to offer, but my initial thinking is that my critical role in this Natural Enterprise would be doing one or more of three things that, for me, are clearly in the area 3 sweet spot:

• Coaching displaced and disenchanted baby boomers and entrepreneurial young people in high school and university on finding meaningful work, including:
• how to find their own area 3 sweet spot work; 
• the possibilities and advantages of creating a Natural Enterprise instead of creating or working in a traditional business; and
• the process of researching and establishing such an enterprise.
• Coaching teens in a very progressive school (one where study is self-directed, not taught at a lectern, and where you learn by doing and by discovery, not by being told what to do) in critical life skills (one of which is finding meaningful work).
• Coaching groups and organizations about how to use complex, adaptive processes to deal with intractable problems.

I am no longer interested in providing services to big corporations: They’re too change-resistant, and for the most part they’re part of the problem, not the solution.

Coaching is an art — more learning and listening than teaching, customizing answers based on context and circumstances, a lot of one-on-one back-and-forth, some brainstorming, imagining possibilities, telling stories from personal experience, and a few organized collective activities when group learning and discovery of diverse groups is appropriate.

My initial sense (though this could change too depending on who I partner with and their skills and perspectives) is that the traditional employment and consulting business models of this kind of coaching are inappropriate for these applications, for two reasons:

• This coaching is urgently needed, but those who need it cannot afford to pay for it; and
• Government has a vested interest in supporting this kind of coaching, above and beyond what they are already doing: It’s good for employment, it’s good for workforce education, it reduces the need for social assistance for those earning too little to live on, and it’s good for local business development.

For that reason I think we might try to persuade governments to fully fund this coaching, and hence offer it through a foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to making citizens better equipped to make a living for themselves. In the US, which is less inclined to fund such ventures publicly than Canada, we might look for progressive-minded private sponsors. There may even be a business model where entrepreneurs and wealthy individuals with the ability to pay for these services would subsidize those who don’t have that ability.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, and these decisions will ultimately made collectively and iteratively by the whole partnership of the Natural Enterprise. The traditional approach to getting such a venture started would be either (a) wait for some enlightened government to offer an opening for such work, through the department of labour, education or business development, and then apply for it, or (b) make a formal proposal to government suggesting they provide this service to citizens, and offer to provide it on a turnkey, not-for-profit basis (I’ll probably do that anyway, since Canada does have some enlightened governments).

But, as I suggested in an earlier article, perhaps the best way to launch this would be convening an Open Space event where anyone looking to establish a Natural Enterprise would be invited to bring their Gift, Passion and Purpose, and their wish list, ideal work description and initial thoughts on appropriate business models, and let’s see what happens. My guess is that a lot of powerful partnerships could emerge from such an event, and a lot of very meaningful workcreated.

Time to give Chris Corrigan a call.

I thought it might be worthwhile, as preparation for this, to blog about some of my personal emerging thoughts on the subject of social networking. This will be the first of a series of posts on this subject.

The mindmap above is a rough taskonomy of social network applications (SNAs) I developed last year. Since then, I’ve been monitoring new applications and their success and (more often) failure. A lot of the applications that have been developed seem to be solutions in search of a problem — simple to develop, kind of interesting, but ultimately, in the cornucopia of sites and applications out there, not terribly urgent or valuable, and ultimately lost in the shuffle.

What is social networking trying to do? Most of the applications so far offer one or more of the eight features or functionalities shown in blue on the mindmap above:

1. Finding people (discovering, rediscovering, or locating them)
2. Building directories, network maps and social networks
3. Inviting people to join your networks
4. Managing access to your networks (“permissioning”)
5. Connecting with people in your networks (using various media)
6. Managing relationships across media (e.g. making the jarring transition from e-mail or weblog-based relationships to voice-to-voice or face-to-face)
7. Collaborating with people in your networks, and
8. Content sharing with people in your networks (and other learning, knowledge-finding and knowledge-sharing functionalities that are arguably the domain of Knowledge Management rather than Social Networking)

MySpace, for example, arguably the most successful SNA so far, is focused on passively helping people find other people (you put yourself out there, and the people you’re hoping to find, for the most part, find you, in contrast to LinkedIn, for example, where you can actively search and connect with people with particular skills, backgrounds, or interests). MySpace and most other SNAs also have some Knowledge Management (KM) functionality — you can share your stuff with others, search for others’ stuff (now often using your trusted network’s recommendations to filter your searches), and do some focused research.

In a previous article, I nominated the following as the ten most successful SNAs to date:

• Weblogs: Content-Sharing/Filtering + Finding People (in your Communities of Interest) + Publishing/Subscribing + Forum. Weblogs provide context-rich knowledge plus a forum for reader conversations. As social software they are successful because (a) they are easy to set up and maintain, (b) thanks to Google, they attract a lot of attention, but they are also very valuable KM tools, so their social value is a bonus. 
• Wikis: Collaborating. They have succeeded because they’re the simplest imaginable asynchronous collaboration tool, and don’t mess that up by trying to be something more.
• Del.icio.us: Content-Sharing/Filtering + Finding People (in your Communities of Interest) + Publishing/Subscribing + Forum. Same formula as blogging, but trading off less work for against a poorer-context relationship, by publishing your bookmarks instead of your articles.
• Flickr: Content-Sharing/Filtering + Finding People (in your Communities of Interest) + Publishing/Subscribing + Forum. Just like Del.icio.us except the shared content is images instead of bookmarks.
• DodgeBall: Finding People + Finding Where People Are Right Now. DodgeBall gets around the invasiveness of tracking other people (stalking) by putting a reverse spin on it: You tell DodgeBall where you are and it tells others in your network (current and desired associates, friends, and crushes) when you are nearby, so that, if they are so inclined, they can contact you to meet up.
• BaseCamp: Collaborating + Messaging + Scheduling/Calendaring. An intuitive project management tool that makes contacting project team members using various media, with a minimum of other bells and whistles.
• MySpace: Finding People + Messaging + Content-Sharing. Dead simple social networking tool, primarily for young people looking for friends & romantic interests and sharing music and photos.
• FaceBook: Finding People. Focused on students in high schools and universities, this simple tool lets you establish networks within your current school and track people from former schools.
• Insider Pages: Content-Sharing + Finding People. The content is reviews of companies by consumers. The idea is to take the Consumer Reports or epinions concept local, so that consumers can see what others think about local suppliers. Information not available elsewhere and probably only ever available peer-to-peer. Enormous potential here, especially if Google Maps is integrated. The challenge is getting people to take the time to volunteer their opinions. The way around the challenge is getting reviewers to sign up their friends and neighbours.
• Mind-Mapping: Collaborating. Simply and quickly documents what’s being said and agreed to, graphically, in real time, so that participants in a conference/meeting/community can see and react to it immediately. Gives participants a complete ‘map’ of the conversation as soon as the conversation ends. The mind-map above was made using FreeMind.

Since then, three new variations on SNAs have caught my (and others’) attention:

• Memediggers — tools like digg and reddit that allow groups to amplify and ‘talk’ to each other about issues they agree are important and/or interesting
• Mashups — SNAs combined with other SNAs, or with multimedia or other apps to increase their utility or add visualization or some other functionality
• SNA/Hardware Interfaces — SNAs that connect with your TV, GPS, medical or emergency monitoring system or some other hardware device

There has also been a proliferation of multimedia SNAs, of the YouTube variety.

Mashups, add-ons and other amplifications and combinations of SNA have arguably widened the digital divide even further. Using many of them requires a certain level of comfort and familiarity with basic SNAs. For the majority who go online just for e-mail and rudimentary Google searches, these apps are too technical and too sophisticated. But because combining and adding functionality to SNAs is so easy, there is a blizzard of new such apps each month, and the digital divide grows even wider as a result.

In the meantime, dissatisfaction with these applications remains high, on both sides of the divide. In my previous article, I outlined ten drawbacks and failings of most current SNAs, which might explain this dissatisfaction:

1. Inflexible, tedious information architecture (“Why is entering this field mandatory?”)
2. Profile poverty (“This tells me absolutely nothing of value about this person”)
3. No separation between What I Have and What I Need personas (the information about you I care about depends on whether I am ‘buying’ or ‘selling’ — even classified ads ‘get’ this)
4. Lack of harvesting capability (“Why do I have to enter this again?”)
5. Populated just-in-case instead of canvassed just-in-time (“Oh, sorry, I no longer work there” and “Oops, sorry, I’m married now”)
6. The most needed people have the least time and motivation to participate
7. Over-engineered and unintuitive
8. Lack of scalability and resilience: Centralized instead of peer-to-peer (when it gets too big or goes down, you’re out of luck)
9. Socially awkward (“I’m not going to tell someone I’ve never met that!”)
10. Low signal-to-noise ratio because of dysfunctional information behaviours (blockages, disconnects, lack of trust) — these need to be accommodated by Social Software tools, instead of ignored

The current generation of SNAs are used principally for recreational purposes. This may be a reflection of the failings above, and the fact that these apps are not yet robust enough to be ready for heavy-duty business use. Beyond the above frustrations, playing around with some of these apps is fun, and that, combined with our deep-seated need for social interaction, and the increasing isolation of our Western culture, accounts for the immense popularity of many of these applications — even though they really don’t work very well.

If these apps are to achieve use and value beyond fun and novelty, however, they need to become more effective, and they need to address real, urgent, important needs and problems. I would suggest there are at least four urgent needs/problems that SNAs could, and hopefully will, fulfil:

1. Finding people to love and live with
2. Finding people to make a living with
3. Finding people who share important or urgent affinities (and then enabling them to organize, activate, and exchange context-rich information peer-to-peer with those people, such as health counsel and ‘epinions’)
4. Enabling powerful virtual collaboration when face-to-face is, for economic or logistic reasons, impossible

Existing SNAs are not very good at doing any of these things, and they’re hopelessly complicated and unintuitive for most people trying to do these things. But if we were to be honest, most of us would have to admit that we’re not very good at doing any of things in any case, with or without technology. For many if not most of us, finding people to love. finding people to make a living with (or at least do meaningful work for), and finding people who share our life’s passion and purpose, is at best a hit-and-miss, serendipitous process.

The non-people-finding apps above should not be problematic. Virtual collaboration tools developed to date are unintuitive and over-engineered, but we’ll learn to make them simpler and more sensible. Likewise, the organizing and activism and information exchange aspects of affinity-group SNAs lend themselves to traditional software solutions, and we can expect some very powerful and ubiquitous apps to emerge in the coming years to do this.

The people-finding SNAs, however, are much more problematic.

Civilization makes finding people mush harder than it was for gatherer-hunter cultures, where the number of people you could expect to meet and know in a lifetime were few, and the diversity of human activities was limited. So we have no intuitive way of finding the right people among the millions who we may have some limited contact with in our lifetimes. So we have to resort to trial and error.

We won’t solve this with top-down standardized centralized databases and web apps either — the process of finding people to love, work with or pursue mutual passions is a complex, highly personal process that does not lend itself to such processes.

How then could we develop SNAs that could accommodate these difficult, iterative, personal processes? Might these SNAs need to be only partly computerized and online, and rely on more ‘essential’ meetups and face-to-face interactions? And how might the filtering mechanisms of such applications be improved to increase the likelihood of finding the right people?

These are complex problems, and they will require the development of processes that are suited to dealing with complexity (most software is designed to address merely complicated problems). We’re not very articulate, after all, at expressing who we’re looking for, or even knowing what and who it is we’re looking for (though, of course, we believe we’ll know it when we see it). Chemistry is often more important than logic in making lasting and meaningful and effective relationships, and in finding the ‘right’ people.

What we need to do is to run a large number of focused experiments, small scale, improvisational, controlled by the test group bottom-up, to hone some approaches that work. They’ll undoubtedly vary by culture and by objective. Dating services, employment and contracting agencies, and self-help groups have always grappled with these issues, but have not come up with terribly satisfactory methods or approaches — they nearly all have high failure and high attrition rates.

We need to do better. Finding people to love, to make a living with, and to share our passions and purposes with, are vital, crucial human activities, and our modern, insulated, transient society complexifies the task enormously. Software alone won’t make it easy, or certain, but SNAs embedded in new processes that embrace complexity could take us a long way, and could easily become the most important uses of the Web of all.

What techniques — newfangled or old, software-assisted or not — have you found especially effective at meeting the people you want, and need, to meet and form meaningful,productive and lasting relationships with? This, I think, is the greatest challenge of Web 2.0. And its greatest promise.

[PS: Today and tomorrow I'm guest blogging at the Fast Company Magazine Blogfest. Some illustrious bloggers are involved and some really interesting ideas being surfaced. Check it out.]