Corporations outsource everything from accounting and manufacturing to human resource functions. For the most part, charity and CSR are methods of outsourcing responsibility, handing off the heavy lifting to someone outside the company who will make strategic decisions to bring about transformations and decide when success has been achieved. These days, with CSR the fastest growing consultant practice, too many companies ask little more of themselves than to find a congenial not-for-profit organization or consultant. When the brand is protected—or even better, enhanced—and performance can be reported on a responsibility annual report, they assume that they are. . . well. . .being responsible.

Real responsibility is up close and engaged. When Colgate Palmolive, South Africa decided to help birth the New South Africa, it did not give money to not-for-profits. Stelios Tsesos, the company’s general manager in Africa, chartered and then prepared Colgate’s entire local workforce to help the new government succeed. Individuals and teams drew on their business acumen to develop innovation that included engaging respected women leaders in the townships. They educated them on oral health, something that Colgate knew well and that was core to their business, and helped them build skills to run small businesses. Then they set up these entrepreneurs to sell very small lots of dental care products within the townships, producing income for themselves and supporting and improving the health of their communities.

The Colgate employees took their engagement even further. They helped lead Mandela’s effort to set up townships councils for improving governance in the fledgling democracy, relying on skills they acquired as they learned how to run Colgate Palmolive, South Africa in the new era. They knew firsthand whether they were succeeding in their promises to the local communities because they were tracking and adjusting toward the results, themselves. We built business skills across the company which was used in these activities. The effect for Colgate was a growth rate of 40 percent per year—all through insourcing, never outsourcing.

Colgate’s effort was company-wide. Another subtle way to outsource responsibility is to set up a CSR department and let everyone else in the organization off the hook. There is no reason for anyone outside the department to think about CSR at all, let alone to think about it every day. It doesn’t get embedded in their decisions. There is no CSR planning and challenge except as the department strategy proposes them. Officially outsourced CSR is all about charity or corporate philanthropy. “Compartmentally sourcing” it has similar effects.

Goggle keeps CSR inside and internalized in everyone’s work. For example, Google Global Food Services has given itself the mission of changing all people’s understanding and behavior in regard to food and its effect on health. Michiel Bakker, Director of the service, has devised a way to work on people’s interactions with food and their understanding of its relationship to health, based on the five stakeholders’ framework in my book, The Responsible Business. As a way to start, Google has launched an Innovation Lab, made up of a broad coalition of experts developing actions to change human behavior and choices.

I am very proud to be a part of this initiative, as well. When Google makes donations, they stay in the wheelhouse and in locations where they can engage directly. Their charity path is targeting childhood obesity.  Part of what the Innovation Lab discovers will be directly connected to this work, as well. When not-for-profits are involved, it is with the Google organization, where they participate actively. Thus understanding and responsibility remain within the company.

The idea of “giving back” should not replace “giving as.” The programs at Colgate Palmolive, South Africa and Google Global Food Services exemplify giving as we do business, not after the fact. This provides one more reason why a business should become directly connected to the everyday work of any charity it supports. Making responsibility a way of doing business, including it in every decision, task, and product, is far more effective than the substitution of donations, good deeds, and sustainable “best practices,” for acts of irresponsibility.  Giving as goes way beyond giving back; the only way to guarantee full integrity is by making responsibility in-house and integral.

Approaches  to responsibility without this level of direct connection and strong commitment to making “it happen”—in ways that allow for continual course corrections—are more like hand offs. Outsourcing and compartmentalizing CSR splinter a company’s efforts and fragment its connections to what it’s really trying to accomplish. Which is not to say that charity is always a bad thing; obviously we must all contribute when dire situations arise. But charity should never be a substitute for full, company-owned responsibility.

In a Responsible Entrepreneur’s business, not all work is equal in importance or in financial or societal return. Some work has more chance of producing success and making bigger a difference. But for a busy entrepreneur it’s hard to know which effort or what kind of work will make a significant contribution.

There are four levels of work, and you have to learn to do them all in parallel, and as you get better at them, to do them all at once. If you aren’t differentiating among them, you are just keeping busy and hoping for the best.

Foundation Level – Operations Work

Running effectively, making your customers happy and glad to pay for your offerings  

Far too many responsibly minded entrepreneurs don’t even meet the conditions of foundational work. They aren’t creating the conditions for a growing business, and they may even be copying traditional business practices in their accounting, relationships with suppliers, and ways of generating customer loyalty. This does not serve customers well or provide what is needed for innovation.

Operational work begins long before you take up societal considerations. There are responsible and non-responsible practices in every realm of basic operations, from hiring and pay systems to planning and strategic thinking. Getting solid at the foundational level takes ongoing commitment and effort and requires that you examine every practice for contamination with non-responsible, traditional ways of doing operating. All this is for the sake of creating a good, solid business.

Market Level – Maintenance Work

Ensuring your relative competitive advantage in a dynamic market place and world

If you feel that you’ve got foundational level work under control, then the question becomes, how good are you at understanding the ways market dynamics affect your business? How do you position yourself not only for competitive effectiveness but also for changing times and conditions that threaten to take you far beyond your bailiwick? How do you avoid the traps of changing trends and crises in the market? And if you are subject to increasingly heavy regulatory guidelines, how do you make them a part of work and avoid hiring more full-time staff or contractors to handle the challenge?

It’s interesting how, when it comes to market-level work, many Responsible Entrepreneurs being to act like traditional businesses. They hope their desire to do good will make up for one area of “business as usual”—but the old ways of thinking about competition can be very damaging to your business and your values. The Responsible Entrepreneur relies on managing principles that suggest when to compete, when to cooperate, when to collaborate, and when to change the game in the industry.

Social and Planetary Level – Systems Change Work

Making choices and acting in ways to create systemic effects

From the operations and marketing to systems change work is a quantum jump. If you aspire to become a Responsible Entrepreneur, you have to get really good on the first two levels and at the same time take on at least this next level up in terms of impact and platform. This involves learning to see how systems work and where the best nodes—“acupuncture points” where you can make important differences—are located, which also means learning to “image” patterns at work and make sense of them.

For example, you might need to ask yourself what makes community building work and where in this regard your business is falling down. This is especially difficult if the community where your suppliers live and create is overseas. How do you engage in such a way that you actually make this community healthier, rather than simply avoid unfair trade practices?

Another example: How do you make buying and development choices for raw materials that are not just less harmful and in line with best practices. How might your choices actually improve the product, make the supplier’s business better, and even improve thinking about materials and their way of being sources. This work requires asking totally different questions than the ones businesses usually ask.

You must take this work on yourself; you cannot trust it to third-party certifiers or consultants because they rarely have the skills needed for systems change. In the current business world, third parties are creating “best practices” to reduce damage and ameliorate harm, rather than working at the roots of systems to transform them.

Evolution Level – Regenerative Work

Developing the capacities of industries and greater whole systems to evolve and play their unique roles in healthy ecosystems

All systems are unique and each has an essence. Regenerative work involves learning to see the essence in all life, all systems, all beings—including customers, suppliers, “lifesheds” (rethinking the idea of watershed), communities and all entities the business touches.

Every system needs the capacity to evolve itself toward its own essence. This is where regenerative work focuses, on learning to see each of your customer classes not as commodities but as living beings with unique character and potential. Innovation took off at Seventh Generation when they shifted from treating their customers as environmentalists, which commoditized their reasons for buying, to seeing them as persons whose lives the company could contribute to evolving. They discovered essence groupings around “natural parenting” and found ways to serve parents who wanted everything in their children’s lives to be natural. No one was attending to that. Seventh Generation developed partnerships and did so very successfully. They also discovered “homecare hyper-sensitives,” individuals with severe allergies to many of the ingredients in traditional cleaning products. This also led to new formulations that improved Seventh Generation product lines.

Knowing how to work at all levels is critical. If you want to know more about the series that teaches these capability, check it out here. And sign up to be kept up to date on the new independent learning products as they are revealed here.

Error Five: Borrowing and Tacking the Ethical and Sustainability Practices of Other Businesses Onto Yours

Why is this an error? When your business borrows plans and practices from other businesses, you can have no idea whether they will make better communities, ecosystems, and economies, and you lose a critical source of innovation and motivation.

Now that sustainability has become an industry,  we can buy programs and plans off the shelf. We can pay consultants to do our responsibility work for us, and  we often do. When a business works and thinks strategically, every decision arises from core beliefs and principles. When it borrows, its people follow a set of practices that are labeled “best” but are probably not validated by the most important question, “Does this make a positive difference in our stakeholders’ health and vitality?” Even worse, by following best practices a business risks losing what makes it distinctive and reverting to Error One, too much time and emphasis on trends and competitive assessments.

New Business Acumen: Learn how to start from global imperatives that are meaningful in the context of your business and part of the ethics of each of your people. Global imperatives are not goals; they are articulate beliefs about how stakeholder domains work when they are ecologically sound and evolving in a systemic way for the benefit of all stakeholders. Only when this way of thinking is developed and utilized can you increase the odds that you are making a difference and build a base for innovation that comes uniquely from your business.

There are a few hundred more ridiculously common errors, all of which spring from good intentions. At The Responsible Entrepreneur Institute, we educate and develop people in the core business acumen needed to avoid them. Our track record includes building successful small businesses and growing them with strong financial and responsible platforms. Learn more about our programs and get an introduction to the five new business acumen arenas on January 10, 2013 at 5 pm Pacific Time. The call is free but space is limited. You must register to attend. If you register and are unable to attend, you may receive a free recording of the call within a few days after January 10.

Error Four: Using Market Research to Know and Design for Your Customers

Why is this an error? You fool yourself into thinking you know your market and lose the most critical opportunity for success—real, caring connections to your customers.                       

Standard business practice is to hire or draw on third parties for research on existing and potential customers and markets. That aggregated information is handed off to those who contract and oversee the research, most often a business’s  marketers. It is further digested and made available to other functions for product development, packaging design, operational improvement, and a myriad of other uses.

There are several errors here. The first is that the number of translations causes the information to become terribly flawed. From customers to researchers to interpreters to functions which use the information—this is like the game of Telephone we played as children, lining up and whispering a phrase, child to child, until at the end of the line it was radically changed. As the distance grows between your customers and the people in your business who wish to know them, the research results become more and more abstract, and eventually distorted. Work designed from this output is generic because the connection to the final user has become remote.

The second error is believing that customers know what they want. As Steve Jobs famously pointed out, it’s useless to ask people what they want because they don’t know it until they see it.  Harvard Marketing Research Institute reports that 80 percent of new launches fail because, even after extensive market research, they are off the mark and they aren’t differentiated. A third error also works against differentiation. If customers can tell you what they want, they can tell it to everyone. No new understanding is gained from what everyone knows. Relying on it is equivalent to buying your sweetheart a gift from a list of most popular items just because it’s what the average person is giving.

New Business Acumen: Know each of your business’s customer groups. Learn their unique ways of living and being and design for them based on your distinctiveness. Do not rely on the demographic categories used in market research. This is what I call learning to create the “essence-to-essence” connection. It is not data driven; it is on-going, meaningful relationships between customers and all of the people in your organization.

To be continued . . .

There are a few hundred more ridiculously common errors, all of which spring from good intentions. At The Responsible Entrepreneur Institute, we educate and develop people in the core business acumen needed to avoid them. Our track record includes building successful small businesses and growing them with strong financial and responsible platforms. Learn more about our programs and get an introduction to the five new business acumen arenas on January 10, 2013 at 5 pm Pacific Time. The call is free but space is limited. You must register to attend. If you register and are unable to attend, you may receive a free recording of the call within a few days after January 10.

Error Three: Taking On the Wrong Initiatives or Working On Them the Wrong Way

Why is this an error? It is one of the most wasteful uses of resources, a lot like gambling or hoping to learn from mistakes as the worst case.

Improvement or development efforts are tricky and hard to focus, whether on products or changes in operations. How do you know if the projects you select will get you where you want to be? The most common error is choosing to gamble on projects whose payoffs you can’t predict and whose results you don’t assess comprehensively. Testing is not based on frameworks that cover all effectiveness arenas in a systemic way, and in particular the financial effects. Often you don’t know until months later whether a project will contribute to earnings, margins and cash flow. But this does not have to be the case.

New Business Acumen: Understand and work with the factors of product, organizing, market and financial effectiveness when assessing an initiative. Make the prediction of success more accurate at its core. Know what actions correlate with each of these arenas. Knowing in advance is what matters—not adding up effects after the fact.

To be continued . . .

There are a few hundred more ridiculously common errors, all of which spring from good intentions. At The Responsible Entrepreneur Institute, we educate and develop people in the core business acumen needed to avoid them. Our track record includes building successful small businesses and growing them with strong financial and responsible platforms. Learn more about our programs and get an introduction to the five new business acumen arenas on January 10, 2013 at 5 pm Pacific Time. The call is free but space is limited. You must register to attend. If you register and are unable to attend, you may receive a free recording of the call within a few days after January 10.

Error Two: Measuring How You’re Doing at the Wrong Place in the Work Stream.

Why is this an error? It promotes navel-gazing internal thinking, which leads to failure to detect customer dissatisfaction and loss of customer loyalty.

Business leaders get tightly attached to the idea of measuring what they can “see” and count. They measure their own effort rather than their effectiveness in the places where it really matters—the customer’s experience and benefits to communities and Earth. They value what is apparent, rather than what is important. It is possible to measure your business’s success in meaningful ways by assessing its effects on the lives of customers, communities, and ecosystems.

New Business Acumen: Measure the effects that your customers value and the internal measures tied to those effects. Know what factors your customers’ successes are based on and measure your business’s effects on those factors.

To be continued . . .

There are a few hundred more ridiculously common errors, all of which spring from good intentions. At The Responsible Entrepreneur Institute, we educate and develop people in the core business acumen needed to avoid them. Our track record includes building successful small businesses and growing them with strong financial and responsible platforms. Learn more about our programs and get an introduction to the five new business acumen arenas on January 10, 2013 at 5 pm Pacific Time. The call is free but space is limited. You must register to attend. If you register and are unable to attend, you may receive a free recording of the call within a few days after January 10.

Error One: Too Much Time and Emphasis on Trends and Competitive Assessments

Why is this an error? It promotes commodity offerings and diminishes the innovation that is core to your business’s entrepreneurial culture.

Most of us have known (or may have been) teenagers who focus too much on competitive awareness. These kids constantly check to see how they fit in compared with others. They want to be in on the latest trends. Caring parents would advise them to stop paying attention to others and find ways to express their own unique selves.

As business leaders, entrepreneurs often compete at the expense of innovation, with effects much the same as the competitive teenagers’. You try to follow in others’ footprints and maybe try to “outdo” them. In the process your business loses its uniqueness, which is its source of innovation and creative motivation.

New Business Acumen: Reveal your essence and design everything about your business based on the distinctiveness that makes it non-displaceable.

To be continued . . .

There are a few hundred more ridiculously common errors, all of which spring from good intentions. At The Responsible Entrepreneur Institute, we educate and develop people in the core business acumen needed to avoid them. Our track record includes building successful small businesses and growing them with strong financial and responsible platforms. Learn more about our programs and get an introduction to the five new business acumen arenas on January 10, 2013 at 5 pm Pacific Time. The call is free but space is limited. You must register to attend. If you register and are unable to attend, you may receive a free recording of the call within a few days after January 10.

1.  Take early and concerted action to do what makes all of your venture’s stakeholders more vital and viable.

It’s easy for entrepreneurs to make tradeoffs, opting to produce benefits only for their own organizations, planning to do more for others later. But there is no later when it comes to doing what is right and beneficial for all. Think about it. What if we considered only ourselves when we made decisions that affected our families and friends, assuring them that we would make it up to them later? We can see immediately how selfish this is and that it would instantly set in motion a breakdown in reciprocity, undoing our essential, primary bonds.

It’s also true that most of us have not fully developed awareness of the ripple effects of our actions on other people and Earth. We tend to be close-sighted; we see only what is evident to our senses. Make a resolution now to put in place within your organization a reflective practice, to do what my grandmother told me always to do—be considerate. Include this practice in all early and on-going decision-making processes. This is good advice no matter what stage of life your endeavor is in—maybe best when your actions have the scale and longevity to produce either significant harm or evolutionary, beneficial effects on a larger playing field.

To work continually with consideration for all stakeholders goes way beyond doing less harm (sustainability) or giving back (doing good). It requires that we be mindful and intentional about all of our choices and their effects. When this behavior becomes an essential characteristic of business culture, it enables systems to succeed by their own definitions, not ours.

2.  Develop and engage the critical thinking skills and personal agency of everyone involved in your value-adding process, from the furthest upstream supplier to the last person to touch an offering as it is delivered.

It’s rare for a business or an individual to be conscious and innovative in every moment, but it’s possible when critical thinking skills are developed. We’re used to hearing complaints from big business about people who have to be told what to do, while entrepreneurial endeavors are full of self-starters. But often those entrepreneurs stop there, at the level of motivation they start with, and thus they lose their entrepreneurial spirit over time. To be self-directed, a person or a business must continually develop personal agency and the ability to think systemically and critically about choices and actions.

In the four years when Seventh Generation grew by double digits in its market, every employee participated in monthly workshops to develop their thinking and self-leadership skills. At the same time they worked on projects and changes strategically targeted to grow the business. Senior management worked three days every month on their personal development, as they were reconceiving the company’s strategic direction. While all this was going on, Seventh Generation also engaged its manufacturing partners in ways that helped them grow. This might seem expensive in terms of time and effort, but the result was triple returns on hours spent, as well as the growth of Seventh Generation’s longer-term capability.

The important factor here is that people work on critical business deliverables at the same time they learn self-management and new systemic thinking processes (living systems modes of thinking). The multiplier effect comes from destabilizing people’s tendency to do things the way they always have, which pops open new ways of thinking that carry over to regular work time and life away from work. At Seventh Generation, it was not only good for business, it was good for democracy. It improved the contribution and engagement skills of co-creators in their local communities and in national organizations and the national democratic process, which ultimately led to their higher-level involvement in leadership at work.

Entrepreneurs cannot wait until they are “bigger” to engage all of their stakeholders. From day one you build your culture and prepare to grow your business. Make a New Year’s resolution to include development of critical thinking skills and personal agency in order to keep entrepreneurial spirit alive.

3.  Resolve to forgo the misguided human resource programs or to remove them if they are already part of your organization.

This is a big step and a critical one if you are to retain an ethic and culture of entrepreneurship and build an organization that is responsible in all of its actions. Human resource programs include feedback, incentives, rewards, recognition, rating and ranking, and many other methods for modifying human behavior. They undermine external considering (thinking beyond ourselves) and internal locus of control (knowing that the buck always stops with us, whether we get the outcomes we plan or not). You can’t help but see the damage they do once you know what’s behind them. All of them are based on criteria set by one group of people to determine how well another group is doing or should do. They set artificial, impersonal goals and use behavior modification to achieve them. They train people to look to others to make choices for them and to evaluate their behaviors and results.

Human resource programs have become pervasive in all aspects of human life. They make it easy to manipulate people politically, socially, and personally. They are so familiar now that it’s hard for us to imagine they aren’t morally and practically the right way to get things done. I have noticed some weakening of their hold on us recently, but most businesses still regard them as sacrosanct and they are becoming imbedded in practice sharing and entrepreneurial programs at colleges. Yet they are the antithesis of everything that will grow your business, make democracy flourish, and generate the life and health of Earth.

Human resource programs invite us to be automatons, rather than humans who reflect and think about our choices and effects. Only by resolving to release ourselves from their influence will each of us recover the gift of personal agency, necessary if we are to take full responsibility for our actions, make big contributions to work and life, and live in communities that prosper.

I invite you to discuss all three of these resolutions with your team, and if they interest you, join us for an introduction to The Responsible Entrepreneur Institute (TREI). Sign up to attend our free, one-hour teleseminar on January 10 at 5 pm EST/8 pm PST or to get the recording if you cannot attend. We will look at the three resolutions and how to adopt them into your entrepreneurial venture, and we’ll introduce you to the first six-month program offered by TREI, which will begin in February 2013.

The program offers you the opportunity to learn critical ways to grow great businesses at 40 percent average a year without extracting ever more resources, how to contribute to democracy around the world by the way you run your business at home, and how to foster the development of human beings who are more autonomous, creative, and contributing. This has always been the power of entrepreneurship. Now let’s resolve to avoid the practices that undermine entrepreneurial success.

Building an Entrepreneurial Mind through Reading:

My list includes books on understanding yourself as an entrepreneur, your customers thinking and how the market works beyond what is visible.  None are written for business audiences exclusively, but have significant thinking to contribute. Only two are new, but the old ones lay a ground missing from some more popular ones. They are often focused on how to think about about very complex situations and how to be more systemic in thinking.

1. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini We have been so brainwashed by the behaviorist we not longer understand how we can create influence.  Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say “yes”—and how to apply these understandings. Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book.

2. The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion

Author John Hagel and co-authors first offer the obvious.  Information now flows like water, and we must learn how to tap into its stream. Individuals and companies can no longer rely on the stocks of knowledge that they’ve carefully built up and stored away. We must learn how to tap into the stream. But many of us remain stuck in old practices—practices that could undermine us as we search for success and meaning.

In this revolutionary book, Hagel et all, reveal the adjustments we must make if we take these changes seriously. In a world of increasing risk and opportunity, we must understand the importance of pull. Understood and used properly, the power of pull can draw out the best in people and institutions by connecting them in ways that increase understanding and effectiveness. Pull can turn uncertainty into opportunity, and enable small moves to achieve outsized impact.

3.The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

By Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom

The Self-Developing Organizations I guide businesses in creating work from the same principles as offered here. If you cut off a spider?s head, it dies; if you cut off a starfish?s leg it grows a new one, and that leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. Traditional top-down organizations are like spiders, but now starfish organizations are changing the face of business and the world.

What’s the hidden power behind the success of Wikipedia, craigslist, and Skype? What do eBay and General Electric have in common with the abolitionist and women’s rights movements? What fundamental choice put General Motors and Toyota on vastly different paths?

4. False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World

By Alan Beattie

This book will rearrange most of what you know about how economics works. If you think you will ever be impacted by more than local (and you certainly will) read this book. It seems far fetched from first glance but it will make you better at strategy and product development. From a deep study of the fates of different countries, economies, and societies-why some fail and some succeed. Here, he weaves together elements of economics, history, politics, and human stories, revealing that societies, economies, and countries usually make concrete choices that determine their destinies. He opens up larger questions about these choices, and why countries make them or are driven to make them, and what those decisions can mean for the future of our global economy.

Economic history involves forcing together disciplines that fall naturally in different directions. False Economy explains how human beings have shaped their own fates, however unknowingly, and the conditions of the countries they call home. And though it is history, it does not end with the present day. Beattie shows how decisions that are being made now-which have either absorbed or failed to absorb the lessons from economic history-will determine what happens in the future.

5. A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

By Daniel Pink

There are two books by Pink in this list. I think some of his ideas miss the mark, but mostly on how to implement his ideas to change things. He is a researcher and author, not a practitioner. He can be forgiven for that. But his research and theory is impeccable. His point in New Mind, is that the future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic “right-brain” thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t.

Drawing on research from around the world, Pink outlines the six fundamentally human abilities that are absolute essentials for professional success and personal fulfillment-and reveals how to master them. A Whole New Mind takes readers to a daring new place, and a provocative and necessary new way of thinking about a future that’s already here.

6. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Also by Daniel Pink, this one tears into the theory of motivation that has and still drives more organizations, education and even families. He firmely disprove it. I have been writing about this for twenty years and was delighted to see Pink give the research a national stage. He gets the implementation really wrong it this one. He suggests using “feedback” which is from even more mechanical paradigm. But he has not knowledge of a developmental paradigm. But the research in the first half of the book is exquisite.

Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money–the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink. In this book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction–at work, at school, and at home–is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does-and how that affects every aspect of life. He examines the three elements of true motivation–autonomy, mastery, and purpose–and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live.

7. Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

By Ori Brafman (of Starfish) Rom Brafman, his brother

This books looks into the hidden psychological influences that derail our decision-making, Sway will change the way you think about the way you think and the way your postion your offerings in the market.

Why is it so difficult to sell a plummeting stock or end a doomed relationship? Why do we listen to advice just because it came from someone “important”? Why are we more likely to fall in love when there’s danger involved? In Sway, renowned organizational thinker Ori Brafman and his brother, psychologist Rom Brafman, answer all these questions and more.

Drawing on cutting-edge research from the fields of social psychology, behavioral economics, and organizational behavior, Sway reveals dynamic forces that influence every aspect of our personal and business lives, including loss aversion (our tendency to go to great lengths to avoid perceived losses), the diagnosis bias (our inability to reevaluate our initial diagnosis of a person or situation), and the “chameleon effect” (our tendency to take on characteristics that have been arbitrarily assigned to us).

8. The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It

Author: Joshua Cooper Ramo

This may seem an unlikely recommendation for business owners, particularly entrepreneurs. The importance of this book is how Ramo is thinking. Disorder exists in the business and economic world that entrepreneurs must navigate. His mind is amazing and entrepreneurial in how he looks at dynamics.

Ramo’s idea is that America is in great peril for its future. In The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo puts forth a revelatory new model for understanding our dangerously unpredictable world. Drawing upon history, economics, complexity theory, psychology, immunology, and the science of networks, he describes a new landscape of inherent unpredictability–and remarkable, wonderful possibility. And how to navigate it.

9. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

Author: Dan Tapscott

The initial book on teaching the world about the power of mass collaboration.  Wikinomics explains how mass collaboration is happening not just at Web sites like Wikipedia and YouTube, but at traditional companies that have embraced technology to breathe new life into their enterprises.

This book, and Tapscott’s follow up Macrowikinomics, was the first to reveal the nuances that drive mass collaboration, and how masses of people (both paid and volunteer) are now creating TV news stories, sequencing the human gnome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding cures for diseases, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, and even building motorcycles.

10.

The Responsible Entrepreneur Institute

Writing, educating and working for and with Responsible Entrepreneurs

There are several ways to join The Responsible Entrepreneur Institute program in order to radically improve:

• Your business’s financial effectiveness (earning, margins and cash flow)
• Your own strategic leadership and ability to align your organization
• Spirit, will and execution in your organization or operations
• Embedding of responsibility as a way of doing business

All of the programs in this TRE Institute series connect you to the 18 Spheres of Business Success, a proven business geometry framework that provides a systemic way to understand the whole of a business from the perspective of The Responsible Entrepreneur. Each program level offers an increasingly deeper experience and personalization, along with increasing amounts of one-on-one time. Each includes personal development leading to increasing levels of personal and professional growth. All levels are progressive and build on or deepen one another. They are also holographic—you can start with any one of them.

The program, as a whole of all levels, is a multiple year process, building effectiveness within all 18 spheres, but significant changes begin to occur within 3-6 months. These include increased understanding of subjects covered, as well as applications you can bring to your business immediately.

Introduction to the 6 Strategic Questions

Free Responsible Entrepreneur Teleseminar:To provide more information about the institute and the Responsible Entrepreneur Workshops coming in 2013, I am offering a teleseminar on Dec. 5, 2012, at 4 pm Pacific Time. If you sign up here, you can listen to the recording even if you cannot attend. This teleseminar and the 2013 workshops are appropriate for both entrepreneurs who own their own businesses and intrapreneurs who are seeking to change the game using business platforms that others have created.