heads.hearts.

And the mediocre caught in between.

A definitely beautiful project from Sarah Kay and Phil Kaye. Worth your 10 minutes.

About The Project
Project V.O.I.C.E. (Vocal Outreach Into Creative Expression) is a national movement that celebrates and inspires youth self-expression through Spoken Word Poetry. Conceived in 2004, Project V.O.I.C.E. encourages young people to engage with the world around them and use Spoken Word Poetry as an instrument through which they can explore and better understand their culture, their society, and ultimately themselves. Project V.O.I.C.E. brings together performance, writing, and a supportive environment to inspire youth to recognize that their views are significant, valid, and necessary.

Is TheOatmeal one of the greatest crowd-funder alive at this time?

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Aaron Hurst is the president and founder of the Taproot Foundation, which works to match up skilled professionals with nonprofits who need their help. He’s seen the social innovation space evolve from an open and undefined network of people trying to do good to a legitimate and more codified industry. While this certainly has created more respect and impact, Hurst isn’t sure it’s entirely better. His advice for budding social entrepreneurs:

1. Know the difference between trying to create an innovation, and trying to scale that innovation. Trying to do both can often make it impossible to do either. 
2. Find good partners. It’s rare that a social innovation that doesn’t involve multiple organizations and people.

Finance CEOs that survived the crisis held forums with their teams—here’s why open communication is an asset, especially when times are tough.

That leads to the most fundamental difference between firms that weathered the financial crisis and those that failed: The successful firms all understood the need for integrated decision making that took account of upsides and downsides of proposed actions and of the firm’s condition at any point in time. Leaders of failed firms simply didn’t get it. They either pursued market share or other league table rankings, essentially without regard to risks, or they failed to manage their firms well enough to be able to understand their potential exposures to downside risks.

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Every choices that we make in life define who we are. Every mistakes that we make along the way shape who we are. Every lesson learned, every consequences faced, and every time we got back up when we fall, determine who we are. Your life is your destiny, not someone else’s. We are the captain of our own ship, sailing in the ocean. Lead the way. Don’t let the weather wears us off. Times will be hard sometimes, but we are harder and stronger each time we fall. Go. Sail. Discover. Enjoy. Live life.

Effectuation suggests you start with who you are, what you know, and whom you know to come up with very doable venture ideas. Then you invest no more than you can afford to lose and invite stakeholders to support the project in a way that ensures they are really committed. The goal is to co-create rather than predict the future.

Effectuation is an idea with a sense of purpose – a desire to improve the state of the world and the lives of individuals by enabling the creation of firms, products, markets, services, and ideas.

Effectuation is a logic of entrepreneurial expertise, developed from a cognitive science based study of 27 founders of companies ranging in size from $200M to $6.5B. Effectuation articulates a dynamic and iterative process of creating new artifacts in the world. Effectual reasoning is a type of human problem solving that takes the future as fundamentally unpredictable, yet controllable through human action; the environment as constructible through choice; and goal as negotiated residuals of stakeholder commitments rather than as pre-existent preference orderings.

Saras Sarasvathy