This story originally appeared in our July 14th, 2011 e-magazine. Click here to download the pdf e-magazine.

While professional management is critical for social enterprises as they scale up, one must take care not to lose sight of the entrepreneur’s social vision, says Professor Madhukar Shukla of XLRI. In a phone interview to Tanmaya Nanda, he speaks at length about the management issues that typically social enterprises face and the best ways to overcome them.

In your opinion, why is professional management important for social enterprises?

I wouldn’t confine this only to social enterprises, but to all entrepreneurial ventures. As we were discussing, all ventures start with a passion about an idea. That is what entrepreneurship is all about, and it is also critical for the venture to take off.

However, as long as the venture remains small, operations are easy to manage by jugaad, trial and error, or through help from friends and volunteers who pitch in. But once it starts scaling up, managing operations becomes an issue. Scaling up is not just about increase in the size of operations, but more about increase in complexity of operations, in the variety of issues one has to address. The variety of demands on the enterprise increase, and the entrepreneur may not have the professional expertise – or time – to deal with all of them. So his passion would need to be supplemented with professional management skills; he has to bring in people who have expertise in those areas. » Continue reading “‘Vision is sacrosanct’”

The greatest challenge in the social enterprise space: scale. How do you move beyond a few cases of great work and great impact to a sector that has the potential for scale? How do you institutionalize and build good organizations around the successes that many social entrepreneurs have had with small pilots? There seems to be a lot of hype around some small scale organizations, but there needs to be a big push – a big push to create models that are actually scalable, cost effective, and efficient; a big push to attract investment; and finally, a big push to attract talent to the sector.

This is what Neera Nundy, Managing Partner of Dasra and leader of the track on Intellectual and Human Capital at the Khemka Forum on Social Entrepreneurship tomorrow, emphasized when I had the chance to sit down with her last week. According to Nundy, “As organizations think about growing their outreach, they need to think about growing thier teams in terms of expertise and skills.” Funding needs to be thought of as not only supporting programs, but being used to hire the people that you need to grow. » Continue reading “Building Alternative Talent Pools”