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- Herausgeber: Die Keure Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
People want to change things, improve the world. Our mind cannot live without meaning. Just like the body asks for food. We all know that we have the leverage to make things happen. It’s important to know what to do, but it’s even more important to remember why you do what you do. Leaving a legacy is about impact surviving the erosion of time. About scaling and accelerating positive impact. Be ready to get inspired about leaving your own legacy.
How do you leave a legacy? What drives a legacy? How about your legacy statement? And how about increasing your impact? Will you choose for scaling up, scaling deep, scaling out, or maybe even scaling down? Get carried away by the impact point of view and discover how you can increase the impact of your organization too. This book reveals strategies of a diversity of organizations, from NPO’s over associations, governmental and knowledge institutes to commercial organizations, who succeeded in increasing their social impact. Because no matter in what kind of organization you are spending your days, you too may leave a legacy that has improved our world socially or ecologically.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Kaat Peeters is an impact maker with a track record in associations as well as governmental institutes. Kaat established a European network and was responsible, as manager, to develop two newly founded associations in the cultural field into solid organizations. Meanwhile, Kaat ran a shop in Persian and Arabic interior objects and a Bed&Breakfast. In 2013, Kaat established the ‘Sociale Innovatiefabriek’, a Belgian based accelerator that stimulates and facilitates social innovation and social entrepreneurship counting an amazing community of more than 500 innovators.
Nowadays, Kaat is lecturer social innovation at the University College ‘Erasmushogeschool’ and with her consulting organisation ‘Impact Projects’, Kaat supports impact organisations with their growth strategies. As hands-on Board of Directors member of cultural associations and social enterprises, making impact is always of paramount importance in her work.
Impact has become the baseline of both her personal and professional life.
Omar Mohout, currently Entrepreneurship Fellow at Sirris, is a former technology entrepreneur, a widely published technology author, C-level advisor to high growth startups as well as Fortune 500 companies and Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Antwerp, the Antwerp Management School, ULB and Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management.
He is Co-chair of the Circle Of Growth; Community host for Corporate Venturing Europe; Organizer of the Growth Hacking Meetup, Co-founder of the #BeTech Community and keeps track of European funding and scaleups on scaleups.sirris.be.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Cover
Page de titre
Tableof content
Foreword
Writing a book is no small feat. But when two apparently different worlds collide, it results in a rapid exchange of ideas. This is what happened when these two authors met. On the one hand, Kaat Peeters has a long list of achievements in social entrepreneurship, while on the other hand, Omar Mohout has a solid track record in working with technology start-ups. At a glance, one author is more socially driven, while the other is more financially driven. Yet, during their productive collaboration, it became clear to both authors that their respective domains are not that different. Social entrepreneurs are entrepreneurial by nature and technology entrepreneurs often have the vision to change the world for the better instead of pursuing an exit strategy. In both groups there are people that have the ambition, bold vision, leadership skills and ability to execute tasks, which all lead to unimaginable and lasting forms of impact. Besides, technology is a lever to create a social impact.
In addition to these two groups of social and tech entrepreneurs, there is a variety of organizations looking for ways to make an impact while achieving financial stability. Non-profit organizations (NPOs), governments, educational institutes and corporations are all aware that they need a solid strategy to achieve their longterm goals. None of them can be insensitive to the challenges that our society and planet are facing. After all, we all want to create a better world for the next generation, don’t we?
Kaat’s in-depth knowledge about creating social impact, combined with Omar’s expertise in scaling organizations, became a source of inspiration. Their insights and perspectives resulted in a practical guide that makes a difference to individuals and organizations. The legacy canvas offers a structural approach, enabling you to achieve extraordinary things.
This book is for everyone who cares and who wants to actively participate in building a better world. Whether you work for a non-profit, an enterprise, your own business, the civil service or as a volunteer, this book will help you to increase your impact and leave a legacy.
Acknowledgements
We offer our heartfelt thanks to all the people who inspired us:
Heman Toch
Linde Wolters
Kurt Peleman
Hadiel Holail
Fons Leroy
Benjamin Gerard
Lieven D’hondt
Rigo Peeters
Brigitta Dekelver
Lakshmi Viswanathan
Bob Elsen
Bart Cambré
Paulien Verhaest
Annelore Camps
Anika Horn
Didier Pierre
Eefje Cottenier
Alain Thielemans
Dirk Vansintjan
… and many others!
Intro
Making a lasting impact, finding purpose in life, having meaningful experiences, engaging in the pursuit of happiness, etc. are what motivate us all. However, finding purpose in life is more than just finding something useful to do. While it is important to know what you should do, it is even more important to remember why you are doing it.
Leaving behind a legacy adds an extra dimension to this issue. Legacies involve translating a mantra into a tangible, lasting and positive impact. This book is about that extra dimension and it deals with how to scale your positive impact.
Creating a genuine and sustainable impact is a long journey. It requires you to stay focused on your mission without ignoring the fundamentals of how to scale your impact. This requires dedication. The way in which you will increase your impact will most likely not follow an existing roadmap from a similar organization, thus it can be a difficult journey. However, if you do not plan how you are going to scale your impact, your journey will be even more tough and will probably lead to failure.
With this book, we offer you several tools. The main tool, the legacy canvas, presents a way to strategically increase your impact. After all, this is a marathon, not a sprint. Having a strategy to scale is essential. We wholeheartedly believe in the potential of entrepreneurship to impact people’s lives in profoundly positive ways. However, it is easy to confuse potential impact with genuine, positive and lasting impact. With this book, we want to help individuals and organizations to make the most of the opportunities before them.
In our opinion, everyone can create an impact and increase it as long as you are committed to your goals and dare to choose certain strategies. We will show you how scaling your impact goes beyond the general view that you need to scale up and increase the size of your organization. Scaling deep and scaling out are also valid strategies and important routes to grow your impact. Even scaling down can be necessary, even if it sounds counterintuitive.
We all benefit from different methods and approaches. Our hope and mission is to motivate organizations to be more ambitious in terms of their impact. Having an impact and increasing it should be more than a green-washing or social-washing strategy. It should become a life goal for people who care deeply.
If you are serious about making a difference, this book is for you. In the words of Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear, “to infinity and beyond”.
Time to get to work!
This book helps you to leave a legacy by strategically increasing your positive impact. In this book, you will be guided through the canvas step by step.
After having reflected on why you want to make an impact, it is time to get started with the legacy canvas.
Chapter 2 will help you to define the impact you want to have and the legacy you want to leave. Chapter 3 will help you to identify your current stage of impact and the stage of impact you would like to achieve in a given time frame. What is holding you back from moving to the next stage? Once you have set your goals, Chapter 4 will help you to plan how you will increase your impact by scaling up, scaling deep, scaling out and/or scaling down
Now is the time to work on your legacy!
Introduction to the legacy canvas
1. All about impact
What is impact?
Impact is the sum of the effects of an organization’s actions on top of and next to what would have happened anyway. It concerns the social and environmental changes that would not be taking place without your actions.
The Center for Social Impact (Michigan) describes impact as “a significant, positive change that addresses a pressing social challenge, as a result of a deliberate set of activities with a goal around generating social impact and social change”. Often, the word “impact” is associated with collisions. However, when we use the word “impact” in this book, we mean the beneficial change we can make to society, the environment, culture, education, the economy, our wellbeing and our quality of life.
Activities that have an impact can be direct or indirect, small or far-reaching, immediate or long-term, close or far away. Impact can be positive or negative, direct or indirect, and even unintentional.
Before we embark on a journey to make an impact, we need to reflect on which benefits we are bringing and to whom. We also need to reflect on any potential, unintended, negative consequences. In our opinion, impact needs to be sustainable.
Organizations working consciously towards creating an impact often follow a sequence in terms of their inputs activities outputs outcomes impact. This sequence is called the “logic model approach”. This approach underpins the Theory of Change of an organization, whereby you believe that your efforts are converted into desired societal results. “We believe that by doing x, the result y will be reached.”
THE LOGIC MODEL
RISING YOU
Rising You is a Belgian social enterprise that facilitates the integration of refugees through programs that provide training in climbing techniques, technical skills (e.g. industrial painting) and soft skills. This innovative solution has a remarkable impact: 93 % of the young refugees who participate in the program get a long-term job. The number of companies that ask for training sessions for their future technically-trained employees is growing fast. Rising You also enriches the refugees’ quality of life.
YOUR LOGIC MODEL
Be the change you want to see in the world
Mahatma Gandhi
Why do we want to have impact?
Steve Jobs stated that “death is the destination we all share” in his commencement address at Stanford University. “No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent.” Death is indeed the only certainty we have as humans. As a result, death reminds us that our time is limited. Once we realize this simple, plain and undeniable fact (usually when something dramatic happens in our lives), we do not want to waste something that is so valuable.
Humans care; it is our nature. Humans want to have an impact. Our time on earth is finite and we need purpose. Our minds cannot live without thoughts, reflection and meaning just as our bodies cannot live without food. We need to connect and share with others, which is how we give meaning to our lives. We want to have purpose but finding purpose is a journey in itself. If we embark on this journey properly, we will create change, as Steve Jobs pointed out.
Our time and dedication to make a difference are precious. In the words of Anika Horn from Social Venturers: “Do something to fan your flame each day. Each interaction is another spark of impact, however small and insignificant it may feel in the moment. We each guard that little flame of passion to save the world and we work daily to create sparks in others. We connect and introduce. Some of us invest. We help define national policy. We create space and we listen. We can instigate and amplify social impact in our communities and beyond.”
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it
William James
To be driven by positive impact is part of human nature. How do you want to be remembered when you have passed away? As the person with the cleanest house? As the person with the most expensive car? Would you not rather be remembered for what you contributed to the world and what you did for other people? In addition to our biological drive to procreate, we all have the desire to belong, to be loved, to make sense of the world and to contribute to it. Human beings cannot help it: we need to contribute.
Why should everyone make an impact in his or her own way?
The world is suffering. Many are calling for action to stop the exploitation and misuse of our planet. The number of people living in poverty remains high, our ageing society presents challenges that urgently need solutions and so on. Last months confronted the world with major challenges: big parts of the world are burning, one virus disrupts societies worldwide, refugees are dying at sea every day… It is impossible to say that “everything is fine”.
Luckily, we, people, have the power to create change. Often, we are led to believe that we cannot alter our circumstances, as if they were out of our control. But the world changes because people make it change. We have the power to create solutions for societal challenges.
There is a Native American proverb that states that we do not inherit the world from our parents; rather we borrow it from our children. This proverb changes our perspective and makes us realize that we do not have the right to use the world; rather, we have a duty to care for the world for the sake of others.
This new perspective encapsulates the essence of this book. How can you create a better world for future generations? How can you leave a legacy?
More than ever, there is an urgent need to create an impact. Given the challenges we are currently facing, we have to be aware of the cost of inaction. The P2P Foundation (peer-to-peer foundation) draws attention to the fact that our current political economy of capitalism uses artificial scarcity and pseudo abundance in a way that social injustice and inequality increase. “The idea of pseudo abundance is based on the mistaken premise of infinite material growth on a finite planet, where natural resources are actually fundamentally limited. Artificial scarcity refers to the strategies that prevent the sharing of technological and scientific progress because of excessively restrictive intellectual property rights. A sensible alternative is, of course, to recognize the limits of what we can use from the world of nature, of which we are an intrinsic part, and to allow for the sharing of all knowledge that can contribute to living within the limits of this ‘biocapacity’. Right now we have a production system where competitiveness is achieved by externalizing human costs to nature and society as a whole. Capitalism has become a scarcity-engineering machine that prohibits the occurrence of natural abundance. From this beginning, our theory of change was based on the idea that the seed forms of a new system grow within the old one, usually embedding an alternative logic to systemic crises.”1
This urgent call from the P2P Foundation brings us to the Three Horizons framework2
