Wavelength - connecting visionary companies

While the financial markets roiled and economic meltdown gripped the globe, our three days nestled in the bucolic tranquility of the English countryside at Wavelength100 might have seemed like an attempt to escape reality. Instead it was an opportunity to engage in some of the most crucial questions on every leader’s plate today—to advance a conversation that just might offer a productive way out of the mess we find ourselves in.

Mixing it up with the incredible collection of progressive business leaders and social innovators (most of whom deserve both labels) at Sheepdrove, I became more certain than ever that this crisis of capitalism is not the result of aiming too high, but of what one of our presidential candidates so elegantly calls “a poverty of ambition.” That may seem strange, given the outsize rewards and Gilded Age excesses now subject to so much anger and recrimination. While it’s hard to equate hedge fund paydays and investment banker bonuses with “poverty”, I’m referring to a fundamental deficit when it comes to defining what winning is in the first place. For far too many companies and individuals at the heart of this crisis (and in the business world in general) the operating principle has been that in order for them to win, others had to lose.

I’m much more interested in a future led by people with what philosopher and reformer John Dewey called “audacity of the imagination.” Individuals and organizations who not only see a new way to win in their industry or area of endeavor (true innovators), but whose greatest ambition is to win precisely by figuring out a way for everybody to win.

That audacious ambition was on glorious display as nearly all of the 100+ participants took the floor, one after the other, to breathe fresh air into that tired cliché, the “win-win solution:”

—A cleaning company that turns low-wage, low-skill, uninspiring work into a vibrant profession and a wildly successful business.

—A vision to take the most derelict place on earth and create an Eden out of it, which is reframing the conversation around climate change and revitalizing an entire regional economy to the tune of £900 million.

—An educational institution that turns barefoot and illiterate grandmothers from the most remote places on earth into accomplished solar engineers who power up villages by the hundreds (and debunks the idea that the poor are without resources in the process).

—A construction company that makes a community out of its workers and views its workers as a vital part of the local communities in which they work.

—An enterprise that imagines a world without poverty—and relentlessly invents new business models to make that audacious goal a reality (and has managed to deliver affordable credit to nearly 9 million people in a way that ensures they’ll repay their loans).

It would be impossible to boil down all of the insights and threads of conversations at the event into neat conclusions, but a few themes emerged:

* If it’s wild success you’re after, start with wild dreams. I can’t keep track of the number of leaders and innovators who began their story with, “they thought I was mad. . .”

* CSR is so last year. If you believe that the challenges we face as a global community are so vast, our responsibility is so indisputable, the demand is so urgent, and the rewards of tackling them so apparent, then you also have to believe that, going forward, all innovation is social innovation. Which makes drawing a line between “business” and “social enterprise” or “entrepreneurship” and “social entrepreneurship” less and less productive. Indeed, the room was filled with social innovators from the corporate world and entrepreneurs of all stripes focused on creating self-sustaining, scalable solutions with measurable impact. In other words, we’re all in this together.

* Ultimately, it all comes down to unleashing people. The only resource we have in unlimited (and vastly under-utilized) supply is human potential. At the heart of nearly every Wavelength organization is a clever mechanism for tapping into and leveraging that force.