I just love this talk. It is perhaps one of the most important TED talks ever related to the field of ethics and doing good. Ernesto Sirolli's work as an enterprise facilitator is well known around the world. In this talk he shares both his early experiences in what doesn't work in Africa, as well…
YOU are your business
A wise teacher said to me recently, "You are your business"; and seldom has a truer thing been said. We live in a world where we celebrate building things outside ourselves - companies, campaigns, architecture, change. Yet on some level these things are not outside of us, they are outward expressions of our inner lives.…
The ethical alignment of mission, strategy and investment
I had an interesting conversation the other day with Nick Moraitis about the ethics and alignment of mission, strategy and investment in social change. Very often social entrepreneurs will possess incredibly ambitious goals about what they want to achieve. This may include eliminating poverty, stopping global warming, or reducing unemployment amongst a certain part of…
The Ethics of Competence in Social Change
It is a basic ethical standard in most professions and industries for one to operate within their field of competence. This is true in law, medicine, psychotherapy, financial advice and more. Professional bodies will often dictate what the minimum standards of competence are, and codes of ethics require or suggest that professionals operate within the…
Pay it forward – searching for a more ethical incentive
In the business world it is a fairly common tactic to use bonuses, commissions and other rewards to incentivise performance and retention amongst employees. Is it possible to create a more powerful incentive however, where the employee who does the work receives nothing personally? In addition, could it be possible to create an incentive where…
Freebirthing and the ethics of judgement
In many ways ethics can be about making judgements or assessment about what is right or wrong, good or bad. But are all judgements the same? Recently there has been an ongoing story in the press about a mother who lost her child in during a freebirth. This event was naturally a deeply tragic one…
Ethics for robots
I'm going out on a limb here to talk about something I have very little idea about. I came across this story earlier in The Economist called "Morals and the machine", which explores the development of robotics in certain fields and the emergence of "machine ethics". The article outlines a bunch of areas where robotics…
Ethics without anger or taking sides
Two questions: can you discuss ethics without taking sides? and can you explore ethics without anger? So far I have received some good feedback on this blog, but one question keeps coming up: when are you going to take sides? When I look around the ethics community, I see how we think this way. It…
The ethics of rescuing food
I want to explore the idea of rescue as an approach to changemaking, and why some aspects of the 'rescue industry' have hidden ethical challenges. This is a follow on from my post on how to rescue a racehorse, which explored a new rescue-based idea to tackle problems in the horse-racing industry. Rescuing others is…
How to rescue a racehorse
About a month ago a guy pitched me his idea in an elevator (yes, it actually happens). His idea was to 'rescue a racehorse'. Actually, he wanted to not just rescue one racehorse, he wanted to rescue thousands of them. He explained to me what he saw as a problem of racehorses being slaughtered for…
How To Do Good 