Letter from the Editor of the Social Venture Network Series

How many times have you seen or heard the phrase “social enterprise” during the past few years? A dozen? A hundred? A thousand? Through repeated overuse and misuse, this seemingly straightforward phrase has taken on a range of roles sufficient to overwhelm the most ambitious actor. What you mean when you use the phrase is probably not at all what I mean.

Now here come Kevin Lynch and Julius Walls, Jr., to toss out the playbill and present us with a broad, workable understanding of “social enterprise.” In this brilliant little volume, they work from a definition that revolves around the purpose or mission of an enterprise (hence the title Mission, Inc.) rather than around its legal form or structure. Nonprofit, for-profit, cooperative, hybrid, whatever—it doesn’t matter. What matters is the mission.

In Lynch and Walls’s estimation, a social enterprise is a business that seeks, above all, to make the world a better place—a “business for the common good.” This handy guideline, which eschews the hairsplitting definitions often bandied about at conferences and in books that promote one or another flavor of social enterprise, comes at a convenient time in the evolution of business. The lines between for-profit and not-for-profit businesses are blurring as a pragmatic new generation of entrepreneurs, investors, and philanthropists comes onto the scene determined to use the tools of business to address the urgent need for action to combat economic injustice and environmental damage. Mission, Inc. surveys this landscape, drawing upon the authors’ extensive personal experience managing viiisocial enterprises and on dozens of other well-chosen examples from the membership of Social Venture Network, the Social Enterprise Alliance, and other sources.

By bringing to life through stories and concrete examples the issues that confront the social entrepreneur in the United States, Lynch and Walls have crafted an eminently practical book that fully lives up to its subtitle, “The Practitioner’s Guide to Social Enterprise.” This volume is no academic exercise in intellectual flimflammery. It comes to grips with the often painful and protracted dilemmas facing anyone who leads a business enterprise that seeks to make the world a better place. A glance at the table of contents will prove the point.

Whether you’re running a social enterprise, planning to set one up, or studying contemporary business at a university or a business school, you’ll find Mission, Inc. to be illuminating, thought-provoking, and down-to-earth. You won’t find anywhere a better introduction to the field of social enterprise.

MAL WARWICK