The Emerge Conference

The Emerge Conference took place this weekend in Oxford with successful social business leaders from around the globe speaking to a few hundred delegates, mostly post-graduate students.

Application of technologies featured heavily. Ken Banks, the founder of kiwanja.net, spoke about his NGO’s provision of a free, open-source platform to send, receive and aggregate bulk text messages all from a non-internet enabled phone. One recent application of this service is for Mothers to Mothers, who prevent transmission of HIV from mother to child through a peer to peer advice service and currently 1 in 5 of HIV-infected pregnant women in Africa. They are integrating SMS messages into their services to remind mothers to take medication and attend. This exemplifies the fact that technology solutions work often because they are simple, effective and focussed on the nuances of communication and delivery, rather than any technological innovation.

In two impact investing conferences, it was striking that the vast majority of investors shunned rigorous measurement of impact for a simple metric of measurement, a story that resonated, and a balanced portfolio covering different human needs (education, health care etc). It’s probable that with the inadequacy of impact measurement, investors prefer simply to be wooed by an entrepreneur’s story and assess their ability to deliver on it.

Regarding the legal structures of companies, there were a number of not for profits that used hybrid models of funding. The profit arm of Embrace handles manufacturing, distribution and R & D, whilst the NFP arm makes a loss on delivering to the most needy and performs monitoring and evaluation. The not for profit holds the IP, which the for profit arm pays a royalty for its use, and therefore supports the unprofitable part of the business.

The conference closed with some wonderfully articulated pearls of wisdom by James Chin, founder of the World Toilet Organisation (check it out: it’s brilliant, http://www.worldtoilet.org/wto/). He recommended taking calculated risks: for example, naming your organisation the WTO because getting sued by the better known organisation by the same name would be worth it for the PR storm. Another gem of many: “There’s no such thing as work that’s easy or hard, just that which is fun or boring.”

How brilliant am I?

How often do we acknowledge our own brilliance?  Not often enough, say Darius and Matt, our guides through the strangeness of accepting our brilliance as it is.  By recognizing our brilliance and stating aloud, we come ever closer to our most productive state of operating – essentially, the nirvana of our career performance.

Most people are brought up to be modest:  modesty is taught to us through childhood, with humility alongside it.  To sit in front of your peers and state the honest truth about your greatest strengths – no, your BRILLIANCE – without dampening any statements using ‘maybe’, ‘kind of’, ‘a little’, was a challenge to say the least!

Softening the experience, however, was what followed.  A feeling of being enveloped in a fluffy cloud of compliments, as your brilliance is explained to you as seen by your peers.  A sort of 360 degree only-positive feedback session.  The atmosphere was one of trust, and calmness.  I think we all felt great at the end, maybe because it was over, but maybe because we all came a little bit closer to our own professional nirvanas.