Two keen bargain hunters go out to get some good deals. Shopper A decides to only look in John Lewis.  Shopper B is less particular: he'll look in Lewis', of course – also anywhere else he might get some better deals.  When they get home their partners want to know how well they've done.  Of course they assume Shopper B must have done better – since he looked at the best deals in Lewis' and everywhere else, wheras Shopper A only looked in Lewis'.  Surely the result is a foregone conclusion...

Yet strangely enough when they look at the actual goods bought there doesn't seem to be a great deal of difference in the deals each has got – in fact if anything it is Shopper A who has done best.

How can this be?

A passing economist doesn't seem surprised: “It seems that restricting our shopping to John Lewis may not result in any statistically significant bargains.”

Reading research on the results of ethical investment is a bit like this.   Late last year for example Emma Sjöström published a review of recent academic studies, which concluded that of 21 published research papers...

A few years ago I was asked a question by a lady who had worked for years at a high level in social enterprise - actually for one of the employee ownership apex bodies - and who was also then researching her Masters in Ethical & Responsible Tourism. Quite an expert in social enterprise in fact. She wrote:

I'm going to the Social Enterprise Conference in Cardiff next week.  On their registration form they have Charities and Social Enterprises listed in different delegate fee categories.  I thought that Charities (or more specifically their trading arms) are SEs?  Am I easily confused?

Of course I was already aware that the social enterprise movement had got itself into the most awful definitions mess – but it was this question that really convinced me of the bigger tragedy we were creating.  We had actually succeeded in taking our wonderfully clear and simple and popular message - that you can do business to do good - and muddying it up so thoroughly that hardly anybody could understand it.

This week I find myself once again mulling over the tragedy that is our movement's failure to communicate what 'social enterprise' really means.

A Guardian Online piece this morning worries that 'social enterprise' can mean more than one thing'. 

There's a big Linked-In discussion going on, set up by the question -

There has been a sudden re-eruption of controversy around the idea of a Social Enterprise Mark, first as a result of Dr Rory Ridley-Duff's research into the problems of applying the SEC/RISE mark to democratic businesses, then what amounts to the launch of an entirely new Social Enterprise Brand by Richard Patey and others.

I've just joined Richard Patey's Social Enterprise Brand Linked-in Group principally because I am interested in the 'collaborative community' development methodology proposed by the new brand, which seems to promise something much more rooted in the real values of social enterprise - which should encompass an entirely new participative and community-owned brand-paradigm.

However, I find myself on the sidelines of most of the discussion here and elsewhere, saddened by the overwhelmingly obvious fact of the matter: that all this mark stuff is causing division - inward-looking, energy-sapping, destructive division.

I suspect the whole idea of a 'Social Enterprise Mark' is wrong-headed - whatever the precise criteria - because social enterprise is more of a 'movement' than a definable 'sector' - analogous to something like 'the environmental movement' - broad and inclusive and welcoming fellow-travelers - aiming to influence all business/life practice - rather than a more specific instance like 'certified organic' that might be successfully 'marked'.  I must admit though that I am intrigued by the possibility that a collaborative 'brand' might encompass such a dynamic movement in the way that a conventional 'mark' cannot.

A recent UnLtd survey found that if they had access to the right support about 1 in 3 people would like to be social entrepreneurs; a startling figure, but tellingly close to Dr Rebecca Harding’s research on the numbers of social entrepreneurs, which also suggested that about a third of all new entrepreneurs would like to be social entrepreneurs, and that there are already over 230,000 ‘hidden social enterprises’ in the UK.

The Third Sector Research Centre work on measuring the scale of UK social enterprise is helpful in addressing the political construction of the ‘social enterprise’ concept - in fact if you ignore the various conflicting definitions and diligently add up all the different measures, what emerges is a social enterprise movement of at least a third of a million people and organisations actively using business models and methods to achieve a social mission.

Don't we need to reach out to this enormous constituency - help those 1 in 3 new entrepreneurs - make the case for the exciting new way of organising human affairs that social enterprise really is - rather than focusing on how many criteria we can fit on the head of a pin?

Solomon Linda (left) with the Original Evening Birds, 1941The young man on the left of this picture is Soloman Linda.   You may have heard of him sometime over the last few years, though in his own lifetime, in his own century, you certainly wouldn't have.

Sometime in the late 1920s Soloman Linda wrote a song called 'Mbube' (um-boo-bay – Zulu for 'The Lion').  Although a talented singer and musician, Soloman Linda couldn't read or write.   He and his wife lived on maize porridge and slept on a dirt floor,   They had 8 children, 2 of whom died as babies, one from malnutrition.

In the 1930s Linda got a job as a cleaner for the Gallo Record Company, where in 1939 he first recorded the song Mbube – and where in 1952 he signed over the copyright for 10 shillings – that would be about £1 now. When Soloman Linda died in 1962, at 53, his family couldn't afford a gravestone.

As for the song, at least 150 artists eventually recorded it, and it was translated into dozens of languages.  In one translation into English, the original Zulu address to the lion – pronounced 'oo-yim-boo-bay' – was rendered as 'wim-a-way', and the title as 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'.

The song was used in more than a dozen films, as a result of one of which, in 2004 a South African lawyer brought a lawsuit against the Disney Corporation on behalf of Linda's family. It was eventually shown that Soloman Linda had been tricked into selling the rights, and that Disney alone owed $1.6 million in royalties for the use of the song in 'The Lion King'. Demonstrators against GlaxoSmithKline's policies on generic AIDS drugs in Africa shut down the pharmaceutical giant's exhibit at the 15th International AIDS Conference, Bangkok, 2004     Photo by Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance / Paul Jeffrey

Now stop, step back, and pick up another thread of this story.

The drug AZT was developed by a US government funded research programme in 1964.  It was bought by UK company Glaxo for use on pet cats.  When the AIDS epidemic broke out, it was again the US government that funded work on the possible use of AZT against HIV – which Glaxo refused to do.  Only when it's effectiveness against HIV was proven did Glaxo assert its patent, and licence the drug for use against HIV – and reap huge profits.

Last year, incidentally, the US pharmaceutical industry spent about $30billion on research into new drugs...   ...and $60billion on advertising.

Glaxo was one of 39 multinational drug companies forced to back down by a public outcry in 2001, after they had tried to force South Africa to stop buying cheap generic anti-aids medicines and instead buy much more expensive patent medicines. Adelaide Ntsele, née Linda, left

Unfortunately, both this victory over the multinational drug companies, and the money from Disney and the other media giants who had made £millions from Soloman Linda's song, came too late for Mr. Linda's daughter Adelaide, who died of AIDS in 2001 at the age 38, unable to afford life-saving medicine.

Why does social enterprise need it's own original approach to intellectual property rights?

I've tried answering this question analytically a number of times, but perhaps stories such as that of Soloman Linda and his daughter Adelaide show more clearly just what's wrong with the globalised big business approach to intellectual property, and why social enterprise really needs an entirely different approach.

A new survey commissioned by UnLtd has found that if they had access to the right support about 1 in 3 people would like to be social entrepreneurs.

This is yet another confirmation of Dr Rebecca Harding's research on the numbers social entrepreneurs.  Her figures suggested some time ago that there are over 230,000 'hidden social enterprises' in the UK, and that over a third of all new entrepreneurs would like to be social entrepreneurs.

It is also another confirmation of the staggering scale of the opportunity we have - and this to me is the area where we really lack leadership (not, as Liam Black recently thought, in defending existing social enterprises).

Our focus on a few kinds of social enterprise - those that happen to fit an official definition, or can be used to forward a government agenda - is blinding us to a much bigger picture.

I've also previously mentioned in my blogs here and in the Guardian Online the Third Sector Research Centre papers on measuring the scale of UK social enterprise (September 2010) and on the construction of the 'social enterprise' concept (forthcoming).  These should have exploded once and for all the myth that there are only 62,000 social enterprises in the UK - yet I still hear this discredited figure trotted out by people who are supposed to be promoting social enterprise!

Nobody knows how many 'social enterprises' there really are because surveys have been shaped around competing definitions of 'social enterprise', so the numbers they come up with are, in fact, politically constructed.  My own view, looking at the analysis, and including Rebecca Harding's 'hidden social enterprises', is that there are probably at least a third of a million people and organisations out there using business models and methods to achieve their social mission.

We need to reach out to them, and to all new entrepreneurs, by seeing ourselves as - and becoming - a dynamic and welcoming and flexible and outward-looking movement, rather than a defensive, static, walled-in 'sector'.

I talk a lot about Business Models in my training workshops.  I reject the Business Plan fetishism indulged so myopically by the likes of Business Link.  Business Plans have their place in some trades – but usually way down the list of ingredients for success.   Getting your Business Model right, however, is near the top.

Business Modeling is something you do in your imagination, and using few words.  A Business Model is a working mental model of the key relationships you have inside and outside the business.  It's the fundamental story you tell yourself about what you do – and tell others if you only have a few sentences.

I usually illustrate this with the story of the British slide-rule manufacturer who thought they were in the business of making slide rules.  They weren't – and when the electronic pocket calculator came along it wiped out the slide-rule business almost overnight (because, people below a certain age need to know, a slide-rule is, in fact, a pocket calculator).   At about the same time an unremarkable American manufacturer of office calculating machines and typewriters lit on the understanding that they were actually in the business of processing information.   That company was IBM, and they went on to become the biggest computer company in the world.

These stories relate to the impact of changing technology, and the importance of seeing what you do from a customer's point of view, but at their heart is the basic Business Model question: what is it, exactly, that we do?

I've been doing a lot of training workshops with people engaged in social care recently, and I've started kicking them off with a little word association game.  I say things like 'Winterbourne View', 'Blackstone' 'Castlebeck' and 'Southern Cross' – and of course the participants respond with words like 'disgraceful', 'cruel', 'inhuman'.  But there is a Business Model issue at the heart of this too.   Blackstone owned both the Southern Cross operating company and NHP, now Southern Cross' biggest landlord.   Blackstone's Business Model mainly involved selling Southern Cross care homes to NHP and leasing them back on exploitative terms, and indeed tampering with existing leases so that Southern Cross became committed to 2.5 per cent rent rises every year for 35 years.  Having 'created' all that future 'value' in NHP, Blackstone promptly sold it for more than twice what they paid less than 3 years earlier.  And they sold Southern Cross for more too.  Needless to say, it was the public sector care purchasers that were primarily supposed to pick up the escalating rents that made the whole deal work.  So more tax for us – or less care for our elderly and disabled people.

Now I hear Blackstone is in the running to buy a portfolio of debt that includes £60m used to finance the purchase of care homes by London & Regional.  Which care homes? - why the Southern Cross care homes they purchased from Blackstone in the first place!

Blackstone attempted a spirited defence of their involvement – which I was astonished to discover parts of the UK press reprinted word for word - though others are busy unraveling it – including the claim that their business model was not based on legal/financial manoeuvrings but on building an excellent care provider.   Sure.   In a couple of years.  While selling the family silver.

The murky details of the Winterbourne View / Castlebeck situation are if anything more appalling, partly because they involve filmed personal ill treatment as well as financial exploitation.  Perhaps for this reason, much of the press coverage of these cases has focused on the failure of regulation – did I mention that amongst all the legal//financial shenanigans Southern Cross were also making a mess of providing care? - but for me this does not go to the heart of the problem.   Indeed, some aspects of regulation – around procurement, for example, which tends to favour large remote ownership structures - actually help create the problem in the first place.

For me, it is the Business Model issue that is the key.  One local authority care worker said in one of my sessions the other day: “It's wrong to make money out of vulnerable people”.  She didn't mean it's wrong to make a living, of course - she meant it's wrong to base your Business Model on greed and exploitation.

What we know in social enterprise – what we all prove every day - is that it is perfectly possible to base your Business Model on doing good and making money.   For years Cafédirect built an exemplary fair-trade model while consistently taking market share away from much larger and greedier multinational companies.  Social enterprise is perfectly capable of doing good work and doing good business.

You won't get as rich as Blackstone, for sure, but you can make a decent living, and help make a more decent world.

I asked a colleague recently if they liked my website - they thought for a bit before replying simply "Not many jokes" - so I thought I'd post this slide from my presentation at The Big Jump Conference yesterday, which some other colleagues found amusing...

I've posed the question elsewhere of whether the NHS Right to Request process actually led to ANY increase in the number of spin-outs to social enterprise – and not received a satisfactory answer.

Of course I know of a few cases claimed by the Right to Request process – my question is whether these, and possibly others, would have gone ahead, and maybe even been EASIER, without this 'support' intervention.  I certainly managed to keep one NHS externalisation last year out of the official process – which was completed very smoothly in just a few months thankyou very much.

Now I've just read the latest Third Sector Research Centre Working Paper on Social enterprise spin-outs from the English health service: a Right to Request but was anyone listening? by Robin Miller and Dr Ross Millar.   This should make uncomfortable reading for the NHS, and all those responsible for promoting the Right to Request.

The researchers studied the uptake of Right to Request in the West Midlands. They found that by July 2010, 2/3 of the PCTs in the West Midlands were still not aware of any Right to Requests being developed.  From the other 6 PCTs 13 staff groups were known to be exploring Right to Requests - 6 of these had had Expressions of Interest approved by their PCT Board, 2 were about to have their Expressions considered, and the other 5 were still at the ideas stage.

Just 3 months later the picture had changed entirely - by October 2010 all of the whole provider arms had abandoned the process, and there were only 2 Right to Requests still live – one clinical team and one service cluster – both still at an early stage.

Although the Right to Request initiative has now finished. the paper's authors also note that the ideas behind it are still live in the NHS and elsewhere, and indeed that aspects of the Localism Bill and the so-called 'Open Public Services' Bill such as the Rights to Buy/Challenge/Provide might extend similar processes to local authorities.

I am of course very much in favour of introducing social enterprise into public services, and very often an independent sector organisation is indeed the best way to do this.

But please lets stop hyping solutions without putting in place the basic conditions to enable them:

• really expert social enterprise developers
• flexible enough pension arrangements and other staff transfer conditions
• contracts that focus on results not processes
• honest responses to trade union reservations
• time release to develop inspirational leadership

 – and I could go on!