Beautiful Norwegian traveling partners and irreverent Buddhist monks.  Connections to people and place.  Burnout.  Long distance travel by motorcycle through Southeast Asia.  Awareness of the present moment.  Vibrant, exotic cultures.  Luck.  Deliberate intent.  Christine and I were talking about these and the other factors that go into starting a business.



Christine Haskell, founder of Social Ventures Labs, consults with businesses that consider their community contribution as part of their product or service.  She profiles mission-driven companies bringing into focus the practices and players in the social venture space that make money by doing the right thing.  Here is her profile of Pangaea.

Conversation is a skill, and Christine has it.  She asks intelligent, focused questions and knows how to follow up.  It's not often when you get to see yourself and your work through someone else's eyes.  It was wonderful to step back with her, range across experiences be they from within a cubicle or from beyond an epiphany, and recount and reconnect with Pangaea's raisons d'être.

Christine isn't a fan of cooperatives.  This isn't to say that she's against them; rather, my sense is that she sees them as encumbered by needless procedural overhead.  Thanks to her I have a series of essays working their way through the electrons in my brain toward the electrons in this blog.  I'll convert her before long.  Stay tuned.

-- Rick