Sustainable Business Learning Community Conversations, Jan 2015 - Feb 2015

Sustainable Business, Jan 29, 2015 Topic: Transitioning Leadership Responsibilities

Comments from last week’s conversation on Setting Limits; How Much is Enough?:

• What message should we give to young people today: do the traditional grind, or work only at a level that takes into account their work, health, and spirit, with a clear understanding of how much is enough for them as an individual.
• Work with more balance in your life
• Detroit can be a laboratory for a new urban lifestyle giving people the freedom to choose a different work/life mix
• Young people today look at older people and wonder if they want that same life
• There is only one life to a customer. What does success look like to you?
• How can one create a successful sustainable business incorporating a new work/life mentality in a system that demands expansion and growth? How does that new way of thinking (enough is enough) fit into the old model? This is not a negative, just an unknown. Working under a new model doesn’t mean you have failed, you’re just not included in the standard models.

Resilience is the New Growth

• Today, being big is very risky (ATT); being small and resilient is much safer and more sustainable.
• We know that monoculture is bad ecologically, economically, and sociologically - we need to build diversity in order to become more resilient as a business.

Today’s Topic: Transition of Leadership:

• Question: Is there any leadership will not need to be transitiioned? The answer is no, because we are always in fluid and ever-changing situations in which leadership will need to change.

• Secret to transitioning: Learning and Listening

• Leadership should overlap during a transition period so that change can happen easily and naturally.

• Do we develop followers as well as leaders? All future leaders are at one point followers; followers of people, trends, ideas… If you think of yourself as only a leader, then you are not open to learning and receiving new ideas.

• We all want to be individuals, and be part of the crowd at the same time.

“I am because we are, we are because I am”

Leadership and responsibility:

• Is relegating responsibility the same as passing leadership on to other people?
• There is a difference between passing on leadership and abdication of responsibility.

Kevin’s teaching position at CCS: Kevin wants to erase leadership/follower model and just have teaching and learning - everyone teaches and everyone learns. Everything is placed in the hands of the students - they are responsible for their own work and what they do. He arranged the work tables in a circle with his own table included as just one of the rest - all at the same level. He has the students explain their work to other students, allowing them to be part of the teaching process.

Sustainable Business, Jan 22, 2015 Topic: How Much is Enough? Finding Limits in a Sustainable Business

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Comments from last week’s conversation: How do we successfully bring things to a conclusion in a sustainable way?

• How do we define a healthy end? We sometimes interpret the end of something as a failure or death. How do we deal with anger, anxiety surrounding endings?
• If your values aren't in sync with those of the other person/business, then it can produce an unhealthy working environment. Bringing a business relationship that is not working well to an end can and should be done in a healthy way. "Nice does not mean stupid."
• Understand what the scope of your work is and what it isn’t - be clear about what a client is paying for.
• Reality of transitions: El Moore Project, we are finishing construction and starting operations. How does this transition go in a healthy way? From leadership standpoint, how do you get people to make transitions? How do you create a transition environment? There is so much to sort out and all those little details can really add up.
• Just like a theater director hands off to a stage manager as they move toward opening night (dress rehearsals, etc), business leaders need to know how to transition smoothly.
• Not addressing the difficulties of things ending is shirking your leadership responsibilities.
• Some transitions mean that you are losing a community - a group of relationships, and that can be hard.
• Kevin: as a designer going from a design phase to an implementation phase is hard for him. One idea for this year is to get over his hesitations - just move forward.
• Jeff’s Mission at DHive was planning for the future transition to the other people who were going to take the various programs of DHive forward. This was a goal he and they were always working on so it wasn’t looked on as a change but as progress. It’s psychological - a mindset that they worked on from the beginning. the DHive brand has peeled away and they were left with two new and healthy organizations - like cracking an egg - DHive was just the shell. Clear finish of DHive and clear launch of the two new organizations. Change was positive - everyone knew what their role would be - everyone knew that they would be moving forward and doing more - all were happy with the end of DHive and transition into new orgs. Change was always the plan from the beginning. If you want people to follow you, you have to tell them where you’re going.
• Planned change, unplanned but not surprising change, and the big surprise (change you didn’t expect and have to now adapt to)
• All endings, all transitions are what we make of them. Can be made into progress, or can be a big mess. How do we take care of the people, community and planet around these changes.
• First must accept that change is happening.

Today’s Topic: How Much Is Enough? Working With Limits in a Sustainable Business

• This is a question that we cannot avoid. How much practice is enough? Design? Money?
• This is a topic that keeps coming up over and over again with the small businesses we are developing.
• Have to gain some emotional intelligence about how much is enough in your business - what limits are sustainable for you in your business?

• Andy: When you invest in the market, you have to know when you have enough money. What do you do once you have enough? When you have enough, then you have choices - you can move away from the risk. You have to have minimally enough, but when do you stop growing?

• If you can’t identify how much is enough, that can lead to trouble and affect you and your organization negatively.
• Must have an awareness of ourselves.
• Identifying “enough” gets personal. You don’t want to regret your choices and know that you didn’t live the life you really wanted. Must do what is healthy for you.
• Kevin’s questions: What are the signs that he needs to look for that let him know that he has reached his limit and that it’s time to move on? Limits can be an ambiguous concept.
• Def of success: Getting to or exceeding your clients’ expectations.
• Advice for Kevin: the more work he does, the better he will be at guessing where his limits are. Also, his clients ought to pay for his play time. It’s all about developing the kind of relationships that allow you to do this.
• How many clients is enough for David B: First of all, it can take some time to learn how much is enough for you (took him 3 years after his retirement). His limit is 20 - 25, and thru experience, he has found that this is how many clients he can handle and only work 3 days a week.. Because he has other interests and responsibilities at home. So he has picked the things he likes to do - quality of life.
• Goethe: constantly seeking happiness - just look and it will be there. (look this up) Lisa to her start-ups: what will make you really happy? work with people in your community? work with communities in Africa? What does being a success mean to you - why do you want to do this business, what makes you happy? Keep checking in with that. You don’t want to get off track - careful of pivots. Be flexible to pivot to new opportunities, but not to the extent that it takes you away from your goals and what it is that makes you happy.
• Talking about money is important - you have to have control of the financials in your business.
• Even if you’re in a non-profit, money is still very important or you can’t do what you want to do.
• Tom: awareness of your limits. Much more accepting of my own personal limits now in his life. He has lived beyond those limits and realized that it’s not a life he wants to live. Part of this process is making mistakes and learning from those mistakes, moving back from too much to enough. Look at your weekly schedule and ask yourself, “Do I want to live that this week?”

Sustainable Business, Jan 8, 2015 Topic: Hopes and Plans for the New Year

As is our tradition with the Sustainable Business Conversation's first meeting in January, we ask participants to share with us their hopes and plans in the New Year for their sustainable business and/or for themselves personally. Here's what we learned:

Darryl (SideBar Black Art Theatre) has two goals:

1. To work with Project One Voice in getting components together for projects in Detroit.
2. Learn how to play the guitar!

Andy: Recently returned to Detroit after a number of years living in various cities around the country; with a background in city planning, he would like to identify a way that he could contribute to the revitalization of the city of Detroit.

Rich: Having recently moved to Detroit from Boulder, CO, he is thinking about how to create a new economy with a focus on people. Currently volunteering with the Michigan Urban Farming Initiative, he has a variety of business interests:

• He would like to continue his involvement in urban farming and be a manager of a farm, if possible.
• Would like to work on building bikes and cargo bikes; encourage people to bike in the city and use cargo bikes to do deliveries.
• Interested in starting a youth apprenticeship program, eventually creating jobs.

Kimberly: Understands that her work is more of a "soup", a combination of everyone's contributions and gifts. Wants to be more open to what others have to bring to the table, recognize the validity of differing points of view and people's different backgrounds and areas of knowledge.

Mark: Wants to start putting what he is learning about permaculture into practice. Through his work, he has learned a lot about how nature takes care of itself and how our artificial, chemical products disrupt natural processes. He wants to be able to put what he has learned onto his website and share that knowledge with his clients.

Kyle: Wants to begin implementing some of the ideas he's been kicking around for the past couple of years.

• First, cargo bike business - continue working on developing design and philosophy around this business.
• Work on advocacy group centered around transportation methods other than cars.
• Wants to move forward with development of a social/economic action group to reduce car dependency and develop bike-ability and walkability of city neighborhoods. Also interested in getting neighborhoods connected through access to transit.
• Learn more about development and how this happens in the city and in its neighborhoods.

John: He resolves to eat some Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to celebrate every cold day of our Michigan winter. Good idea, John!

Harriet: Wants to finish setting up her Etsy store to sell the products she makes.