It is a BLEND… NOT a blur!

Blurring. Non-Divisible Value. Value Blends.

It is 3AM and snowing outside and I’m supposed to go meet a friend to go elk hunting…

In a future blog, we can explore why I eat meat and feel responsible for securing same as opposed to forcing some poor cow to get injections of various drugs, stand in some stinking feedlot to get beefed up (so to speak…) and then listen to the screams of its comrades as it marches to its death…

but that is not a topic we will cover today, because something else is eating at me and I just need to say one thing:

If i hear one more person talk about the blurring of the boundaries between nonprofit and for-profit, I fear i will toss my lunch…

Over the past years, there has been a great deal of debate regarding whether nonprofit organizations should engage in revenue generation and corporations be held responsible for social performance. And there are those other discussions about whether a grant can be thought of as an investment and if the nonprofit sector has a capital market or just a charitable mess…

The latest (and what set me off…) is that I just got an email from someone telling me another leading business magazine is doing a piece on this topic, which is probably (depending on how they handle it…) not a such a totally horrible thing…

And, yes, I must confess that some of the folks I know and admire most in this “field” have referred to these issues as a question of “blurring” (see Sector Blue Report [PDF]). Hell, even my favorite academic, Greg Dees (with whom I have co-edited two books and for whom I have incredible respect), has on several occasions used the concept of “blurring” in his writings, something i have heretofore had the good graces to overlook in our personal dialogs…

However, the bottom-line is that to use the word “blur” has the connotation of something having

gone astray,

run amok,

become involved in mission drift

or a modest distortion of reality…

And it is fundamentally the wrong way to think about what is in play, which is (at its core) value creation by organizations and those that provide capital (in whatever form or with whatever expectation of returns) to them…

This is not a question of good or bad or what have you, but rather one of folks just looking at the world through their existing lens and not rising above the present framework to understand the emerging, deeper paradigm shift…(I’m sorry to have to resort to using the “p-word.”)

So, alas, this question of “blur” has now become one of my pet peeves…

These inquiries would be amusing if it didn’t take up so much of our time and other people’s effort (I will, myself of course, make the singular effort to address this question in this brief blog and perhaps in the inaugural issue of a new magazine—called Value—that a group of us are working on and hope to publish early next year).

But then, that is it, over, fini…no mas…get it?

So, let’s lay this baby to rest:

Value is non-divisible.

It is Whole.

You cannot put social value with nonprofits and economic value with for-profits and pretend that somehow that makes sense.

Please stop attempting to do so…

you may hurt yourself and that would be a shame, since you know I care deeply about you, your intellectual growth and personal, physical well-being…

I’m serious…

stop it now before you hurt yourself.

thank you.