Yesterday we encouraged you to join us as a supporter of Kiva, a non-profit website that allows you to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur in the developing world.  Today we want to celebrate you along with the New Year.  

We hope you take the 16 minutes to sit back and enjoy this video and message:

“Validation” is a fable about the magic of free parking. Starring TJ Thyne & Vicki Davis. Writer/Director/Composer - Kurt Kuenne. Winner of numerous Int’l Film Festival awards.

On this last day of the year, we at 1-Focus would like to pay tribute to all the individuals out there who are working to make this planet and healthy and safe place for everyone of us.  As a team supporter of Kiva we hope you will consider joining us.

I want to recruit you to my lending team, Sustaining Change, on Kiva, a non-profit website that allows you to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur in the developing world. You choose who to lend to - whether a baker in Afghanistan, a goat herder in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a restaurateur in Cambodia, or a tailor in Iraq - and as they repay the loan, you get your money back.

Here is a YouTube video that a fellow Twitter made with his son on Kiva:

If you join our lending team, we can work together to alleviate poverty. Once you’re a part of the team, you can choose to have a future loan on Kiva “count” towards our team’s impact. The loan is still yours, and repayments still come to you - but you can also choose to have the loan show up in our team’s collective portfolio, so our team’s overall impact will grow!

Not all entrepreneurs are about making money. Some just want to make the world a better place. Whether converting rice husks into electricity in rural India or using video games to help pediatric cancer patients stay on their meds, Fast Company’s 2009 Social Enterprises of the Year were driven by entrepreneurs exhibiting the “kind of innovative thinking that can transform lives and change our world.”

You can see a slide show of the ten organizations that comprise Fast Company’s honor roll of 2009 Social Enterprises of the Year. We salute each one, especially Civic Ventures for their efforts to develop leadership in the not for profit sector.

In the not-for-profit sector, the severe shortage of managers is estimated to grow to 640,000 by 2016. Among baby boomers, there’s increasing interest in “encore careers,” especially in not-for-profits. Civic Ventures wants to “help supply and demand find each other,” says Marc Freedman, president of the group, which is sponsoring this program to ease the transition for retiring Silicon Valley professionals through mentoring and, yes, internships. The first class of fellows, from HP and Agilent, will be placed as early as January.

Roberta joined Sandy as a partner in 1-Focus International in the fall of 2006. In the past two years we have focused our vision and strategy around the philosophy and values that we both share.

We believe that when one is working from a clear vision, mission and values, whether as an individual or organization, not only do you have a flexible roadmap to use for your tough decisions, but you are also operating in alignment with your core being – positively impacting the world and people around you. Continuous learning, growth and change seem to happen organically, creating thriving systems.

Here is our small video of the two of us to you and yours - however you may choose to celebrate.

Frieden, Paix, Shalom, Salam, Shanti, Hoa Binh,

This came across my desk today and with good humor, I had to share it with you. The full post at Maggie’s Farm is by guest poster Bruce Kesler is Oy, Come All Ye Faithful: First Night of Hannukah (with Christmakah)   Maggie’s Farm describes itself as “a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics”.

Continuing the current trend of large-scale mergers and acquisitions, it was announced today at a press conference that Christmas and Chanukah will merge. According to reliable industry sources, the deal has been in the works for about 1300 years, ever since the rise of the Muslim Empire.

Massive layoffs are expected, with lords a-leaping and maids a-milking being hardest hit. Under conditions of the agreement, the letters on the dreydl, currently in Hebrew, will be replaced by Latin, thus becoming unintelligible to a much wider audience. Also, instead of translating to “A great miracle happened there,” the message on the dreydl will be the more generic: “Miraculous stuff happens.”

I particularly enjoyed Dr. Maynard Brusman’s recent post on his Working Resources Blog: Executive Coaching for Stress Resiliency – Calm Leadership under Pressure.  

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One of the most powerful questions one can ask is “How well do I manage my stress under pressure?” Stress hardy leaders have calm energy and help others become stress resilient under pressure.

The concept of resilience is a core competency in our Collaborative Leadership Model and Brusman’s article asks some great questions around this skill set. As you can see from our definition below, we believe that the starting point for all of this is how well one is grounded in his or her values.

Resilient:  Demonstrates optimism, courage and adaptability that inspires others to be authentic.  Internally well grounded in a strong self knowledge and personal value system. 

Model of: 360 Leadership Readiness™

We do have a specific question around stress in this competency but it is also referenced in some of the other competencies as well.  One of the statements that we use in the “Collaborative” competency speaks well to what I believe Brusman is also emphasizing: I act in a respectful manner even under difficult circumstances.

Stress is a part of everyday living.  How well we manage it will depend on if it creates the tension for positive action or becomes  detrimental distress for us and those around us.

There is a great artcile on the pshychology of fraud written from a business perspective from The UK Guardian yesterday.  It stresses the importance of understanding this issue because “organisations in the US are estimated to lose around 5 per cent of revenues to fraud of various kinds, while in the UK in the first half of 2008, accountant KPMG recorded 128 cases of fraud with combined losses of £630m”.

The conventional explanation of fraudsters’ behaviour is that they are greedy and dishonest individuals whose activities are enabled by lazy supervision. The reality, however, is less simplistic; business psychologists believe that frauds come about because of a complex set of interactions between the personality of the fraudster and the environment in which they operate. Good governance won’t have any effect on the former, but it should on the latter.

Here is the kicker:

In an environment that encourages risk-taking, rapid innovation and the pushing of boundaries, the borderline between ethical and unethical activities can become blurred.

At the bottom of the article is a review of three famous financial fraudsters.

Meanwhile, as the effects of the financial crisis are being felt around the world, Transparency International’s 2008 Bribe Payers Index (BPI) exposes the degree to which companies of the leading exporting nations are likely to engage in bribery when doing business abroad.

First place in the 2008 BPI is shared by Belgium and Canada with a score of 8.8, signifying that Belgian and Canadian firms are the least likely to engage in bribery when doing business abroad. Netherlands and Switzerland occupy third place in the index, each with a score of 8.7. At the other end of the scale is Russia, coming in last with a score of 5.9, just trailing China (6.5), Mexico (6.6) and India (6.8).

I must confess that I take a pride in Canada being at the top. As a Canadian, living in Switzerland, I am perhaps not well suited to other cultural views on this issue.  My values may not, I should rephrase, are not shared by a large part of the world.  But who is right?  It appears that rampant bribery is about corruption and not good for business.  

The announcement highlights fears that leading emerging economies are undermining international efforts to tackle corruption. Chinese, Indian and Russian companies bribe routinely to win overseas contracts. Ms Labelle said Transparency International’s research “provides evidence that a number of companies from major exporting countries still use bribery to win business abroad, despite awareness of its damaging impact on corporate reputations and ordinary communities.” (See FT.com article here.)

We are now most definitely living in a global economy.  It appears that while individual cultural differences and values will remain, a broader common denominator of dealing with international issues will be expected, demanded and required.  If only the western corporations could live up to these standards in the first place!

The Financial Times/ArcelorMittal Boldness in Business Awards will take place at the Tate Modern gallery, London, on March 19 2009. The categories, which will be nominated by a panel of judges, are: Drivers for Change; Corporate Responsibility; Environment; Emerging Markets; Entrepeneurship and Lifetime Achievement.  A couple of things caught my eye besides the title which in of itself is quite catchy. 

The definition of the first category is particularly interesting: Drivers of Change

Bold drivers of change see opportunity where others see only danger and are not afraid to transform their company and even their industry. They are not afraid of change and they are decisive. A bold mergers and acquisitions transaction, for example, is one that has the potential to transform the company that undertakes it - allowing it to dominate its own sector or to move into new ones. 

I suspect that the example of a bold M&A is in part in response to one of the sponsor, ArcelorMittal.  At 1-Focus, we have been following ArcelorMittal.  We have written before about how impressed we have been in their approach and integration strategy.  It follow the process that we have developed and it took into account (either by plan or default) the five critical factors.  I was amused by the first part of the definition.  For the past 20 years, all I have heard about is that change is always with us.  ”Not afraid of change.” Interesting. . .  ”Decisive” . . . Interesting.  Draw your own observations.

There will also be a special Readers’ Award, which will be voted for by readers of the Financial Times and FT.com. A shortlist of five companies that have shown boldness, leadership and embraced innovation in the last twelve months have been selected.  They are:

• Nintendo
• Twitter
• American Apparel
• HCL Technologies
• Santander

Read about the reason for their selection. Alternatively, you can vote for your own company by emailingboldness@ft.com

I don’t know what “older workers” means anymore. I suspect it is anyone (in the US at least) over 50 who “theoretically” can take early retirement. However, even before the current economic situation, I don’t know of many who actually stopped all work (i.e. nothing that paid).

Some older Americans want to give back to society but need some pocket change to cover their costs, while others need a temporary cash cushion as they look to change careers. Either way, there are some options out there. This video is specific to the USA but it might help all of us to push the boundaries of what we think is possible.

For those in transition due to relocation, expat, mergers etc — regardless of age — might want to brainstorm on some of the suggestions and ideas mentioned to expand your own options.

MIT Sloan Management Review has chosen three recent leadership articles designed to help you address a number of common leadership challenges. In these challenging economic times, the effectiveness of leadership in corporations is increasingly becoming a source of concern. They claim that insights in this complimentary collection will help you make effective decisions about leadership recruitment, promotion and development strategies.

MIT SMR De-Mystifying Leadership Collection, sponsored by Hewitt Associates can be obtained here.

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Kiva is an amazing program and one that 1-Focus International has chosen to support. At t his time of year when many of us give thanks, I want to recruit you to our new lending team, Sustaining Change, on Kiva. This non-profit website allows you to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur in the developing world. You choose who to lend to - whether a baker in Afghanistan, a goat herder in Uganda, a farmer in Peru, a restaurateur in Cambodia, or a tailor in Iraq - and as they repay the loan, you get your money back.

When you join our lending team, we can work together to alleviate poverty. Once you’re a part of the team, you can choose to have a future loan on Kiva “count” towards our team’s impact. The loan is still yours, and repayments still come to you - but you can also choose to have the loan show up in our team’s collective portfolio, so our team’s overall impact will grow!

Check out the Sustaining Change lending team, and learn more about lending teams on Kiva in general, by clicking here.