There is such power in watching what young people can do when given a chance.

Last month, I attended the JA Worldwide/JA Africa Company of the Year competition in Accra, Ghana. Seventeen teams ranging in age from 15 to 19—many of whom have never been out of their respective countries—competed in this event co-sponsored by Barclays and FedEx. During this event, the teen-run companies participated in a trade fair where they promoted and sold their products and pitched their companies to a panel of judges comprised of business leaders.

The competition is JA Worldwide’s annual celebration of the achievements made by students who have participated in the JA Company Program across the Africa region in the previous year. At this event, students present the results of the enterprise experience they gained while attending the Company Program, where they learned the skills to start and run their own businesses. The student companies appear before a panel of independent judges who determine company performance against the competition criteria. The JA Company of the Year competition is not simply a business competition for young people. The goal is to balance the business achievements of each team as a whole with students’ personal development. Therefore, it is not enough to simply run a financially successful company, or to have created an exciting product or service. Competitors must also demonstrate that they understand how and why their company performed as it did. Judges looked for evidence of innovation and the application of new ideas in all aspects of running the company, as well as an understanding that continuous improvement through innovation is essential to the success of a business.

The winning team from Swaziland celebrates its success

One of the most inspiring moments from the competition came from Zainab Abdallah, a 17-year-old young woman from Tanzania. During the roundtable discussion on leveraging social enterprise to enable marginalized youth in Africa, Zainab asked if she could deliver a poem to the audience. At the end of the session, about 250 people listened as Zainab gave us a compelling view of the world of marginalized kids living on the streets and in the villages. Without notes in front of her, this talented young woman touched our hearts and opened our minds to the social challenges facing young teens who often cannot see a way forward. I came away from the roundtable discussion with the overwhelming feeling that we have to harness this kind of passion and talent to ensure that the next generation of young Africans has a fighting chance at further developing the continent. 

Teri and JA Africa President, Chinwe Effiong, With Two Competitors

So why was this event so poignant? Most of the students who were there would tell you that they now want more. They are hungry to learn more about how to succeed as an entrepreneur and better contribute to their families and communities. They see what is possible—they are learning from their peers and from the adults who volunteer time to open the doors and give them a chance to explore what they are capable of.

To witness the full impact of this amazing celebration of young African talent, don’t miss the event slideshow created by Crossland Group photographer Erica Pelaccia:

As part of Junior Achievement Worldwide’s recent board of governors meeting in Boston, the president of JA Africa, Dr. Chinwe Effiong, delivered a powerful message about how her regional operations are affecting change for close to a million young people in Africa. During her presentation, Dr. Effiong showed the board a powerful video about JA Africa’s efforts, which was created in collaboration with Crossland Group team members Erica Pelaccia, Megan Hogan, and Teri Riddle, and videographer Rob Merkle.

Encouraged by the success of how this tool functioned to communicate JA Africa’s social impact to the JA Worldwide board, the Crossland team is excited to continue to explore innovative ways of helping clients demonstrate how their organizations are making a difference in the world.

I recently read the excellent book by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers called What’s Mine Is Yours, about the rising movement of what they’ve coined “Collaborative Consumption.” The book takes a look at how the world is slowly moving away from a culture of hyper-consumerism and moving into a more sustainable, less materialistic, and collaborative way of living. It’s a fascinating read, which will soon be highlighted in our “What We Are Reading” section.

One of the companies touted in the book is Airbnb.com, which is a self-described “trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique spaces around the world online or from an iPhone device.” Have a spare room you’re not using? List it on Airbnb.com and find someone who’s traveling to your neck of the global woods and rent out your unused space.

While the company started out only three years ago in the San Francisco living room of two Rhode Island School of Design alums, an article posted today on the FastCompany website interviews Andreessen Horowitz of DST and General Catalyst about why he has just invested $112 million in the growing company. Check out the article here.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

When I first came across The Dressmaker of Khair Khana back in April of this year, it piqued my interest on a couple of levels. First, I learned, this was a story of an incredible young woman who took on the immense and dangerous responsibility of providing for her entire family during the Taliban takeover of Kabul in September 1996. I was immediately interested on a personal level. But this was also a story of a brave entrepreneur whose efforts not only saved her own family from starvation, but encouraged and inspired countless other female entrepreneurs in her community, thereby creating the powerful ripple effect that has come to define the entrepreneurial process. Given the work Crossland has done partnering with Junior Achievement Worldwide in the area of youth entrepreneurship, I also became interested on a professional level.

While studying at Harvard Business School in 2005, former ABC news reporter Gayle Tzemach Lemmon flew to Afghanistan in search of stories of female entrepreneurs making a difference in their war-torn communities. It was here that Lemmon first heard about Kamila Sidiqi, a young woman who began a dressmaking business out of her home when the Taliban regime changed the rules overnight, making it impossible for women to work or attend school. Lemmon then spent three years on the ground capturing the details of Kamila’s story; Dressmaker is the final result of her work.

From the very first pages, I was captivated by the story Lemmon weaves together about Kamila, her ten brothers and sisters, and her loving parents who encouraged education above all else for their children … especially their nine girls. When the Taliban came, Kamila had just graduated from a teaching training institute and was poised for a career in academics. In a matter of hours, her dreams are thwarted by the new dictates of a regime determined to keep women in the shadows. With her parents having fled the city, along with an older brother, Kamila is left to care and provide for her six younger siblings left at home. Determined to find a way around the strict laws prohibiting women from working in the community, Kamila decides to learn how to sew and start a dressmaking business from behind closed doors.

The challenges Kamila faces in starting a business are plentiful, but none are as risky as the one she must face when she has to leave the safety of her courtyard to go into town and market her dresses at the local bazaars. Required to be accompanied by a mahram, or a male escort, Kamila and her brother brave the dangerous streets of Kabul day in and day out looking for buyers. Kamila becomes highly adept at bargaining, making deals, and growing her clientele, thereby increasing business and creating more work not only for her and her sisters, but for the now steady stream of local girls who gather at the Sidiqi house to sew and earn money to provide for their own families.

Kamila eventually has the idea to marry her teaching abilities with her newfound business acumen and starts a sewing school alongside the dressmaking business. In doing so, she brings opportunity to women who are yet unskilled in the art of tailoring and simultaneously ensures that there is work for any woman who knocks on her door looking for it. What’s particularly powerful about Kamila’s story is her continuous desire to help as many women in her community as possible … and her courage to push the envelope of the Taliban law just enough to ensure she’s able to continue to do so. Her accomplishments within the tight reigns of the regime are nothing short of amazing.

The final thought I was left with after turning the last page of this outstanding book was the often undervalued power of one. Here was one young woman who not only turned her own life around, but passed that empowerment on to many other women, creating a cycle of education and job creation that, in this case, meant the difference between life and death.

How many other stories are there of women who work in intrepid ways to pull their communities back together after war and other atrocities have torn their way of life apart? Lemmon suggests the number is countless, and dedicates the book to “all those women whose stories will never be told.” She suggests that Kamila’s story provides a new lens through which to view women from war-torn communities—instead of the traditional characterization of these women as victims of crimes committed by men, Lemmon argues that they should rather be seen and portrayed as “resilient survivors who deserve our respect.” May Lemmon’s work inspire more of these invaluable stories to be told.

Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World by Bob Johansen

I imagine that many of you feel like I do … that our world is in the midst of an extraordinary transformation. The social, commercial, and political structures that govern life on this planet are integrating. Climate change, global supply chains for food and medicine, and the domino effect within financial markets are all examples of how connected we have become. Furthermore, in the wake of global integration have come new levels of complexity and accelerated, deepened change.

Given today’s dynamics, it occurs to me that the requirements of leaders are also dramatically shifting—perhaps even the very definition of leadership is changing. As such, I have been exploring the opinions of leadership experts to identify the new skills and competencies required for navigating effectively in this era. One noteworthy source is Leaders Make the Future: Ten Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World by Bob Johansen, who is a Distinguished Fellow of the Institute for the Future.

Johansen begins his book with a discussion about three basic assertions:

1. The world is characterized by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA), and these characteristics will become even more pronounced in future.

2. The VUCA world will have both danger and opportunity.

3. Leaders must learn new skills in order to make a new future.

The subsequent chapters describe these skills and provide real-life examples of leaders in action. The skills Johansen describes are:

• Maker instinct: the ability to exploit your inner drive to build and grow things, as well as connect with others in the making.
• Clarity: the ability to see through messes and contradictions to a future that others cannot see.
• Dilemma Flipping: the ability to turn dilemmas into advantages and opportunities.
• Immersive Learning: the ability to immerse yourself in unfamiliar environments to learn from them.
• Bio-Empathy: the ability to see things from nature’s point of view.
• Constructive Depolarization: the ability to calm tense situations where differences dominate and communication has broken down.
• Quiet Transparency: the ability to be open and authentic about what matters to you without advertising yourself.
• Rapid Prototyping: the ability to create early versions of innovations.
• Smart Mob Organizing: the ability to create, engage with, and nurture purposeful business or social networks.
• Commons Creating: the ability to seed, nurture, and grow shared assets that can benefit other players.

At the conclusion of the book, Johansen provides some suggestions about steps leaders might take to ready themselves for the future, beginning with a comprehensive self-assessment focusing on the skills previously defined.

I thought Johansen’s book provided a stimulating departure from the norm on the topic of leadership. Rather than focusing on age-old leadership skills and lessons, it provided some thought-provoking ideas about the novel skills that will be needed to help business and society deal with the realities of our age. However, in addition to his description about ‘what’ it will take for leaders to succeed in the future, I would welcome Johansen’s suggestions about ‘how’ leaders can bridge the gap from the current to the future state. Getting down to practical applications of how leaders can start to get traction would be of great benefit for those of us who would like to have a hand in shaping our future.

Brains on Fire: Igniting Powerful, Sustainable, Word of Mouth Movements by Robbin Phillips, Greg Cordell, Geno Church, and Spike Jones

Although these days, with an active two and a half year old at home, it’s hard to find the time to start—never mind finish—reading a book for pleasure, I recently found myself quickly turning the pages of Brains on Fire (2010). Published by the South Carolina–based word-of-mouth marketing and identity company of the same name, the book is an astutely written manual about how to shift the way we think about traditional marketing campaigns in business today, and provides a step-by-step guide on how to stop ‘marketing to’ customers, and instead start tapping into our existing customers’ needs and wants and with them co-create sustainable movements that promote our businesses in a more organic and genuine way.

Each chapter in the book is a ‘lesson’ in how to ignite these word-of-mouth movements, with titles ranging from “Movements start with the first conversation” to “Movements make advocates feel like rock stars.” Supported by case studies from their own clients, such as Fiskars (the orange-handled scissor company), BestBuy, and the state of South Carolina, the authors illustrate how embracing the people already loyal to your product/service, and making them a part of your day-to-day business practices (and we’re not talking focus groups here), can make ‘fans’ out of your customers and in a very natural way, cause them to start communicating your value to the community you serve by—you guessed it—word of mouth.

Brains on Fire articulates a fresh and exciting way to think about how we get the word out about our businesses, and how we continuously grow a loyal fan base around what we do. As someone who has worked in traditional marketing circles in the past, the authors’ philosophy on the limiting and disconnected nature of advertising campaigns, target markets, sales figures, and generally pushing messages out to people who are already overloaded with information, really resonated with me. It’s obvious that the nature of how clients interact with the businesses they support is changing rapidly, and traditional marketing tactics are being rejected in place of more honest, transparent, and genuine relationship building.

In a very real way, Brains on Fire also taps into the recently discussed idea of the need for businesses to embrace a strategy of ‘creating shared value.’ Co-founders of the global social impact consulting firm FSG, Michael E. Porter and Mark Kramer published a well-publicized article in the January-February 2011 edition of Harvard Business Review, entitled “Creating Shared Value.” In short, the idea of creating shared value means that businesses can “generate economic value for themselves in a way that simultaneously produces value for society …” Porter and Kramer argue that operating on the principle of creating shared value is the future of effective business strategies—those who don’t begin to incorporate the idea of creating shared value into the way they operate will soon be outpaced by those who do. I see Brains on Fire taking the same line on a smaller scale: by igniting movements instead of pushing campaigns, businesses can create economic value for themselves while simultaneously creating value for their customers. (I highly recommend a thorough read of Porter and Kramer’s excellent article).

Although I think Brains on Fire could have benefitted from a more holistic look at word of mouth movements—both past and present—instead of solely focusing on the work the company Brains on Fire had done with their own clients; overall, the book is a very accessible and a worthwhile read for anyone involved in the marketing side of business. The lessons, tips, and ideas put forward in the book are easy to understand and the results they illustrate are quite compelling. Ultimately, if the book speaks to you, it will serve as a solid jumping off point for changing the conversation about the marketing practices within your business.