Maybe I just don’t get it but I’m trying to wrap my head around all the buzz about social entrepreneurs.  I think I understand the idea that a social entrepreneur is one who is starting businesses that are designed to do good for people.  To help people somehow.  Make their lives better in some way.  Happier.  More Productive.  More Green.

Here is what I don’t get:  Isn’t that what any good business is supposed to do?  As Richard Branson says in his book Business Stripped Bare, a good business makes things better by making better things.  That’s what any good business does.  So why do we need this new classification of the “social” entrepreneur.  To me that implies that entrepreneurs that are not labeled “social” are somehow bad people.  It may even imply that business in general is somehow bad or evil.  I think that kind of thinking is just plain dangerous.

I’m reading Branson’s book now so its fresh in my mind.  I love what he says about business not being anything separate from life.  Anything you want to go out and create, do or accomplish is a business.  Sure we want to make profits, but all the profits in the world won’t make us happy unless we got them from making something.  And we won’t sell any of that something unless people actually want to buy it right?  Even if we manage to pull off a ruse, it can only last for so long.  Someone will come along and expose us sooner rather than later.

I’ve been thinking about all this lately because all of our internal projects are productivity applications.  Tools that make people’s lives more efficient and productive.  Better.  I sat down with a friend of mine who wanted to connect us to an investor who is a “social entrepreneur”.  This investor is looking for projects and people with that label to invest in.  I had to sit with it for a moment.

What do you think?  Should I just conform and give my self that label?  What we are doing could certainly fall in to that category.  It would be really easy to just give ourselves that label and fall right in to line wouldn’t it?  No harm done…?

Our products stand for integrity.  They are tools that help people go out and do what they said they would.  To achieve their dreams and goals.  Almost all of these people are in business.  All of them if you want to use the Branson form of the word.

Well I hesitate.  Not for myself or for Mingling Media, but for us as a society that so easily likes to vilify business.  A few bad apples really can spoil the whole bunch can’t they?   No.  I think we should go the other way.  Don’t call us social entrepreneurs.  Don’t label us as the few, and the bad apples as the many.  Let’s flip it on its head.  Call us simply “entrepreneurs” and call them __________.  What do you think we should call them?  The James Taggarts of the world (had to slip Atlas Shrugged in to this somewhere ) ?  Rottrepreneurs?  Here’s to holding on to the fact that most people out there are good.  Even those of us in “business”.