Brilliant stuff on corporate social responsibility from Richard Thaler.
Beth Comstock: You Have To Tell A Story, Before You Can Sell A Story – words of wisdom from Beth Comstock, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer at GE, in conversation with Behance founder Scott Belsky
Compelling case for marketers and communicators as internal champions of what’s next and, in my interpretation, counter-balance the tendency to get caught up in one’s own daily grind.
An infographic depicting the percentage share of formal firms that are owned by women in Africa. Data from the World Bank.
Many women, to avoid costly and time-consuming registration procedures, keep from upsetting husbands or elder male kin, and other reasons, choose a life as an informal entrepreneur as the only means of earning needed income for their families.
While everyone is not cut out to run a formal enterprise, many women who run informal enterprises would rather work at a formal enterprise. The more accessible and comfortable formal enterprise becomes for women, the more jobs they can create for their communities and the more profits and income those communities can acquire. Yes, men may certainly own formal enterprises, but why shut out half the population?
Reliable economic and business journalism is something individuals and businesses take largely for granted in developed economies. Leading publications have widespread coverage of financial markets, corporate news and key economic indicators that are of crucial importance for the livelihoods, employment opportunities, and investments of ordinary people.
It wasn’t always that way. As business reporter Chris Welles wrote:
For years, business economics and finance journalism was a bleak wasteland — ‘the most disgracefully neglected sector of American journalism,’ according to former NBCtelevision correspondent and former dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism School Elie Abel. If you did a lousy job covering city hall, couldn’t hack it writing obituaries, weren’t too swift taking classified ads over the telephone, then they sent you to the business section. Maybe they even made you business editor.
Media outlets of all kinds in developed economies have since responded to globalization and the explosion of information available for consumers, investors, policymakers, and business managers by investing in higher quality economic and business reporting. As they continue to do so, they benefit greatly from the institutional environment around them.
…In developing and transitioning economies, facing a tremendous growth of private sector activity and economic development as well as an explosion of information, economic and business journalists operate in a murkier institutional environment where providing reliable and useful information to the general public is more challenging.
James Liddell, a friend and former colleague, and I string together some thoughts on the challenges facing economic and business news in developing countries, what overcoming those challenges means for those countries and some ideas for how outsiders can be of service to do so. The full article is in Adobe PDF.
Despite such obstacles, Pakistani youth are optimistic about their futures in this field. Most participants expressed they’re “prepared to leave a well-paid job for the sake of an entrepreneurship journey” and that they are mentally ready “to work for themselves with absolutely no source of funding.”
When asked if they fear of failing as entrepreneurs – whether that means unsuccessfully launching products, or unable to meet family expectations, etc. – nearly everyone said no and concluded that failure is part of the road to success.
