Thought for the Day: The Personal Trainer

Tonight I did a lot of sweating...tiredness spreads throughout my body...and I bet moving in a fluid fashion will not happen tomorrow.  My initial session with a personal trainer went well, I think.  

In an hour I got up to...

 

• Cardio - running on the treadmill...several hills and sprints
• Strength - pull ups, dips, medicine ball, barbell
• Core + boxing combo - abs, jabs, cross punch, bag work
• Stretches 

It was tough and I wanted to leave about half way through.  

Lesson from the experience: 

• Challenge - my trainer pushed me harder than I push myself alone and for that I'm grateful (not at the time of the workout, though)
• Vanity - I attempted to do what he suggested over and over to avoid looking bad even though I would have preferred to go to the pub
• Expertize* - The trainer knows how to put together an effective and efficient routine and gained my respect as a result
• An outside, critical perspective helps - a coach, trainer, friend or colleague can make a big difference to performance in a short space of time.  Unfortunately, I believe this nonsense enough to go back for at least a couple more sessions in the next 2 weeks.  

I'm off to bed.  I need some sleep.

(*To my British friends, I'm American and rarely get the opportunity to write in American.  This is my blog and I'm going to enjoy using lots of z's (that's zee, not zed, by the way) and other such American-isms.)

Social Entrepreneurs, Step Out of the Way...

A thought about social entrepreneurs and those who develop growing social ventures.  

I don't have hard stats so I'm basing this on experience, observation and instinct...individuals who start social ventures often lack the necessary skills to implement robust structures, systems and strategy to grow their businesses into financially and socially sustainable enterprises.  Is this a generalization?  Yes.  Does this make social entrepreneurs bad or wrong in some way?  No.  

In the dot com days, entrepreneurs would often start up businesses, grow them to a certain size and then recruit someone else, often an MBA type, to run the day-to-day operations while they either worked in a division that suited their strengths or went out and started something new.  (Note: I acknowledge that there's a financial incentive here too).  

In the social economy, social entrepreneurs usually stay at the top for too long to the potential detriment of what they try to achieve.  Managing a board, staff, volunteers, partners, finances, operations, sales and marketing all start to get in the way of the original vision.  Do social entrepreneurs need to be experts at all areas of a business?  No, but they should know their limits and hand over the reigns when appropriate.  "Just getting by" and "making it up" work well as a start-up concepts but do not help when sales significantly increase and quality of service matters.  

So what do I suggest?  Either get skilled up or recruit someone with the know how and the values to take the social enterprise to the next level.