Insights

The public rightfully pressed local governments to address how their police departments were engaging communities of color after George Floyd, a Black man, lost his life under the relentless knee of a Minneapolis officer. A lesser-known impact of the 2020 reckoning over who benefited from unconstitutional policing and who bore its burdens occurred in the private sector.

My hometown newspaper has been rife with stories lately about social service programs that had launched with lofty goals only to crash and burn a year or two later. Three lessons emerge from the debris.

Being audited doesn’t have to rank up there with root canals and other things that are eventually good for us but awful in the making. That is, if you understand the audit’s purpose and are prepared.

I was lucky enough to develop some management chops under the watchful eyes of teenagers. It was the perfect incubator for a budding executive, which I was then as the director of a pilot project-turned-non-profit-organization to develop community-minded leaders in El Paso, Texas.

It is not unusual for the people who work in an organization to be blind to or ignorant of its vision, assuming it has articulated one. Even worse is for it to be derided by those being counted on to achieve it.

I once participated in a vision-setting session during which a colleague scoffed at the idea that our little office could do much to influence the future we had just agreed collectively we wanted to see.

Four tips to run a profitable business with a higher purpose

Maurice Rahming and Ali O’Neill started their Portland, Oregon-based business in 1998 as an electrical contractor. It has evolved into O’Neill Construction Group, employing more than 100 people and generating average annual sales greater than $20 million.