ChangeThinking with SmithMartin

Category: management skills

Public service co-operators

Moving from the wrap around direct support of the pubic sector and taking services into another social business form can be an amazing journey. It can also be a rocky road fraught with…

Realism in social business development

The short video below tells the story of an organisation and team, in this case, in the technology sector, that burned through 40 million dollars of capital in five years and failed on…

Startup Britain – a useful web resource?

The ‘Startup Britain’ web site has the support of the Prime Minister – but is it, as some commentators have cynically described a government backed web link-farm – offering already available resources to…

Authorities – give away your space?
Become an ideas enterprise…

We were reading an interesting web article about the internet giant AOL and how they had made available, at no charge, the 225,00 square feet of office space they own in Palo Alto…

The web and education – how we think about information

Michael Wesch of Kansas State University produces a continuous stream of films and concept refreshing ideas about information, education and the cultural power of the web. The short film below offers the viewer…

Being brave with the budget! Websites…..

Children’s Centres Budgets are getting close to the end of the financial year. If you want to find a way to spend the last of the budget wisely giving benefit for many years…

A surfeit of information?

Below is a short film of a recent TED programme talk by a teacher – Diana Laufenberg. It has a number of different messages. A mapping of the transition from a knowledge poor…

Creating the right zone

We have been doing a lot of work recently on the creation of good governance structures for a variety of charitable and social enterprise organisations. Policies and process play a large part in…

Renegotiating Value; Bonus or Pro Bono

‘Bonus vs Pro Bono’ is the second in a series of Renegotiating ‘value’ seminars and seeks to explore the value of inspirational leadership in business. The seminar will be held in the St…

Time and the social entrepreneur

We are regular readers of Entrepreneur.com – a great source of inspiration, ideas and shared experience for start-ups. Although U.S. based, the site does often contain the stories of UK and European organisations and…