Lucky Iron Fish is a certified B Corp working to improve health around the world, starting in Cambodia. They’ve made a short video, with the help of Google, to tell their organization’s origin story. The video is a great two-minute organizational narrative example that uses the five parts of Joseph Campbell’s mythological story form to...Continue reading
Low-income kids fall behind during the summer, not just academically, but in health and nutrition as well. When school is out, students lack access to free school lunch. How do communities distribute free school lunch to these 21 million children when they aren’t in a central location such as the neighborhood school?
In business school, we poured over case studies about how companies solved, or didn’t solve, a particular challenge. So here’s a challenge for you: how would you use existing products, distribution channels and means of promotion in health marketing to improve nutrition in one of the largest and richest countries in the world?Continue reading
One popular post on this blog covers the villains, victims and heroes in organizational storytelling. This triad of characters has driven stories for thousands of years. Starting in the 1800s with authors such as Edgar Allen Poe and Wilkie Collins, writers focused on the theme of crime using a specialized triad of characters: criminal, victim,...Continue reading
More golf courses have closed than opened since 2006, according to Bloomberg. Many a failed municipal golf course opened during the stock market bubble of the 1990s and the housing market bubble of the 2000s, only to suffer during the Great Recession. In 2013, 14 new courses opened in the U.S. while 157 courses closed.
School’s out for the summer, but it’s not always a happy time for kids. For students participating in the federal free and reduced lunch program, summer time can mean going hungry. Many schools continue to offer subsidies meals during the summer, but not all students can trek to school during the summer when buses are...Continue reading
Here’s a puzzle: an estimated 33 to 40 percent of food produced in the U.S. is wasted, and yet at the same time, one of six Americans are classified as food insecure, meaning that they lack reliable access to affordable, healthy food.
Elinor Ostrom‘s great book Governing the Commons describes how one community in Japan managed its common mountain forestry for hundreds of years using local traditions instead of government rules. But can government rules help revive commons farming in Japan?
Heifer International is a non-profit that helps impoverished families gain access to livestock such as chickens, goats, and bees. Livestock provides both food and marketable products, helping end both hunger and poverty, which supports Heifer International’s mission “to work with communities to end hunger and care for the Earth.”
In this blog, I’ve talked about the distribution of goods and services, one of the pillars of marketing. I’ve also talked about fairness and inequality, which are closely related to distribution. But when it comes to the public good, maybe that’s all more complicated than it’s need to be. Maybe we just need to be...Continue reading