The Weekend Business Challenge 2: the glorious results

NVSBS spent a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend in appreciation of our blessings and in speculation about corporate social responsibility. Now, with another WBD weekend behind us, NVSBS would like to present two articles about the practical implications of corporate social responsibility.

Today, we'd like to feature several words by Nikolay Safonov, CEO of NVS Business Solutions. Sasha's article on CSR will come in the next post on the NVSBS blog, so tune back in on Sunday, comment, subscribe, and enjoy the world of small opportunities for improvement.

The Internship Program that Might Save the World

Some can argue that corporate social responsibility can only coexist with diminished profit. I would like to offer a form of CSR that creates value for shareholders.

There are tons of high-school dropouts that end up in depressed sectors of economy with very little hope for social elevation. In the meantime, corporations suffer from high staff turnover, and consequential losses from the “Rookie effect”.

What if the corporations offer internship not only to university students, but to these outsiders too? Sounds crazy? But listen. When an internship is positioned as a “one shot” opportunity, disadvantaged applicants will take this opportunity to break away from their misery very seriously. Meanwhile, they will have a taste of the corporate environment, which can give them an impulse to go back to school.

In addition, during the internship they will acquire skills that are difficult to acquire in a different atmosphere. These will open up their choices in regards to employment.

Eventually, when the expertise gap is closed, high school drop-outs will be much more inclined to apply for a job in a fostering company.

As a result, everybody will win. The society will see the number of people living below a poverty line decrease. Companies will recruit loyal, skillful and dedicated staff.

A socially responsible extension- The Weekend Business Challenge

Due to the holiday weekend, Nick and I decided to extend the scond Weekend Business Challenge until this Thursday, December 2nd, 2010. We wish you a bright start to the new week, and we are hoping to hear more of your ideas about CSR. Ciao!

What is corporate social responsibility? The Weekend Business Challenge 2

Corporate social responsibility – which people also call by other interesting names like CSR, sustainability, and corporate conscience – is a model of business behavior that regulates a company in a way that aims toward generating benefit to the society. This CSR entails activities that range from making donations to nonprofit organizations and hosting recycling programs to making social responsibility the entire company's pivotal goal. In its strongest form, CSR runs next to social entrepreneurship. It is unclear however which form of CSR bring the most monetary profit, and whether it is appropriate for profit and social responsibility to stand next to each other in the same discussion.

After a brief break, NVSBS is coming back to challenge your minds with a new Weekend Business Challenge. This time, we would like to hear your ideas fire up into a discussion of corporate social responsibility. Do you believe that CSR is necessary in the modern world or, rather, that it creates inefficiencies that hurt society? We'd like to hear every one of your ideas about how to best implement sustainability in a corporate environment.

When I think about CSR, my mind inevitably arrives at the thought that today, too many businesses participate in their actions because they think they are supposed to. Too companies create environmental sustainability programs because of a lack of better ideas. Unless your firm transforms the wind into energy, these commitments to alien goals will not be able to bring much benefit.

So what should we do? You tell me, and I will tell you.

This challenge will run until Sunday, November 28^th. Once we have all your submissions on the twenty-eighth, I will read and feature them in the post for that day. Also, I will answer my own questions and I expect that our collaboration will leave everybody with fresh ideas and satisfaction from spreading wisdom and increasing the world's well-being meter as a team.

The results are in!

We are very proud to announce that the first NVSBS Weekend Business Challenge is officially over! Give yourselves some applause, because everybody who participated (even if they didn’t send in anything) should be proud. We thank you for being with us to witness the Weekend Business Challenge’s first step.

This week’s topic was the Pareto principle, or the idea that an average endeavor gets eighty percent of its results from only one-fifth of the time and money investment that it receives. This 80-20 rule concept is fairly simple. However, we asked you to think of additional applications for it, and think you did.

What is the 80/20 rule? The Weekend Business Challenge.

The Pareto principle, also called the eighty-twenty rule, is a movement of management thought that has been in development since the 1900s. The gist of the principle is simply that, in general, 80% of your sales income comes from 20% of your clients. This idea can be further expanded into the notion of a general effort-result distribution. That means that no matter how much one works, only about one-fifth of one's efforts go into generating the most of the results he sees. The rest of the energy, unfortunately, goes into less productive endeavors.

The principle has been widely applied to sales management as well as marketing, but that doesn't mean that you cannot get creative and see use of it anywhere else. After all, as an entrepreneur, your task is to find new applications for existing resources. So go ahead; think about 80/20; we are rooting for you. All the while, today's post is going to be fairly short. Instead of giving away all the secrets at once, we are giving extra credit to all of you who participate. Do some research, ask your coworkers, or just think about the information that we have given you already.

Leave a comment with your thoughts about the implications of the Pareto principle and how it applies to your professional life. Do you think it works? Which part of your workday do you think is affected by this rule? Then we will recap the challenge and write down our own thoughts about the 80/20 rule on Thursday, October 21, 2010.The best responses that we get from the participants will be featured in the post on that Thursday.

Keep in mind: your input doesn't have to be a Nobel-prize winning work. All we want is help you start applying theory to the work that you (yes; you!) are striving to accomplish these days. Here are some resources to get yourself started:

• Basic Pareto's Principle on About.com lays down some theory
• An intriguing explanation uses animation as a graphic example for the rule.

We are looking forward to your participation! Even though this challenge will run for a week, we will still run on schedule, so check back for a new article this Sunday. We believe in you!