Center for Business Excellence

Our latest project is the Sustainable Leadership Forum, a membership organization with transformational programs and a unique Program Investment Fund that allows contributors to put their funds to work while maintaining some degree of control over them. The Center for Business Excellence is the vehicle for creating the Forum and its programs.

The CBE, created in 2004, largely suspended its activities when I began to foster the Sustainable Business Incubator within the Institute for Sustainable Enterprise at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

While this effort continues, it has become important to create and maintain an independent network of “sustainability champions,” that can in some sense drive a reality-based conversation that is larger than that of the College of Business. Societal sustainability requires the transformation of business, and of the individuals running them, and the first responsibility of the 21st-century business school is to teach these realities of marketplace and of its limits.

The Sustainable Leadership Forum represents a new form of collaboration. It is very much a hybrid “social enterprise,” in that it supports its members’ initiatives, both for-profit and non-profit. It is also its own best experiment in creating a sustainable organization, with a sustainable philosophy and method of operation. It recognizes the flaws in our present way of life, and engages in an inquiry as to how to remedy them. In this process there is a place for everyone interested in stepping up to leadership.

I therefore invite you to become part of it; we will be offering membership meetings, local chapters, and online opportunities to become involved, empowered, and engaged. Please check out the Forum’s web site, and stayed tuned for more details.

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Following several months of discussions, planning, and internal reviews, the Sustainable Business Incubator is now taking shape as a public reality. To see where we are today, please visit http://SustainableBusinessIncubator.com.

The Center is evolving to meet the new challenges – and take advantage of the new opportunities – offered by a renewed focus on sustainability. In the past year or so, with the release of An Inconvenient Truth, the transition to a Democratic majority in Congress, and the Bush Administration’s acceptance of the reality of global warming, there has been an extraordinary upsurge in business as well as popular interest. In conjunction with the Institute for Sustainable Enterprise at Fairleigh Dickinson University, the CBE is now creating a Sustainable Business Incubator.

For more information on this project, email jcloud@cbe-nj.org.

This activity would not be possible with a source of sustainable funding. In 2004, the Center for Business Excellence conducted a study called “Beyond Philanthropy,” which looked at new charitable models where organizations receive ongoing business revenues from some of their associated activities. Successful examples include for-profit/nonprofit partnerships, where the for-profit generates some form of income for the nonprofit, financial subsidiaries, and joint ventures.

We are currently working with the Institute to develop sustainable funding sources for the Incubator and other projects.

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