You have to be very careful. If you over-commercialize a social mission, it completely loses its soul.
Interpretation
Commercializing a social mission can undermine its core values.
This quote suggests that the essence of a social mission can be compromised if it becomes too commercialized. The act of prioritizing profit over purpose can lead to a loss of authenticity and the original intent behind the mission, emphasizing the need for balance between financial sustainability and social impact.
In practice
Using this quote in a social entrepreneurship conference to highlight the importance of maintaining values.
We need to understand the other side to impact the other side. We become much more effective as humans and leaders when we engage in hearty conversations with those who are different from us, not necessarily to change our opinions, but to build the empathy muscle.
Civilized discourse demands critical thinking, self-reflexiveness, sober-headed analysis.
The ideal is to build a culture of healthy discussion, where everyone's ideas are valued. At KIND, we want everyone to be comfortable challenging my or anyone else's ideas without ever feeling or making someone else feel that the questioning is a personal attack.
My dad had this incredible kindness that oozed through every part of his body. He had the ability to look at life positively in spite of what he went through. He was a Holocaust survivor. When he was 15-1/2 years old, he was liberated from the Dachau Concentration Camp by American soldiers who risked a lot to save people they had never met.
To maintain our entrepreneurial spirit, we have to create a culture in which everyone remembers that every order, big or small - and every interaction, every moment - will define what our company is today and what it will become tomorrow.
The rule of law, democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of expression - we cannot take them for granted. They do not exist willy-nilly across the world; they are very rare.
We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.
...It all seemed to him to have disappeared as if behind a curtain at a theater. There are such curtains that drop in life. God is moving on to the next act.
God is not something I think about but something I experience as an energy, a Presence. I do find it easier to pray to a female Presence or an androgynous Presence.
All religions accept that there is something called 'criminality.' And criminality cannot be excused by religious fervour.
The Contessa was surely way ahead of her time, too, in believing that men were not only usless and idiotic, but downright dangerous. That idea wouldn't catch on big in her native country until the last three years of the Vietnam War.
We must remember that Islam is not an enemy, and we have no war with Islam.
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