What if Richard Branson Managed Volunteers?

Why Richard Branson? Well my first answer will be "why not?". As Graham Allcott suggests in his book, How to be a Productivity Ninja, (highly recommended) looking at things through a lens that is completely different than our own can help us think of things in a new light and think of things we might never have otherwise. My second answer is that Richard Branson is a wealth of inspiration. It’s hard to deny the fact he is an accomplished individual. (If his accomplishments are unfamiliar to you, you can brush up on them at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Branson).

Like many volunteer departments, he started his path with no financial budget to speak of. He had a vision however, that he could build on small, early successes and grow continually from there.  He has not only found a way to make ends meet, but grow from roots in a youth oriented magazine he founded as a teenager to a multinational corporate powerhouse and world leader.  Your volunteer engagement doesn’t have to grow to the size of Branson’s employee base for his path of layering new successes on previous ones to be a source in innovation for you.

He has always maintained a “why can’t we do it” attitude that has also existed at the roots of so many volunteer efforts (despite an ongoing push in the sector to encase this attitude in bureaucracy… but I digress). He has, in many occasions, been the underdog that has demonstrated what is truly possible, despite being told it would never work. Branson was challenged by dyslexia, had difficulty learning to read, found himself at the wrong end of more than one scholastic whipping for failing in school, and when he got his first business off the ground as a teenager, it was halted by a postal strike far from his control.  Somehow he rose above all of these challenges to achieve significant business, personal and humanitarian successes.

We can’t accomplish everything we might want with our volunteer engagement and sometimes success in one area means taking resources away from another area and acknowledging a focus that means some desirable outcome won’t be met. Branson has had to make many difficult choices along the way, such as selling off one business to support the larger success of another.

His successes in life seem to come from (among others things) commitments to:

• Giving people what they want (when existing companies seem unwilling to do so) – Realizing that people (many of them youth) could not get approved for long term mobile phone contracts, he built the Virgin Mobile brand on meeting that need and pioneered the mobile pay-as-you-go concept.
• Never giving up – When a massive postal strike shut down his ability to ship the record albums he was selling, he shifted distribution to retail shops.
• Doing good – Virgin is committing substantial amounts of money to create greener fuels. Although it will benefit Virgins transportation companies in the long run, Branson sees decisions like this as imperative by all businesses if we are going to have a future to do business in at all.
• Being Innovative – In launching the music publishing arm of the Virgin companies, Branson signed the then unknown Mike Oldfield (debut album Tubular Bells included a track that became part of the Exorcist sound track) and the Sex Pistols because no one else would as they were too much like trouble makers. Both of these acts were an important piece of the foundation that grew into the powerhouse Virgin Music is today.
• Going for it – While finishing up a vacation, the flight operated by a tiny airline that was to take Branson and his fiancé, along with many others off the island got canceled. They were left stranded. Branson saw a charter company plane and booked a charter flight. Charging a portion of the charter fees to each of the others stranded, he essentially booked the first Virgin Airlines flight (long before there was a Virgin Airlines).
• Having fun – He has crossed oceans in a balloon, appeared apparently naked in Times Square (dressed in a naked looking costume with a phone where you’d expect something else, to promote “nothing to hide” phone contracts) and he knows how to turn off email from time to time.

So the question I propose that you consider in your own circumstance is, “What would Richard Branson do if he was managing the volunteers here at _______” Let’s take “donate millions” off the table right from the start and dig deeper into what morsels of his way of doing things could help propel our organizations forward.

• What do we subject our volunteers to that in a Branson influenced organization they would boldly promise not do?
• What challenge have you faced that seemed to be insurmountable until someone had an a-ha inspiration that then made it all possible?
• How big could your organization’s benefit from volunteer engagement grow to be if everyone involved saw it as boundless as Branson saw his future as a teenager?

Share your thoughts using the comments space below here or join in the chat on twitter using #ttvolmgrs

How are frogs like processes?

Both can make amazing leaps. You can too if you don’t needlessly weigh yourself down.

Let me begin by quoting a portion of a blog by Aleem Walji, Head of Global Development Initiatives, Google.org:

“Mobile is growing faster in Africa than in any other part of the world. While levels of internet penetration are well below 5% for the continent, nearly 40% have access to mobile phones and Nairobi sends more text messages in a single day than New York (a statistic frequently quoted in the region).”

You see, because land-line telephones have not typically reached rural Africa, there is no legacy system in place to act as a boat anchor – nothing to hold them back from adopting something new and better.

I have been aware of this phenomenon for some time, but it resurfaced in a very real way for me while presenting at the Asia Pacific Regional IAVE conference this past weekend. My presentation was on the Mission Points model of measuring the Return On Investment of volunteer engagement. The Mission Points model looks to supplant the outdated Wage Replacement model of measuring ROI, with something more aligned to the needs of today’s volunteer sector.

What fascinates me is that, although there were some concepts in the Mission Points model that the Asian participants will want time to digest, there was no sense of struggle with – or resistance to – the ideas presented. I can’t help but to think that the reason for this is similar to cell phones taking off in Africa. The Asian participants have not adopted the whole Wage Replacement model in the same way that the volunteer sector has in parts of the western world. Without an anchor to hold them back, they were free to look at something new and judge it solely upon its own merits; and they did not have to be concerned about what might be left behind in order to get it. (More information on the Mission Points ROI model can be found here at: www.volunteer2.com/ROI.)

So the point is, be very cautious of the “that’s-not-how-we’ve-always-done-it” attitude. While it is certainly true that not everything new is necessarily good, we should always be on the lookout for old processes that prevent us from looking forward.

Cloud computing is certainly one of those things that many people are wary of because it is a software model that they are simply not used to… yet. The writing is on the wall, and while I would never make a silly claim such as “it will be with us forever” (because nothing is these days), it is clearly the direction we are headed in for the next while.

At Volunteer² we asked ourselves questions around this ten years ago, when we chose not to develop a desktop version alongside our cloud based software. In retrospect, I am thankful to my team for convincing me that generating a desktop model would have been our own boat anchor – slowing down the development of what we know today as Volunteer Impact.