This is the second installment in this year’s Bernie memorial series. Remembering Bernie, the lessons of social entrepreneurship are so fresh. Approaching “the double bottom line,” profit and social benefit, most business people struggle with “doing good for others.” My journey took me in the opposite direction. Profit, the traditional first bottom line of business, was hardly on my radar until we were about to open our first school. That was the moment when a friendly autho

We are less than two weeks from Bernie ’s memorial. It will be seven years that he’s gone, a long time and no time at all. Planning for this year’s remembering, we’ve been talking about Bernie the Social Entrepreneur and looking at some of the old videos. Old lessons have come back to me.   By the time, I met him, Bernie was already quite the social entrepreneur, embracing business as a vehicle for doing good for others. The Greyston Bakery was a flourishing enterprise – they

It’s my Hamlet koan, found of all places, in two books resting on my shelf. We find our koans, those apparent paradoxes to which we return again and again as we work to free ourselves from our conditioning, in the strangest places. I found many of my koans, plowing through the 300-odd in four hallowed collections with Roshi Bob . I found some in lines of liturgy which is not surprising. Others I found in unexpected places. Here’s one I found by putting together two book title