How 25 Teen-Trepreneurs Succeeded And Left World Leaders Scratching Their Heads
Written by Sabirul Islam
Never before has the voice of youth been as powerful and as meaningful as it is today. From witnessing the London Riots all the way to the Arab Spring. The future rests up on young people coming together, making a statement and creating a better way of life for themselves. Rather than solely rely on decisions made by a generation of leaders whose policies and ideologies do not fully reflect the true need of today’s youth.
Young Entrepreneur World contains interviews with 25 of the world's most influential young entrepreneurs, youth activists and changemakers with a vision to create positive change. Their interviews deliver empowering messages on a personal, business and political scale. The book shares their success stories and how they got to where they are today. It also challenges the unwanted statement of whether today's youth are a lost generation.
How can young people today plan for a better future for themselves? What options do they have and how can they embark upon an entrepreneurial life? Will the youth of today be left behind by society and will many struggle to get into higher education, seek employment and earn a healthy living? These are just some of the questions which this book provides insights and answers to. The solution is simple...bringing together the world'
Especially as we are now in a time where communication and commerce is global, investment is mobile, technology is instant and ambition for a better life is universal.s most influential young people who have been able to break out of the 'lost generation' shell is vital as it is they who will lead the way to inspiring, guiding and educating the youth of today. It is possible for young people to achieve success even in these times of doom and gloom.
The Young Entrepreneur World provides a global insight as to the beliefs of today’s youth, we stand united when we say “NO to oppression, YES to freedom, No to corruption and bad policy and YES to transparency and opportunity.
The leaders profiled come from all over the world. Europe, the US, Asia and Australia and started their journeys from their teenage years. This book will challenge and inspire young people across the world to break out of their comfort zone and create a successful and fulfilling future for themselves.
Social Enterprise, Innovation Converge At The Skoll World Forum
Written by Jake Hayman
The 2011 Skoll World Forum, held March 30 through April 1 in Oxford, England, United Kingdom, provided a unique insight into the battle for language being played out across the social enterprise space. A forum that began with standing ovations for a man who was not even on the stage, Bill Drayton of Ashoka, was subsequently dominated by audience after audience that pushed their panels beyond the boundaries of social enterprise as it has been known.
Social enterprise has been a fluid term since its inception. In its early days social innovators, who took entrepreneurial approaches that did not necessarily involve revenue generation, sought to lay claim to the aspirational label. In the US, many still do.
Muhammed Younis’s definition took popular understanding forward, demanding that a social enterprise include at least aspirations of financial self-sufficiency through revenue generation. He also demanded a commitment to reinvest profits in growth, in social impact.
Now the social purpose business leaders - who reserve the right to make unrestricted private profit out of or whilst ‘doing good’ and impact investors,who want to invest for profit in social organisations - are seeking to stretch the movement, and this cherished title, to a point where it is comfortable with profit.
This year’s Forum was more dominated by commercially minded impact investors and social-purpose business leaders than any other. The halls were crowded with conversations about opportunities to make money by doing good as much as how to finance good works alongside the traditional conversations amongst those who are set on doing good regardless and would like to find a way to make this self-sustaining.
The language of the impact investors presumes both ends of this spectrum are in the tent but the definition between them is very simple: are you ‘impact first’ or ‘finance first’?
The indefatigable Archbishop Desmond Tutu was the Forum’s guest of honour and it was primarily representatives of non-profit organisations that took the Skoll Awards, but the atmosphere in the corridors was one where the fault line around private profit was far from clear.
The major problem with allowing social businesses to call themselves social enterprises is that the ‘social’ refers to a motivation rather than a concrete tenant of a business. Social businesses are self-defined organisations – businesses that were set up to do good and make private profit.There is no insurance against abuse of the term, nothing stopping a ‘social entrepreneur’ (as they would have it) set up an old people’s home ostensibly to provide care but then maximize profit at the expense of basic support for residents.
In the case of social business it is the motivation that protects customers and beneficiaries over the structure of the organization.
At this Skoll Forum, for the first time perhaps, confidence and good faith was put into profit making enterprises and entrepreneurs on the basis that those at the Forum are qualified, beyond any others, to ‘know it when they see it’ when it comes to social enterprise. Jake Hayman is the CEO of The Social Investment Consultancy, (www.tsiconsultancy.com), a firm consulting across the social enterprise spectrum.
"Shop Girl Diaries" Blogger Enjoys Being An Auspicious Author
Written by Nadia Di Martino
Emily Benet
Last month, Emily Benet won the overall award for Best Author Blog with her Shop Girl Diaries, which she started writing in her mother’s ‘light shop’ in South London, and has since become a book.
She was with Paulo Coelho and Neil Gaiman among the 28 authors shortlisted for the inaugural Author Blog Awards, run by CompletelyNovel.com and ex-SYP chair Jon Slack, in partnership with publishers including the Random House Group, Simon & Schuster and Penguin.
“I didn’t think I’d still be working in my Mum’s chandelier shop at 24.” is how her book starts. Salt Publishing, which released the book in December, describes Emily as “doing for chandeliers what Bridget Jones did for publishing.”
How has Emily gone from being a shop assistant to giving talks at Birkbeck College in London, publish a book and film a TV pilot for which she has co-written the script?
“I have kept a diary since I was a kid. I was reading one just recently. ‘This is the idea for my novel and I am going to publish it’, it said at one point. I was only 9 at the time!” she says.
For South African filmmakers, the 2000’s may be remembered as the decade where their contributions to film were recognized far beyond their borders.
In 2005, Tsotsi became the first South African film to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Tsotsi is about a gang leader who steals a baby from a mother whose car he stole. Interestingly, the film’s director, Gavin Hood, went on to direct X-Men Origins: Wolverine, released in May 2009.
In August 2009, District 9 premiered in theatres. Promotion for this film can best be summed up in three concepts: aliens, Johannesburg, and producer Peter Jackson, best known as director of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. District 9’s sci-fi interpretation of South African apartheid was widely praised as one of the most original films to come along in years. And, the film was comprised mostly of South African cast and crew.
The success of District 9 arguably put the South African film industry on the map for good. And even though building it up to becoming an industry that can compete and exist on the same playing field as Hollywood and Bollywood won’t happen overnight, it is possible with the kind of talent S.A. is starting to foster.
Public Figure Probes Swaying Between Public Interest and Paparazzi
Written by Nadia Di Martino
Stephen Whittle is a Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Oxford University. (Courtesy photo)
Over the last few years, the media has drawn more and more attention to the private lives of public figures. There seems to be a trend toward said figures’ sexual habits.
Whether it is the scandal of former U.S. President Bill Clinton or the one Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi currently faces, what stands out as unequivocal is the fragile and often conflicting connotation that ‘private life’ and ‘public interest’ have come to assume.
The fact is that we are not always able to tell when we are in front of “peeping-tom” kind of media, and when instead conscientious journalists are working in the public interest. This becomes especially urgent given the challenges that new media (i.e. Facebook) poses to the concept of privacy, juxtaposed with our celebrity-obsessed culture.
In the attempt of giving this conundrum a solution, Stephen Whittle, journalist and former BBC Controller of Editorial Policy, and Glenda Cooper, consulting editor at the Daily Telegraph, sought to highlight the right to a private life in their study “Privacy, probity and public interest” published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford (RISJ) in July this year.
For one year Whittle and Cooper spoke to lawyers, academics, journalists, bloggers, those who have found their privacy invaded by the media and those who have crossed the line themselves.
The Leader World interviewed Stephen Whittle to understand his point of view on relevant current affairs where private sexual habits have been exposed in the name of ‘public interest’.
Never before has the voice of youth been as powerful and as meaningful as it is today. From witnessing the London Riots all the way to the Arab Spring. The future rests up on young people coming together, making a statement and creating a better way of life for themselves. Rather than solely rely on decisions made by a generation of leaders whose policies and ideologies do not fully reflect the true need of today’s youth.
The 2011 Skoll World Forum, held March 30 through April 1 in Oxford, England, United Kingdom, provided a unique insight into the battle for language being played out across the social enterprise space. A forum that began with standing ovations for a man who was not even on the stage, Bill Drayton of Ashoka, was subsequently dominated by audience after audience that pushed their panels beyond the boundaries of social enterprise as it has been known.
