Author's Pick: My Twelve Favorite Posts From 2009

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2009-12-24 11:58:00 UTC
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Yesterday I posted the top viewed posts of 2009 from this blog. Today, I've dug back through the archives to find the posts that I liked best. Many of these flew below the radar, or represent issues that I care about but don't necessarily have widespread currency. In no particular order, my favorite posts of the year:

The Secret of Networking Is to Give Way More: All about building your social capital in advance by diligently sharing resources and helping people find what they need. (October 20)

Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Obvious: Four words that summarize how society views and then finally adapts to disruptive innovation. (October 2)

Can Silicon Valley Really Change The World?: A breakdown of some of the hyperbole that runs around the startup world. (September 18)

Why Give? Because Your (College Entrepreneur Friend) Asked: I wrote this after yet another group proposed a new idea to me about how they were going to change the way I donated online and I responded that no, I wasn't. (November 7)

Making The World Safe For Smart: Why TED Matters: Public intellectualism that invites everyone in - especially in the era of Glenn Beck - matters. (September 21)

Risk, Talent, and Why Some Become Entrepreneurs and Others Don't: Why safety needs and social capital are the vital currency we need to cultivate to unleash entrepreneurial capacity everywhere. (June 05)

When Society Expects Us To Fail, We Usually Do: How we create the environments in which people flop, and why we need to fix them. (August 10)

Stories Truer Than The Truth: The Brand of Social Entrepreneurship: Why we need to try to merge the brands of "social enterprise" and "capitalism." (July 01)

Overclass: The Problem of the Bootstrap Era: While it's good that startup nonprofits and companies are getting better at doing less with more, the "bootstrap era" we're in limits who gets to be an entrepreneur.(March 31)

The Weakest Critique of Social Entrepreneurship: Stop arguing that there need to be less nonprofits just cause there are so many already. Seriously. (February 14)

Founder's Syndrome: Using Steve Jobs and Apple as a lens through which to re-evaluate the way we treat founders in the social sector. (January 17)

The Nine Inch Nails Theory's of Entrepreneurship: All comes down to loving your fans. (January 08)

(Photo: jrobertshaw)

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
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