Ask Joe

Social entrepreneur John Marks developed a set of eleven working principles that have become his modus operandi and provide the basic framework for his new book, “From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship," from which a series of three articles is adapted. While Marks applied these principles in nonprofit work, he says they are also applicable to social enterprises—and to life, in general.

PART THREE

PRINCIPLE #8: PRACTICE AIKIDO. By nature, I am an impatient person, and I yearn for rapid solutions to problems that are tearing apart the planet. When I worked in the Middle East and the Democratic Republic of Congo, I witnessed widespread violence. Still, I understood that, even though Search was a comparatively large organization, it lacked the power to reverse events, and it was usually futile to take a confrontational stance. Literally and figuratively, screaming “STOP NOW!” only made matters worse. Instead, I adopted an approach rooted in the Japanese martial art of aikido: namely, when someone is attacked, they do not try to reverse the assailant’s energy flow by 180 degrees. That is the aim in boxing, where the goal is to knock the attacker backward. In aikido, the person under attack accepts the attacker’s energy, blends with it, and diverts it by ten or twenty degrees to make both people safe. For social entrepreneurs, this means accepting a conflict or problem as it is and working with it, transforming it one step at a time. Indeed, aikido makes a virtue out of necessity because almost no one has the power to win with adversarial tactics.