If Your Enterprise Changed Hands Tomorrow

A Field Session on the Ownership as Justice Canvas

Many founders design the product and the pitch with care and leave ownership for later. Later tends to arrive with the first outside check or the first offer to buy.

In this ninety-minute working session, Laurie Lane-Zucker, author of The Impact Entrepreneur Breakthrough, opens the Ownership as Justice Canvas from Chapter 4 of the book, and then you put it to work. On your own you will work out who owns, decides, benefits and carries the risk in an enterprise you know, and run the canvas’s Succession Test on it. Then, in a breakout room of four, each of you takes a turn, and the room helps you draft one provision that would make betraying your enterprise’s mission structurally hard.

Our guest, Doug Singer, is a partner at Falcon Rappaport & Berkman and chairs its Social Enterprise and Impact Investing Practice Group. When the rooms come back, he will say from his own practice what tends to hold when a buyer comes calling, and at what cost, with a few of the rooms’ drafts as examples.

Bring a company, a cooperative, a nonprofit or a portfolio company. The canvas is free to download from the book’s frameworks page, and you don’t need the book to take part. Registrants receive a short pre-reading brief on November 24.

IE Premium members attend free: choose the Premium Member RSVP. Tickets for everyone else are $25, or $12 for students and anyone on a low income. Your Zoom link comes with your ticket or RSVP. Nothing said in the session is legal or financial advice.

Premium membership starts at $18.50 a month and includes this session and every Deep Dive. The annual membership, at $200, also includes the book: a print copy within the US, an ebook code elsewhere. The book and its free companion materials are at impactentrepreneur.com/breakthrough.

About Breakthrough Field Sessions

The Impact Entrepreneur Breakthrough carries eighteen canvases in all, seventeen chapter canvases plus the cross-cutting Impact Diligence Canvas. Each is a single page that turns an argument from the book into questions you can put to a real enterprise. Breakthrough Field Sessions are where those pages get worked.

Every session takes one canvas, and every participant brings one enterprise. Laurie Lane-Zucker opens with the chapter’s argument and the canvas’s own test. You work the first moves alone, on paper, then take your case into a breakout room of four, where each person’s case gets a turn. The rooms bring back what they wrote, and a guest from the field responds from practice. A closing round gathers what each of you will carry forward.

You leave with a partly completed canvas and one written line about what you would change in the enterprise you brought. Sessions run ninety minutes on Zoom and are listed with IE’s Deep Dives.

How this session runs (all times Eastern)

• 12:00 Welcome, and Laurie’s opening on the chapter’s argument and the canvas’s own test.
• 12:10 A first round in the chat.
• 12:18 The canvas on screen, then six minutes alone with it, on paper.
• 12:27 A breakout room of four, where each person’s case gets a turn.
• 12:55 What the rooms found, and our guest’s response from practice.
• 1:13 A closing round on what you will carry forward, then a short poll.
• 1:30 An optional fifteen minutes for anyone who wants to keep talking.

Featured Guest

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