If you are in business, your primary aims are to produce and promote your products and to make money. Here two commentators add to that the idea of also being generous. The first is Masimba Biriwasha, a freelance writer and children’s book author from Zimbabwe and living in Thailand. He writes on Oh My News International, a training center for young journalists and on-line publishing opportunity based out of South Korea.

In How to Be a Generous Entrepreneur, Mr. Biriwasha gives tips about being generous in business such as ensuring that the business is financially stable before giving donations and considering the non-financial benefits that a corporation can provide to support charitable efforts. He also writes about including generosity as part of the business plan and is careful to caution against being charitable solely for the purpose of marketing and good public relations.  This balance between being charitable for its own sake, or the sake of the recipients, and for the sake of income for the company is interesting. Although Biriwasha  writes,

As part of this vision it must be clear to the entrepreneur that generosity is not some sort of a media stunt aimed at boosting the fortunes of the business. Generosity must be practiced in its own right and not as a hidden agenda.

he also writes,

In essence, generosity can open up new opportunities for the endeavors of the business person. At the same time, generosity has a boomerang effect which can help to propel the fortunes of a business.

Biriwasha’s last section is called Start Inside and in it he speaks to aligning the entrepreneur’s personal life with his corporate actions:

This is perhaps the important tip on developing a reputation as a generous entrepreneur because everything that a business does reflects the character and content of his or her life. When a paradox exists between an entrepreneur’s generosity and their private life, it can spell doom. The entrepreneur must always make a conscious effort to ensure that they are generous with employees and family. As the old adage goes, if it doesn’t begin in the home, it will not go far. Generosity must begin within the entrepreneur’s own organization.

Although Brirwasha is a young man and may have limited experience operating within a large company, he is reaching to grapple with issues that should be on the minds of everyone in corporate leadership. These are about the relationship between the corporation and the community it is part of and whether it should act altruistically or strictly in its own interests, even when being charitable.

Kevin Kelly helped co-found Wired Magazine about a decade ago and is now busy with 9 blogs on the web. One of them is The Technium, which is part of a book in progress about “the greater sphere of technology - one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types.” In a posting called Better Than Free, he writes about the internet as a giant copy machine, where information, images and sound is available in unlimited amounts. He states:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

Then Kelly gives 8 qualities of things that cannot be copied, and thus become valuable in a networked economy. They include immediacy, personalization, and findability. It is worth reading the whole article if you want to click on the link, because Kelly is making a case that our old economy will not work as it had because so many people have access to what they need, for free. He writes,

These eight qualities require a new skill set. Success in the free-copy world is not derived from the skills of distribution since the Great Copy Machine in the Sky takes care of that. Nor are legal skills surrounding Intellectual Property and Copyright very useful anymore. Nor are the skills of hoarding and scarcity. Rather, these new eight generatives demand an understanding of how abundance breeds a sharing mindset, how generosity is a business model, how vital it has become to cultivate and nurture qualities that can’t be replicated with a click of the mouse.

Who would have thought that advanced technology and the internet would bring us to a place where things that drive business income, that are financially valuable, “must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured”, like generosity? It will be interesting to see how this evolves beyond observation of current web phenomena and theory into a viable business model built around generosity.