BretWagner.com

Few orga­ni­za­tions have been able to recruit such high-quality peo­ple into an orga­ni­za­tion, track their progress, then objec­tively eval­u­ate their per­for­mance to deter­mine who the best are. Teach For Amer­ica is one of these organizations.

I think the qual­i­ties that make a teacher excel­lent in the class­room trans­late very well to the startup world. There is a huge amount of auton­omy in the class­room of an urban or rural school. Set these for­mer teach­ers loose at a startup and they’d be unstop­pable forces.

Teach For Amer­ica uses the Teach­ing As Lead­er­ship frame­work as guid­ance for what excel­lent teach­ers do in the class­room.  It seems a nat­ural exten­sion, then, to apply this Teach­ing As Lead­er­ship frame­work to star­tups. You’ll see a ‘Frame­work for Star­tups’ in the next few weeks, tak­ing the most rel­e­vant pieces of TAL and fit­ting it into a new frame­work social entre­pre­neurs and tech­nol­ogy star­tups alike can use to pro­vide direc­tion to their efforts.

What­ever busi­ness you are in, think about this scary sta­tis­tic: 75% of all busi­nesses in the US depend 100% on the US con­sumer.  Amer­ica is a consumer-driven econ­omy, which is why things get rough when con­sumers keep their cash safely tucked away rather than spend it.

We should cel­e­brate the other 25% that have fig­ured out what it is that the rest of the world wants and are sell­ing it to them. Emerg­ing mar­kets are a sig­nif­i­cant oppor­tu­nity in the Amer­i­can econ­omy, one that should be pur­sued in the efforts of tran­si­tion­ing this 75% econ­omy with a more global one.