A few years ago I was asked a question by a lady who had worked for years at a high level in social enterprise - actually for one of the employee ownership apex bodies - and who was also then researching her Masters in Ethical & Responsible Tourism. Quite an expert in social enterprise in fact. She wrote:

I'm going to the Social Enterprise Conference in Cardiff next week.  On their registration form they have Charities and Social Enterprises listed in different delegate fee categories.  I thought that Charities (or more specifically their trading arms) are SEs?  Am I easily confused?

Of course I was already aware that the social enterprise movement had got itself into the most awful definitions mess – but it was this question that really convinced me of the bigger tragedy we were creating.  We had actually succeeded in taking our wonderfully clear and simple and popular message - that you can do business to do good - and muddying it up so thoroughly that hardly anybody could understand it.

This week I find myself once again mulling over the tragedy that is our movement's failure to communicate what 'social enterprise' really means.

A Guardian Online piece this morning worries that 'social enterprise' can mean more than one thing'. 

There's a big Linked-In discussion going on, set up by the question -

There has been a sudden re-eruption of controversy around the idea of a Social Enterprise Mark, first as a result of Dr Rory Ridley-Duff's research into the problems of applying the SEC/RISE mark to democratic businesses, then what amounts to the launch of an entirely new Social Enterprise Brand by Richard Patey and others.

I've just joined Richard Patey's Social Enterprise Brand Linked-in Group principally because I am interested in the 'collaborative community' development methodology proposed by the new brand, which seems to promise something much more rooted in the real values of social enterprise - which should encompass an entirely new participative and community-owned brand-paradigm.

However, I find myself on the sidelines of most of the discussion here and elsewhere, saddened by the overwhelmingly obvious fact of the matter: that all this mark stuff is causing division - inward-looking, energy-sapping, destructive division.

Solomon Linda (left) with the Original Evening Birds, 1941

The young man on the left of this picture is Soloman Linda.   You may have heard of him sometime over the last few years, though in his own lifetime, in his own century, you certainly wouldn't have.

Sometime in the late 1920s Soloman Linda wrote a song called 'Mbube' (um-boo-bay – Zulu for 'The Lion').  Although a talented musician, Soloman Linda couldn't read or write.   He and his wife lived on maize porridge and slept on a dirt floor,   They had 8 children, 2 of whom died as babies, one from malnutrition.

In the 1930s Linda got a job as a cleaner for the Gallo Record Company, where in 1939 he first recorded the song Mbube – and where in 1952 he signed over the copyright for 10 shillings – that would be about £1 now. When Soloman Linda died in 1962, at 53, his family couldn't afford a gravestone.

A new survey commissioned by UnLtd has found that if they had access to the right support about 1 in 3 people would like to be social entrepreneurs.

This is yet another confirmation of Dr Rebecca Harding's research on the numbers social entrepreneurs.  Her figures suggested some time ago that there are over 230,000 'hidden social enterprises' in the UK, and that over a third of all new entrepreneurs would like to be social entrepreneurs.

It is also another confirmation of the staggering scale of the opportunity we have - and this to me is the area where we really lack leadership (not, as Liam Black recently thought, in defending existing social enterprises).

Our focus on a few kinds of social enterprise - those that happen to fit an official definition, or can be used to forward a government agenda - is blinding us to a much bigger picture.

I've also previously mentioned in my blogs here and in the Guardian Online the Third Sector Research Centre papers on measuring the scale of UK social enterprise (September 2010) and on the construction of the 'social enterprise' concept (forthcoming).  These should have exploded once and for all the myth that there are only 62,000 social enterprises in the UK - yet I still hear this discredited figure trotted out by people who are supposed to be promoting social enterprise!

I talk a lot about Business Models in my training workshops.  I reject the Business Plan fetishism indulged so myopically by the likes of Business Link.  Business Plans have their place in some trades – but usually way down the list of ingredients for success.   Getting your Business Model right, however, is near the top.

Business Modeling is something you do in your imagination, and using few words.  A Business Model is a working mental model of the key relationships you have inside and outside the business.  It's the fundamental story you tell yourself about what you do – and tell others if you only have a few sentences.

I usually illustrate this with the story of the British slide-rule manufacturer who thought they were in the business of making slide rules.  They weren't – and when the electronic pocket calculator came along it wiped out the slide-rule business almost overnight (because, people below a certain age need to know, a slide-rule is, in fact, a pocket calculator).   At about the same time an unremarkable American manufacturer of office calculating machines and typewriters lit on the understanding that they were actually in the business of processing information.   That company was IBM, and they went on to become the biggest computer company in the world.

I asked a colleague recently if they liked my website - they thought for a bit before replying simply "Not many jokes" - so I thought I'd post this slide from my presentation at The Big Jump Conference yesterday, which some other colleagues found amusing...

I've posed the question elsewhere of whether the NHS Right to Request process actually led to ANY increase in the number of spin-outs to social enterprise – and not received a satisfactory answer.

Of course I know of a few cases claimed by the Right to Request process – my question is whether these, and possibly others, would have gone ahead, and maybe even been EASIER, without this 'support' intervention.  I certainly managed to keep one NHS externalisation last year out of the official process – which was completed very smoothly in just a few months thankyou very much.

Now I've just read the latest Third Sector Research Centre Working Paper on Social enterprise spin-outs from the English health service: a Right to Request but was anyone listening? by Robin Miller and Dr Ross Millar.   This should make uncomfortable reading for the NHS, and all those responsible for promoting the Right to Request.

I've been mulling over the stream of research findings over the last year or so around the way excessive public sector bureaucracy hampers the effective delivery of services – for example Professor Eileen Munro's recent finding that the safety of children is being compromised because social workers spend too much time on paperwork and targets.

I don't want to repeat here any of those Daily Mail kind of stories about the absurdity of some health and safety bureaucracy – though it is perhaps worth drawing attention to the government's recent attempt to get a sensible grip on all this through the Common Sense Common Safety report.

We all know about the inherent tendency of the public sector to get bogged down in bureaucracy.   It's hard to find anything new to say about it.  But one area in which social enterprise must keep on raising this issue is public sector tendering.