Mission Accomplished?

I've always felt that the greatest victory would one where Akasaa would have felt it had done its job and be able to close its doors and call it a day. When we would have served our purpose for existence and created enough momentum for the tides of change to carry on its own path. 


In fact, it's in built as one of our internal strategies that we would hand over intellectual property and our knowledge base to communities once we've successfully proven that our social enterprise model of business and financial metrics can bring organisations and other social enterprises to economies of scale. 


Oh yeah, but that day hasn't come yet, with the spate of intellectual property (IP) violations we've been facing the past year with the Awake Minds training and our other publication, Answering is an Art... can any social enterprise or regular business make any major headway in the midst of plagiarism and lack of respect for people's ideas? To read one of our major challenges this year as social enterprise on the IP front, click here.


But here's a great story on the New York Times and hopefully, we'll be able to say that same for Akasaa in the future, Mission Accomplished. The pitfall for any founder of a business or organisation is the sense of ownership over it. To feel that somehow we are the keepers the legacy. 


Even Peter Benensen, founder of Amnesty International, resigned from the human rights organisation he founded - that's what happens when founders find it difficult to let go and perhaps the generation that took over the helm didn't live up to the spirit in which it was founded. 


The reality is, nothing is yours, even the things you conceptualise and build with your two hands. We all leave the way we came. But it's still nice to look forward to that distant Someday: dust your hands and say, "Mission Accomplished".


Au revoir, for now.