Calling virtualization "the yellow brick road to the cloud," Staten recommends companies assess their own technological maturity and their adoption of virtualization in order to ascertain whether private cloud environments are the right move right now.

According to Staten, you're ready for the private cloud if you meet the following criteria:

1. You have standardized most commonly repeated operating procedures.
2. You have fully automated deployment and management.
3. You provide self-service access for users.
4. Your business units are ready to share the same infrastructure.

Staten notes that preparing your IT operations for Stage 4 will take many years, but says that moving to the cloud doesn't have to wait until then. Rather than a whole-scale switch, he recommends moving smaller projects and investments, such as development and testing, into the cloud. He also recommends outsourcing the internal cloud to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud provider - preferably one that will offer some training.

The popularity of social enterprise—business with a social mission—is surging. MBA courses on the subject are oversubscribed and the number of social enterprises is growing around the world. But it’s hard enough to start a successful business; founding a social enterprise that must compete in the marketplace and create social impact is an even taller order. That’s why few social enterprises have achieved substantial financial scale: decades after the first social enterprises were founded, there are few if any examples with revenues of $1 billion per year. For example, in annual revenue terms, Amul Dairy in India has just over $1 billion, BRAC in Bangladesh has $200+ million, and Grameen Bank, also in Bangladesh, has under $100 million. Perhaps there are a few other social enterprises in these leagues, but not many. By comparison, in India alone there are 124 traditional, profit-oriented businesses with over $1 billion in revenues.