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Duane Kurisu embodies all that is great of a business man - and he is seemingly, to most if not all, an epitome of success. Duane started his entrepreneurial career in the real estate business at the age of 29. With former colleague Mike Fergus, they put together a partnership aptly named Kurisu & Fergus. Today, he owns a conglomerate of businesses - the AIO Group - which spans several industries including media, publishing and food manufacturing. Duane also owns a stake in companies such as Star Bulletin, MidWeek and the San Francisco Giants baseball team.

From employee to employer
Duane's University of Hawaii credentials would prove useful to his quest for career success, having obtained both his baccalaureate and MBA awards from the institution. His first taste of the corporate world came as an employee for the American Security Bank. Eventually, he was recruited by a man named Ron Petty who he worked with for seven years. Realizing his drive as a business person, Duane, along with Mike Fergus, started their real estate company in 1985. In a span of one year, they were able to accumulate a number of properties which expanded their business profile. As Duane explained, this was due to their focus and drive to succeed in their endeavor, which complements their humble approach to doing business.

"We went and bought a piece of property and then another and another. It was all based upon cash flows and how - like Mike and I would say we put our heads down and we really worked hard and one year later we looked up and we realized how many properties we had amassed, I mean - we never really kept count."

Subsequently, in the late 80s, Duane started to veer off from the property business to extend loans to Hawaii companies on the verge of breaking apart. This move could be seen as his first bid on social entrepreneurship - by keeping the local business community thriving.

"In 1988 and 89 there started to be this whole mergers and acquisition trend across the United States and people were buying companies then breaking them up. It came to Hawaii on a significantly smaller scale. So what we decided to do was, we wanted to keep companies, rather than having them break apart, so we had people come to us to invest in their companies to keep their companies intact."

Duane eventually took some time off and went fishing for three months, literally. The serendipitous break from his usual business activities brought him to realize his true passion - making a difference in other people's lives.

Hawaii Winter Baseball League
In 1992, Duane began working on HWBL - borrowing and revamping an already existing winter baseball league, albeit on the brink of collapse.

"This guy came to sell me season tickets for a winter league that was being started here in Hawaii and I thought ‘Wow, what a terrific idea.' Then the next time I saw the guy, he said that they were closing down, and pulling out."

"I decided to keep the league going," Duane explained. "I kept the president here and we took it to become an international baseball league  -  the first true professional international baseball league of its kind in the world," he added.

The best things that come out of the league stem from the camaraderie that it establishes between the US and international players that get involved. Duane said, "despite the cultural and language barriers, the top performing teams in HWBL were those with a mix of national and international talents." He theorized that it was due to the extra effort that each player had to exert to communicate with their teammates. Players in the HWBL spoke fondly of their participation in the league, like Ichiro Suzuki, who Duane quoted as saying that he pointed his success in the MLB to his involvement in Hawaii Winter Baseball.

As for Duane's entrepreneurial career, HWBL brought him to acquire a stake in one of MLB's most popular teams, the San Francisco Giants. The league also posed as a platform for his charitable involvement. One of their promotions engaged the league attendees to make ornaments while watching the game, which at the end of the match were collected and distributed to homes for the aged.

HWBL has been reborn and will launch a new season in the winter of 2006.

Make Your Life. Make a Difference
Duane's philanthropic bustle extends way beyond the ballpark. Microcosmically, his business principle revolves around the notion of self-discovery in his employees. Duane believes that to be able to help others, one must be able to initially help him or herself and instilling this in the workplace culture may prove, over time, beneficial to the community where they belong.

"Find out who you are and make your life count. Know what you want to be. Know that you really want to become a responsible person. And only from then can you make a difference. You've got to take care of yourself first before you can make a difference in other people's lives," he said.

"We actually have certain programs in our company that helps to encourage these things to take place. So one is I will say we call ‘My Life.' So each supervisor goes and talks to the employee to find out really what the employee's vision is five years from now and it's okay if that vision is outside of the company. So first there is all this trust building for the employee to really reveal what he or she feels and a lot of times it's self-discovery for the employees."

To fully capitalize on his employees' search for personal worth, Duane generously gives his workforce an option to take a one-week extended vacation, provided that it is used for discovering something new about themselves. This, he considers, "social leverage where output is exponentially greater than input - simply put, doing something locally that can be of significant impact to the bigger community."

"Some employees end up doing things solely for developing a personal skill, others have gone out and reached out into a community, because that's what they felt they always wanted to do. So when you talk about leverage, I kind of see that as leverage too. Leverage with employees, because really my true satisfaction is the success of each, when I see each, I really mean each of our employees."

A Philanthropic Upbringing
Duane Kurisu learned the value of humility, respect and care for other people as a child growing up in a plantation community. In this rural area of the Big Island, Duane's father, a machinist, and mother, a government employee, have instilled in him the morals that he now conjures as a social entrepreneur.

"My mother used to bring people home for dinner because she felt sorry that they had no one to eat with. My father would have the children catch O'pae in the stream for our friends and neighbors," Duane said. It was through experiences like those that Duane developed his sense of responsibility for others.

This community needs more leaders like Duane Kurisu.

For the full audio interview and transcript please visit greatergoodradio.com. Greater Good Radio airs every Saturday morning and Wednesday night on 1420 AM and online at www.greatergoodradio.com.