Category: Generosity

No Soup for You

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

I was having a light-hearted disagreement with a colleague about the loyalty card programs of the lunch places across the street from Acumen – the cards where you get 10 punches / stamps and get a free lunch. Some of them, like Chelsea Thai, allow you to combine different cards, so if you don’t always have your card with you, you can still get a stamp and combine cards. Others, like Hale & Hearty Soup, have a strict policy: no combining of cards.

The disagreement was whether there’s a meaningful difference between the two.

I discovered the intricacies of the Hale & Hearty stamp card policy a few years back when I showed up with two soup cards, one with 6 stamps and one with 4. Those two cards represented a good deal of concerted soup-eating effort on my part. Proudly, at the front of the line, I presented my two cards only to be told that the policy was “No combining cards.”

No (free) soup for me.

To be clear, I could get a free soup when I presented ONE business-card-sized piece of card stock with 10 little ink stamps on it, but not two separate cards adding up to 10.

From that moment, I stopped collecting Hale & Hearty Soup stamps.

Now, one could easily (and convincingly) argue that it’s not too much to ask that I keep track of that one card. That’s probably true. But I wonder about the culture of an organization that enforces that kind of rule, one where employees cannot make a call to say “yes” to a customer who is showing up and vouching for their own loyalty to your store.

Dov Seidman, author of How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything…in Business (and in Life), conducted a survey of 5,000 managers and executives in the US, to understand their values and behaviors. From that survey, he grouped companies into three categories:

Companies in the first group, called “blind obedience,” rely on coercion, formal authority, policing, and top-down command-and-control leadership. The second group, “informed acquiescence” organizations, have clear-cut rules and policies, well-established procedures, and performance-based rewards and punishments — the standards of high-quality 20th-century management. The third group, organizations with “self-governance,” are the most farsighted organizations, best positioned to thrive in an interdependent world. People at all levels of the company are trusted to act on their own initiative and to collaboratively innovate; a shared purpose and common values guide employee and company behavior.

I’d pretty much forgotten about my Hale & Hearty frustrations until last month when, on my way to India, I had a short, groggy layover in London’s Heathrow airport. I found my way to a Pret a Manger, my new favorite London destination, and began searching in vain, amongst the throng of coffee-starved travelers, for oatmeal (“porridge”). I waved and gesticulated a few times to the cashier, asking her where to find it, and she kept on pointing me to the same spot. Then, finally, she stepped out from behind the register, looked for herself, and realized that they were fresh out of porridge.

Immediately upon returning to the counter, she not only apologized to me, she offered me a latte on the house! Her decision was so quick and made with so little hesitation that I couldn’t help but wonder if she was bending the rules or whether, even in such a big chain the front-line employee is given the freedom to delight a customer.

It turns out that this is how Pret works, that their philosophy is all about team and front-line employees and about delighting their customers. Which would be quaint if Pret were a mom n’ pop shop, but in fact it is majority-owned by a private equity firm, it has more than 350 stores, nearly $1 billion in revenues, and it’s growing like gangbusters.

Maybe, just maybe, the follow-all-the-rules-or-you’ll-get-fired approach to management is starting to show its colors as the un-enlightened, underperforming approach it seems to be.   Because while there’s no doubt that most people would rather work somewhere where their job is to make other people happy, we’re starting to see more and more (and more) examples of how the by-the-numbers approaches are revealed for what they truly are: races to the bottom.

Why I (like everyone) gave to ALS while on vacation

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

A friend and colleague asked me.

It was personal and I didn’t want to let him down.

It was (a little bit of) a challenge to how macho and bold I could be.

It was public.

Turning something like this down, given who I am and my values, would be just a little bit shameful.

Everyone was doing it.

It was fun.

I could talk to my kids about it and get them involved in it.

It was easy and quick to do.

I could share it with friends in a way that felt totally positive – without putting them out. In fact, many friends said “Thank you! I was hoping to be challenged.”

It incorporated video, and allowed me, in 30 seconds, to create a video I was happy to post and that I knew would be entertaining (no edits, no storyboards, no nothing).

Did I mention how fun it was?

That’s a pretty good list to choose from for how you fundraise. I’m positive you won’t hit all of these, but if you’re hitting none of them then you’re pushing a rope uphill.

And the really tricky bits that I can’t stop thinking about are:

I did give to ALS, but most people won’t. That’s totally fine as long as what you create is huge.

The specifics of the organization I was giving to, and the cause, didn’t matter. This would have worked for any cause.

I talked to my kids about ice water not about ALS.

Pretty quickly my head starts to swirl about ends and means, whether (some? all?) philanthropy should be fun and what is lost when it is fun (and what doesn’t happen when it’s not).

When giving is more like eating dessert than it’s like eating your vegetables, is that a problem? Certainly not, today, for the folks suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

(and for those keeping track, the ALS Association has now raised nearly $100 million from 3 million donors…versus about $23 million last year).

What if he’s conning me?

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

“What if this story this guy is telling me isn’t true? What if he, 70 years old, scraggly hair, sitting in a wheelchair, knee brace on his left leg, with a couple of bags and a book on his lap, didn’t really lose his place in Hurricane Sandy? What if that’s not what pushed him over the edge and shoved him back into a life of homeless shelters and benefits checks that don’t go far enough?”

Sure, that goes through my head.

But as I stand there listening I cannot help but stand face-to-face with my own good fortune, all the challenges I don’t face every day, all the barriers that aren’t in my way.

So, instead, I endeavor to think, “maybe this is a chance to help. Maybe a little bit will make a difference. Maybe experiencing the indignity of asking for money on the subway is something that this articulate guy shouldn’t have to go through.”

Maybe the chance to help even a little is a chance worth taking.

Aristotelian virtues

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Recently, I had the pleasure of spending two days with Acumen’s class of 2014 Global Fellows.  These Fellows, a group of truly outstanding individuals from around the world who are committed to social change in the developing world, spend two months with Acumen training in New York before working for nine months with Acumen’s companies in India, Pakistan, East and West Africa.  While at their placements, they do things like run the sesame business for Gulu, a company serving more than 40,000 smallholder farmers in post-conflict Northern Uganda; or helping d.Light expand its solar lighting business in Nigeria.

One of the foundational elements of the Fellows’ training is the Good Society readings.  Based on the work of the Aspen Institute, the goal of these sessions is to give Acumen Fellows – who have committed to a life of social change work – the opportunity to take a step back and reflect on the moral and philosophical traditions that they are a part of.  Questions like: what is your view of human nature? How do you feel about tradeoffs between equality and efficiency?  How do we build a good and just society?

These are heavy readings, and the Fellows did amazing work grappling with the likes of Hobbes and Rousseau, and Plato.  They had heated discussions about the worldviews of Aung San Suu Kyi and Lee Kuan Yew, building upon a deep conversation of the impact and value of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written just after World War II.  They dissected the masterful use of rhetoric and the display of moral imagination in Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, by far one the most inspiring pieces of writing I’ve ever studied.

Near the end of the two days, we took up a discussion on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, a piece I had never read.  As I waded through the difficult, mostly obtuse 2,000-year-old writing, I came across a passage that summarizes more clearly than I could one of the main underpinnings of my worldview:

The virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well.  For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

–          Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Ch. 1

What Aristotle understood, two millennia, ago is that it is the actions we take that define and build our character, not the other way around.  This is the reason for a sustained practice of generosity, of humility, of audacity.  This is why being kind in small ways opens our hearts to others in big ways, why taking care to be our best selves in each interaction can transform us over a period of months and years.  It is why reflection around our core values combined with deliberate cultivation of behaviors and habits that we cherish can lead to profound change.

“We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”  Indeed we do, and it through deliberate practice that we become the people we aspire to be.  And while it may be the case that our greatest heroes were born different from the rest of us, it may also be that they started practicing just or brave or temperate acts early on, and stuck with it for a lifetime.

You can too.

How generosity touched you

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

Not long ago, a group of senior executives asked me to speak to them about generosity.  So I started the conversation by asking each of them to share what generosity meant to them.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, but what I heard back were examples of niceties – I volunteered a bit here, I helped someone with something there.  It was probably my mistake to open a conversation with a new group and expect that folks would take the opportunity to be vulnerable.  I should have laid the groundwork first.  Nevertheless, it was telling.

At times I’ve been surprised with negative reactions to talk of generosity and Generosity Day.  That day – hearing example after example of nice, kind, but mostly peripheral acts of generosity from a group that I knew had much deeper stories to tell – helped me understand what was going on in a new light.

I’ve been purposely exploring generosity for nearly five years now, and while I humbly admit that my own practice of generosity is still very much a work in process, my points of reference when hearing the word “generosity” are profound, textured, nuanced, and potentially very deep.  Generosity and giving are cornerstones of cultural practices dating back thousands of years; they are bedrocks of all the major religions; generosity is one of the five yamas in the eight-limbed path of yoga!

That’s the opposite of small, the antithesis of trite.

Nevertheless, just because that is my experience of generosity does not mean that is what others hear.  If someone’s conscious engagement with generosity is limited, when they hear talk of “generosity” their minds can naturally avoid things that are deep, grounded, or profound.

If I could restart the conversation I had with that group of executives, I would ask a different question.  Not “what does generosity mean to you?” which somehow got people to talk about when they had been generous, but “when has someone else’s generosity made a difference in your life?”  I’ve been amazed with how consistently I hear poignant stories of generosity when people are freed to answer this question.  People see others’ better angels.  Small, fleeting acts from decades ago are revealed to be seminal milestones in peoples’ lives.

I just heard about an effort to raise $60,000 on Indigogo to produce a movie called The Perfection of Giving.  I thought the trailer looked good and that you might want to check it out.

If I have one wish for the project, it would be that it move beyond the more obvious focus – how a practice of generosity transforms the giver – and delve deeper into how acts of generosity changed the lives of recipients (and, equally interesting, to uncover the countless acts of generosity practiced daily by people who do not, by external appearance, seem to have a lot to give).  I know all good stories need a protagonist, I just think the message is most powerful when we can share others’ stories, rather than describe our own experience of transformation.

So: when has generosity touched you?

Perfection of Giving

I am generous when…

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

My daughter made this poster for a project in her Kindergarten class.  The assignment was to finish the sentence: “I am generous when…”

In case it’s hard to read: “I am generous when I have a lot of books and my little sister wants some I let hear her have some.”

Life used to be simple and we made it complicated.

Makes me think about finishing that same sentence from time to time.

Zoe_generous

Generosity Q&A

~ Sasha ~ 7 Comments

Edna Rienzi, one of the amazing Generosity Day volunteers, asked to me to do a short Q&A about generosity and Generosity Day (below).  She also shares her own beautiful, honest story in her blog post about her own exploration of generosity – and how learning about vulnerability from Brene Brown helped her understand the fear that she experienced with her own generosity experiment, and helped her reengage with generosity in a new way.

I’m so looking forward to reading all the generosity stories that get shared between now and February 14th.

Q: Generosity is…

Opening your heart, being courageous, creating connection, living a life of service.

Q: What is something you know now about generosity that you didn’t know before your generosity experiment?

A lot. Honestly I’d never given any proper thought to generosity before my generosity experiment and I never thought of it being particularly important. That is, I always admired generous action but I never understood how foundational generosity could be in our relationships, how it is the foundation of all philanthropy and social change work, how all the major religious traditions have generosity as a core foundational pillar, etc.

I find that we walk through the world deciding what to notice. So before I had kids, I never really noticed kids. And once I became a father I saw strollers everywhere! It’s been the same with generosity. Once I started paying attention to generosity, I started seeing it everywhere.

Q: Did your generosity experiment change your behavior in any lasting ways?

It did, but it really was the first steps down the path. I’d love to say that I’m radically altered, but I think change takes time. I’m naturally a highly analytical person, and I think that mindset can create separation. I see people who don’t have to overcome this like I do and I really admire them. That said, like everything in life it is a practice, and by creating a different intention and by creating space for a new orientation, I have seen changes big and small. I’m keeping at it.

Q: In your blog, you wrote that you believed that Generosity Day struck a chord with people because everyone is hungering for more connection and more meaning. What do you think makes connection and meaning more difficult to attain in today’s society?

At least in the West right now, we’re all so hyper-connected, hyper-busy. We’re running around with our heads buried in our devices and our inboxes overflowing. So on one hand we’re more in touch than ever, but it also feels to me like we’ve created so much separation. It’s so easy to tune out the world around us these days, and in some sense I feel like in doing so we’re denying our basic humanity.

Q: How do you respond to critics who say that it is irrational to give just because someone asks? Some, for example, would argue that it’s a more effective use of your money to donate to a homeless shelter than to give to someone begging on the street.

Of course it’s irrational to give just because someone asks! I don’t think giving starts with rationality, I think it starts with expressing a purpose, acknowledging abundance, and confronting the terrifying notion that you (the giver) and the person who receives your gift are not so different from one another.

What I think confused some people about my generosity experiment was that they might have understood me to be saying that everyone should give to everyone always. I don’t believe that. But I also believe that if you never pick up your head when someone asks for help, if you never actually see the person right in front of you with their hand out…well then you’ve lost a tiny piece of your humanity.

I see a lot of parallels between my generosity experiment and my yoga practice (which was pretty regular up until last year when my third child was born!) So much of yoga is about teaching yourself, through repetition, to unlearn patters of thought and reaction that you’ve taught yourself over decades. So while it’s not actually important to be able to contort your body into some strange position and not panic, it’s really important to learn how to be in stressful situations and stay grounded. The yoga poses are practice for real life. Similarly, I wanted to create a new pattern, to cut directly against the grain of saying “No” every time someone asked for a handout—just to see what a habit of “yes” would feel like and how it might change me. So far I’ve been happy with the results.

Q: Are there any requests for help that you would refuse even on Generosity Day?  

Sure—ones that seemed ugly or self-serving or intentionally against the spirit of the day.

Q: Does romance fit into your vision of Generosity Day or does that get lost in the “reboot”?  (One of my daughters, by the way, accused me of being the Valentine Grinch when I explained Generosity Day to her!)

My wife and I still celebrate Valentine’s Day—in fact, if anything, I’ve been more comfortable with Valentine’s Day than she has over the years! I finally understood what she was saying when we had one of our most romantic dinners early on a Saturday afternoon right before she drove me to JFK airport for a trip to Kenya. I’m a real romantic, but I do agree with my wife that saying, “OK, tonight we’re going to have a special memorable evening!!” can raise the stakes too much, and that the most romantic moments are often the unexpected ones.

Q: What do you hope Generosity Day accomplishes this year? And in the next 10 years?

I’ve had this dream that we could actually shift Valentine’s Day and create broader traditions of love and giving on this day. There’s no reason that can’t happen—I think it would be a relief to people (well, maybe not to Hallmark and Godiva, but to lots of folks).

This year, we’re really focusing on people engaging in generous action—in addition to spreading the word. Because the day won’t really stick with you if you don’t behave differently.

I promise, if you engage in just one act of radical generosity this February 14th, you’ll remember it for years to come!

Generosity Day – ready to launch

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Just three days until Generosity Day and all the pieces are in place – so now is the time to start spreading the word!

The “why” of generosity and of Generosity Day is something I continue to explore for myself, and I’ll share more thoughts in the next few days.  I just posted a piece on Fast Company’s FastCo.Exist as part of their wonderful generosity series – and in the act of writing that I learned something about what’s at the core of this for me.  What I realized is that when this all started, when I first jumped in to my generosity experiment:

“…I knew almost nothing about generosity. I’d never worried about it, cultivated it, practiced it, or thought about how regularly I failed to be generous. And suddenly I felt a huge disconnect. Suddenly I realized that I could never make the change I wanted to see in the world using half of my brain and none of my heart.”

To me that’s the starting point, and it’s what I keep returning to.  I’m trying to understand what a practice of generosity means in social change work.  I’m trying to cultivate generosity in me because, paradoxically, it is core to so many decisions I’ve made in my life and yet at times it doesn’t come naturally to me.  So I work at it, I try to understand it, I decide to practice it even when it does not come naturally…and slowly, day by day and action by action (but never in a straight line, never just in one direction) I change.

If I have one wish for Generosity Day this year it’s that it be a day of action.  What would it mean to have a million generous acts happen around the world?  It would be transformational.

To help make that happen, this year it’s easier than ever to share your story.  There’s amazing momentum building already on www.facebook.com/generosityday.  People are already tweeting with the #generosityday hashtag – things they’re doing, ways they’ve been touched by generosity, and just to spread the word.  I hope you’ll be a part of it.

Just three days to go.  Can you hear the distant rumble?  That’s the momentum building.

30 Days of Courage

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Christen writes, “Sasha, I know Generosity Day is coming up, and I wanted to share something with you. Last year I noticed that others, along with me, struggled with fear when they contemplated radical generosity.”

Thanks Christen.  I agree, and I think you’re on to something.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fragility of generosity.  I find that my own generous actions can easily be quashed – by fear, doubt, self-criticism, breaking barriers, social risk or vulnerability:

Fear that I’m making a mistake (“should I really give?”) or that my generosity will be rejected or mocked.

Doubt that I’m doing the right thing.

Self-criticism because, let’s face it, I’m great at criticizing, especially myself.

Breaking barriers, because often generosity requires face-to-face interaction with and acknowledgment of someone with whom you don’t have a strong connection (I think this is why I’m interested in the social distance we create with our iPhones and other devices).

Social risk, because you’re breaking about 10 different norms simultaneously (unless you’re part of a community, religious or secular, in which generosity is expected and valued).

And vulnerability because at a moment of giving you are open, you are tapping into something deeply human, you are acknowledging that you’re not so different from the person to whom you are being generous.

Just looking at this list also reinforces my conviction around the importance of cultivating a practice of generosity.  My own chorus of self-criticism is great at recruiting new members, and it’s so easy to belittle the practice of generosity – to think of it as sweet or nice but not truly important.  I think the next time my chorus of critics, internal or external, starts singing, I’ll remind myself that what I’m practicing encompasses everything from overcoming fear to being comfortable with vulnerability.  That feels right.

At the end of his email to me, Christen suggested that anyone who finds themselves confronted by fear – whether in their practice of radical generosity or otherwise – should try out Marianne Elliott’s 30 Days of Courage course.  I didn’t know Marianne before Christen introduced me, but she’s the author of Zen Under Fire, the account of her humanitarian work in Herat, Afghanistan; and is also a teacher of yoga and mediation.  Marianne’s walking the walk.

Generosity Day is less than 30 days away, and your generosity practice, my generosity practice, all of our practices of generosity could probably use a boost.  Maybe 30 days of courage is just what the doctor ordered.  I’ve signed up.

Thanks, Christen.

Happy New Year – 2013

~ Sasha ~ 10 Comments

As the father of three young kids, vacations (and even weekends) are never “relaxing” any more.  They can be invigorating, joyful, replenishing, exhausting – just not relaxing.  There’s just too much going on.

Last Thursday our family was in Nashville, TN to visit my in-laws.  We were having a typical family vacation day: getting up early with the kids, the grandparents took them to Cracker Barrel for breakfast (they were thrilled), then at 10am we bundled everyone up to head to the Science Museum – where I don’t think I was the only adult who found that the planetarium show made me queasy.  After a bunch of climbing, of the kids bouncing in zero gravity and exploring giant-sized replicas of organs of the human body, we corralled our tired, hungry crew and drove off to Burger Up, an upscale burger place with locally sourced meats and a mean black bean and quinoa burger.  My 8-year old son, once a picky eater, has recently discovered bacon cheeseburgers.

Burger Up

Burger Up was filled with a lunchtime crowd and we found ourselves waiting for a table.  As a defensive move, I took our 19 month-old daughter away from the front entrance to entertain her, and she and I ended up standing next to a couple that was halfway through their meal, a guy with a long red beard and a black cap, and fair woman with jet-black hair eating a veggie burger.  My daughter was smiling and giggling a lot, and I joked with her that if she smiled big enough they might even let her steal a French fry.  They did offer a fry, which we declined, and we took a few steps towards the other end of the bar to let them eat in peace.

A few minutes later we found our way to a table, ordered six burgers (I got the veg one) and a starter of fried oysters; and, as we always do, we asked the waiter to bring everything all at once since the kids can only sit still for so long.  The waiter got it – he’d seen crews like ours before.  A few minutes later, he came back with our drinks and, after setting them down, he said with a smile, “I wanted to let you know that that gentleman over there (the guy with the beard who offered us a French fry) has picked up your tab for lunch.  He said you are such a nice family and he wanted to wish you a happy new year.”

Gasps ensued.

I’ve read a lot about people paying for random meals, at restaurants or at Starbucks or the drive-through line, or even at Karma Kitchen where the bill comes for $0 and you pay what you want to keep the chain forward and pay for the next person’s meal –  but it’s never happened to me.  It was really an incredible experience – something brand new that no one in our group really knew how to address.  We all were a little giddy, feeling both shy and elated.  And as the meal wore on we started saying things like, “C’mon, if we’re all such a nice family let’s sit still and wait for our food to come without shouting…!”

It was a joke at first but it did feel like the gift bestowed some sort of truth upon us, at least for a little while.  Things that afternoon felt charmed, easier.  By seeing ourselves through someone else’s eyes and by being exposed to a gesture that didn’t make “sense” in any traditional way – and because it didn’t make sense in any normal way it was uniquely pure and full of joy – our perspectives shifted, our reality shifted.  We were living up to that gift.

As that gentleman stood up from his meal, I walked up to him, looked him in the eye, shook his hand and thanked him.  I told him we would pay it forward, which we did, but mostly I just wanted to be grateful and gracious without putting him on the spot or making him at all uncomfortable.  With the kids clamoring in the background and all the newness of that situation, I didn’t manage to have a proper conversation with him, I didn’t manage to ask too many questions or get to know him or do anything that would allow me to see him again.  But maybe it’s better that way.  He got to be an angel for a day, I got to have an angel in my life for a day.  It didn’t change the course of my life or of his, but it touched me and it taught me – and that was all very real.

My and our forever struggle with generosity is: are we using our heads when we are being generous?  I think the answer to that question is “sometimes,” and I think it depends on where you are in your practice of generosity.  Some people have an advanced practice of generosity – it imbues who they are, and the spirit with which they walk through the world.  I bet those peoples’ generosity muscles are so well-developed that they can flex in all sorts of situations.  For me, well, I know that I’m still cultivating generosity, still working at not having analysis squash the heart-full practice of generosity.  For me, a regular dose of pure, unadulterated, unanalyzed generosity every now and again is just what the doctor ordered, both in giving and in receiving.

Here’s wishing you a happy and generous 2013.  And if you find yourself in Nashville this year, I’d recommend a stop at Burger Up.  You’ll probably have to pay for your own meal, but it will be delicious.