For no other reason than that we all need a laugh…a 30-second video I shot, with all due apologies to Allastair Fothergill and his team.
(yes, that’s one of my two dogs, Stella. And yes, that’s me narrating. No idea how my accent became South African).
I recently had a powerful conversation with a friend about humility and arrogance. We talked about the danger and allure of arrogance, how blinding it is and how much it keeps us from seeing each other’s humanity.
“Sometimes,” my friend shared, in a moment of deep candor and vulnerability, “even when I’m actively not being arrogant, I wonder if I’m being arrogant.”
I think we all know what she means – how easy it is to value our own strengths, how easy it is to take credit for our own successes, how easy it is to create separation, to be blind to the gifts of others, to forget that who we are and what we have is thanks to others.
Here’s how I was reminded of the wisdom of her words.
On my way into work yesterday I read an article in the New York Times about Tatsuo Osako, a man I’d never heard of, a man who is a hero to me…
Before getting to Mr. Osako, a bit of background. I am the grandson of refugees, Holocaust survivors who escaped the Nazis in 1940 thanks to Chiune Sugihara, a Japanase vice consul in Kovno, Lithuania.
In 1940, Mr. Sugihara, defying his superiors, issued transit visas to more than 6,000 Jews fleeing the Holocaust in Lithuania. These visas allowed these Jews, including my grandparents, to escape Lithuania and go by train to Vladivostok, Russia, and then to Japan by boat, saving them from the concentration camps.
The story of Mr. Sugihara is part of my family history. My grandfather told this story to us countless times when we were kids, and long ago I read the 1979 book The Fugu Plan by Marvin Tokayer and Mary Swartz, that documents this history.
Mr. Sugihara didn’t act alone. Someone needed to escort these thousands of Jewish refugees on the boat trips from Russia to Japan and ensure them safe passage. And that brings us back to Tatsuo Osako. He was not a diplomat, he was an employee of the Japan National Tourism Organization. Yet he spent nine months from 1940 to 1941 serving as this escort on boats going back and forth between Russia and Japan, a civilian playing a diplomat’s role because there was no diplomat to do the job.
Sadly, I’ve never met Mr. Osako, my newly-discovered hero who died in 2003. But, thanks that article, I not only learned about Mr. Osako, I learned, while barreling towards Grand Central Station, that the author of the book about Mr. Osako, Akira Kitade, was going to be in Grand Central Station as part of an exposition that day by the Japanese Tourism Organization. Turning my day upside-down, I made my way to Vanderbilt Hall and found my way to Mr. Kitade, a quiet man in his early 70s in a black shirt and a trim tweed jacket. Many years after the War, Mr. Kitade worked for Mr. Osako at the Japanese Tourism Organization, and though Mr. Osako never spoke about his part in helping these 6,000 Jews escape, Mr. Kitade eventually learned about Mr. Osako’s story and decided to write a book about it.
Making my way past the velvet ropes to the back of Vanderbilt Hall, I found Mr. Kitade and introduced myself. I shared my story and he shared his. Our conversation was kind, open, and also tentative thanks to language barriers. I bought a copy of his book, still only in Japanese, and we talked about his hope that Stephen Spielberg will someday make a movie about Mr. Sugihara, the “Japanese Schindler.”
I also met Chikako Ichihara, the woman in charge of the Japan Tourist Board exhibition. Though she was swirling in the rush of last-minute preparations for this expo that she’s spent a year developing, she stopped and made a few minutes to talk. I found myself overcome with emotion, as was she, as I related my family history and shared my gratitude for her choice to include the history of Mr. Sugihara and Mr. Osako in the expo. She shared some details I didn’t know about the Japanese government’s policies and about the heroics of so many everyday people who chose to take a stand and do something they knew was right. As we closed our conversation, she shared that her father had come from the same village as Mr. Sugihara, the man who wrote the visas that saved thousands of lives.
What a morning. What a reminder, impossible to ignore, that so many people I’ve never met are part of who I am, that there are so many ghosts of everyday heroes who have paved the path for me.
We all have these stories in our lives, known or unknown to us. They too often are lost in the blur of the everyday, allowing us to create a too-narrow narrative about who we are and what it took for us to arrive at today, at this place, at this life.
We are who we think we are, and we are also so much more thanks to the incalculable efforts of so many heroes, past and present, to whom we owe our gratitude.
What is your courage quotient?
What will it take to have you go towards:
…a feeling of discomfort?
…a place that is just outside where you normally sit?
….an action that you’ve talked about with a few people but have never taken?
…an idea you have that you’ve wanted to share, but you’re afraid it will get shot down?
…something that you’ve been building but have kept hidden away from everyone who matters?
It’s all too easy for all of us to get caught in behavioral ruts – patterns that have worked for us so far. These can create parallel emotional ruts, a safe emotional space whose safety comes from nothing more than a sense of familiarity.
It’s like you’re standing at the side of a pool, thinking about how cold the water will feel when you jump in. And the time keeps passing until it’s impossible to stop thinking about that first moment, that big shock that’s coming to the system.
It’s true, it might be a big shock. But only for a minute, and then it passes. The truth is that few of us will look back at our lives and think “I was too bold. I was too courageous. I reached too too far for the things that really mattered to me.”
No one’s asking you to be Lewis Pugh, not yet at least.
Jump.
I recently had the chance to catch up with Michael Faye, one of the co-founders of GiveDirectly. I first wrote about GiveDirectly in December 2012 after meeting with co-founder Rohit Wanchoo and being so impressed both by the approach they are taking as and by how they were going about building the company: a core great idea, being smart about leveraging technology, have a big focus on transparency and accountability, and run the organization with four volunteer founders and extremely lean staff (they were just hiring their first employee).
I met them early enough that my blog post was one of the first published pieces about their work. Since then GiveDirectly has justifiably captured a ton of attention, including receiving a major grants from Google and from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and being covered in The Economist, on NPR, and in the New York Times.
GiveDirectly is a platform for giving unconditional cash transfers to the extreme poor in the developing world, primarily in Kenya. Their target clients make about US$0.67 a day and they receive cash directly from GiveDirectly via mobile cash transfer. A typical grant in Kenya of $1,000 is equivalent to two years’ income for a recipient.
The most intriguing part of the GiveDirectly story (and, naturally, the focus of all the press they’ve received so far) is whether giving cash directly to a poor person works. Like most people, you probably have a gut reaction to the question of whether a typical recipient will spend the money productively or squander it. Interestingly, the data show that, by and large, the money is spent productively: in a random selection of households in 63 villages receiving cash transfers, according to The Economist, “the number of children going without food for a day has fallen by over a third and livestock holdings have risen by half.” Perhaps most intriguing, these one-time cash transfers appear to create both short- and long-term improvements in well-being. That’s a big deal. (the Economist has lots of great additional details on all of these data).
What’s interesting from a marketing and storytelling perspective is that the fact that cash transfers work isn’t new, it’s just new to the mainstream. As Michael is quick to point out, more than $100 Billion is already being transferred by governments to poor people through both conditional and unconditional cash transfer programs around the world. The biggest and most-studied cash transfer programs are the Bolsa Familia in Brazil (which is directly credited for 1/6th of the reduction in poverty in Brazil over the last decade, at a cost of just $12 per child – about 0.5% of GDP) and Oportunidades in Mexico. These have been in place for more than a decade and have helped tens of millions of poor people.
What IS new about GiveDirectly, beyond the fact that the cash transfers are unconditional, is that they are creating a platform that makes the entire transaction – from funder to end recipient – cashless. This creates huge potential efficiencies in a massive global money transfer system that is ripe for evolution, and if GiveDirectly can serve as a leverage point to begin to transform a $100 Billion industry, allowing more of the money that goes into these programs to end up, safely and conveniently, in the hands of end recipients, then they will have significant global impact.
It strikes me that there is yet another important leverage point for GiveDirectly that I don’t hear people talk about, and it’s around how to benchmark impact. The typical benchmark, whether for a large-scale, rigorous randomized control trial or for simple observational analysis of an intervention, is a control group with “no intervention.” Put another way, this means that when we study whether a $10 million program worked, our question often is: “was there a quantifiably discernible impact relative to a group that received no intervention?” Put more simply: did our $10 million do more than nothing?
That’s a dispiritingly low bar.
Wouldn’t it make much more sense to demand that we show that our $10 million created more impact than we would have created if we had directly handed $10 million over to end customers? To show that, for example, $10 million put into a seed company or a solar lighting company or a sanitation company created $100 million in value – in terms of savings or increases in productivity? This thinking is what led Acumen to develop the Best Available Charitable Option (BACO) methodology, and it feels like it is high time that we all use this higher benchmark to assess our work.
Surely our goal must be that we can do better than, figuratively, dropping money out of a plane.
Today marks the fourth year of Generosity Day. I’ve heard from people as far away as Dubai and as close as a local preschool in New York City about their plans for Generosity Day this year. It makes me proud, and it humbles me.
This year, my celebration of Generosity Day is a quiet one. I decided this year that I wanted to focus my energies on the practice of generosity, rather than on further spreading the word about Generosity Day. So the Generosity Day team is not doing a big online media push or reaching out to the press. This feels right this time around. Generosity Day has always been organic and has always lived in the hearts of those who choose to celebrate it. Evolution is part of what makes this a real, living and breathing thing.
For all of you who are celebrating Generosity Day today, I encourage you to take a moment to remember that you are part of a global community that cares about the practice of generosity. This is a community that knows that we can choose to become the people we aspire to be, a community that understands that through practice we grow and evolve, a community that lives everywhere and is owned by no one.
I wish you a day of discovery and of joy. I thank you for the gifts you give to others, the gifts you give to this community, and the gifts you give to yourself.
I have this nagging feeling of an elephant in the room – in the room of impact investing, I mean.
On the one hand, we’ve made tons of progress. I don’t just mean progress in terms of more funds being raised and more mainstream attention – though those are both good things. I mean that it’s become increasingly accepted, conceptually at least, that for an investor to be an impact investor, she must actively intend to create impact, and she must actively measure the impact she is creating.
(E.g. the World Economic Forum report’s recent definition of impact investing as “an investment approach that intentionally seeks to create both financial return and positive social or environmental impact that is actively measured.”)
While we’ve made progress on the language, I’m not sure how far we’ve come on the “actively measured” bit – mostly because it’s really, really hard to measure impact.
Let’s not forget what’s at stake here though. We value what we measure. And what we are able to measure today is financial return.
Think about it: we have hard, objective measures on the financial side – or we will, as soon as more impact funds realize their returns.
And we have a framework for measuring impact (in the IRIS standards, and in GIIRS ratings) but no agreed-upon standard of what social impact data should be collected and shared by impact funds. This means that, despite the incredible work of building IRIS and GIIRS, we continue to build an impact investing sector without agreement on what constitutes impact and what minimal data should be collected by impact funds. If we continue to walk this path, my fear is that (say what we might to the contrary) we’ll inevitably end up ranking and sorting impact funds by the only thing they can be ranked and sorted by – their financial returns.
It strikes me that part of the way forward is by constraining our path. What if what’s holding us back is too many options, if the Achilles heel of the 400+ IRIS indicators is that they leave even the most well-intentioned impact investor overwhelmed and a bit mystified? What if part of the way forward is to narrow our search to the most important, most universal, most quantifiable data we can find that will give us one-level-deeper insights into what’s going on underneath the hood. Quantifiable because this is the only thing that might start to balance the scales and be weighed equally with the financial returns we hope to realize.
For example, wouldn’t it be nice to understand who impact investors are actually serving? To understand who the end customers are for the companies that make up various impact portfolios? If this could be objectively assessed, and if we could gather this data easily, this data might start to tell us something beyond what we can find in the glossy prospectuses of impact funds. We know, of course, that reaching the emerging middle class in urban sub-Saharan Africa and reaching the poor in rural sub-Saharan Africa are two completely different balls of wax, yet gathering data on who a given fund is actually serving has been, so far, nearly impossible. And until we gather this data, we’ll never begin to properly understand how far market-based solutions can go to reach poor and underserved populations.
This is just one of the areas I’m excited to be exploring with our impact team led by Tom Adams at Acumen – using cellphones and text messages to quickly and reliably understand who end customers are, so that we’ll have the real data capturing who is actually being served across different geographies and sectors. We successfully piloted this work last year with a Kenyan firm called Echomobile, and we’re rolling it out more broadly across the full Acumen portfolio. The idea is to use technology, married with smart frameworks like the progress out of poverty index, to make it easier to get data and insights about real impacts on the ground.
I don’t know what these data will tell us, but I do know that the pursuit of easy-to-collect, quantitative data will be a first step towards differentiating the social impact strategies of the myriad impact investors in the marketplace. And I think this will be part of the way forward.
This video of a talk I recently gave at Acumen’s Investor Gathering explored this idea in more detail, and it starts to outline what the end state of impact investing might be. Let me know what you think!
Every time you send an email you’re asking someone to make a decision.
Open this now or later.
Prioritize it or put in the “I’ll get to it later” pile. (And later never comes.)
When you write your spouse, your best friend, your boss, you write a subject line that will help them understand why you are writing, help them understand how important the message is (or isn’t), help communicate something. The subject line is the second thing they see when your email arrives (the first thing they see is that you sent it).
If it goes without saying that you would never, ever, send one person an email with the same subject line each and every time, how can it be that I still get newsletters whose subject is the name of the newsletter, conference invites whose subject is the name of the conference, offers from companies with the company name as the subject in big capital letters?
As in: NONPROFIT NEWSLETTER VOL 3
Or
SOLAR INDUSTRY CONFERENCE SPECTACULAR
Why oh why?
Just because you are writing something for an institution doesn’t mean you’re supposed to sound like an institution. Please, sound like you.
Occasionally I pick up a little Indian food in Grand Central Station on the way home from work. These are always semi-rushed encounters of picking two veg entrees as part of a platter over rice (mysteriously, with a bit of iceberg lettuce on the side) crammed into a plastic takeout container.
The last time I was there I ordered Chana Masala (chickpeas in a tomato sauce) and Dal (yellow lentils). As the owner was packing up my order at the register, he asked what had happened with my Dal. While I had a nice portion of Chana, the Dal was a watery, soupy thing with barely a spoonful of lentils. The owner gave my plate back to the server, haranguing him to give me a decent serving of Dal. The guy gave me a bit more, still mostly too-thin broth, and it took one more exchange between the server and the owner before a decent pile of lentils ended up on my plate.
What the owner knows, but the server forgets, is where the transaction starts and ends. To the server, I’m just another guy placing an order, one in a long line of people he’ll serve in a day. The transaction starts when I make my order, and it ends when I shift down the line to pay.
What the owner realizes is that the transaction starts way before a customer arrive, beginning at the moment when she decides to pick this place out of the 50-odd places where she could grab a bite in Grand Central. In this transaction, he’s up against the Shake Shack and Two Boots Pizza and Magnolia Bakery. He’s also up against Golden Krust (Jamaican patties, right by the train track), Zaro’s Bakery, Chirping Chicken (best roast chicken in NY), and about 30 other places.
Winning the battle against all of that noise is really hard. Which means that the moment the customer shows up is the big win. The hard work has been done and now we have a one-to-one interaction where the only choice we have is to delight that customer – in this case with an extra five cents worth of Dal.
How often is our customer standing right there, smile on her face and money in her hand, saying “delight me”….and we miss?
We miss because we forget that whenever we have the choice between shouting louder to get more people to stop and delighting the people who are standing there in front of us, we must choose, every time, to delight.
Monday was Martin Luther King Day in the United States, an opportunity to celebrate the life and leadership of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. One of the many great pieces he wrote was the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. King wrote this piece in the margins of a newspaper and on scraps of paper while imprisoned for nonviolent protests on April 10th, 1963 in Montgomery, Alabama.
The letter is a response to a statement made by eight Alabama clergymen condemning the Montgomery protests, describing those leading the protests as outsiders and rabble-rousers, and positioning themselves as reasonable men wanting “honest and open negotiations of racial issues in our area.” Most of all, these clergy argued that they “do not believe…that extreme measures are justified in Birmingham.”
King’s letter is a clear, measured, but also deeply powerful response to these clergy. His language, his eloquence, his clarity of thought and his refusal to compromise on issues of morality, rights and dignity inform the conversations we are having today about inequality and social justice. King writes:
The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations. He has to get them out. So let him march sometime; let him have his prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; understand why he must have sit-ins and freedom rides. If his repressed emotions do not come out in these non-violent ways, they will come out in ominous expressions of violence. This is not a threat; it is a fact of history. So I have not said to my people “get rid of your discontent.” But I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channelized through the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. Now this approach is being dismissed as extremist. I must admit that I was initially disappointed in being so categorized.
But as I continued to think about the matter I gradually grained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love – “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice – “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ – “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist – “Here I stand; I can do none other so help me God.” Was not John Bunyan an extremist – “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist – “this nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist – “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” So the question Is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love?
We discuss this passage at length with the Acumen Fellows, pushing one another on what it means to be an “extremist for love” and asking one another if, where and when we are willing to be extremists for causes we believe in.
Are you an “extremist for love?” Do you aspire to be one?
One of the reasons I blog is so that I have a regular, disciplined practice of turning loosely-formed ideas into concrete, cogent, shareable posts. Over and over again. Until I get better at it.
Part of the power of repetition is getting to observe a process unfold repeatedly. So, over the last 5-plus years of blogging (and of life), I’ve learned that most of the time my best ideas come through conversations. When someone asks me a great, thorny, interesting question, and we engage in real dialogue about how to answer that question, I learn things. This is a powerful piece of self-knowledge that I otherwise wouldn’t possess. It informs how I structure my time and how I think about the conversations I need to have, and the people I need to interact with, to learn, to push my own thinking and my own understanding of the world and of my work.
Rare, though, is to have a photograph of that moment.
The most popular post I wrote in November was How do I get a job in impact investing?, and after I wrote the post I saw this tweet from Josh McCann. It’s a photo taken the moment I was asked by the Warton Social Venture club how to get a job in impact investing. I was stumped, but I winged it, and we talked, and together we figured it out.
Where do your best ideas come from? Alone, or in conversation? After a lot of reading and study or on the spur of the moment? With a pad of paper and a pencil, a whiteboard, with a cup of tea or cranking at your desk at work, constantly jumping back to your Facebook feed (probably not)?
We all struggle with managing our time the right way. Knowing where we get our best ideas can help. This is one of the big ideas in Peter Drucker’s Managing Oneself, an article that’s worth rereading at least once a year.
