What we pay, what we get

April 21, 2010April 21, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Lots of inspirational moments today at the Global Philanthropy Forum (live webcast here).

It’s too much to try to capture in one post, but my parting reflection from today is how continually humbled I am by the accomplishments of Aravind Eye Hospital, the recipient of this year’s Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize. Founded in 1976, Aravind pioneered high-quality, high value, low cost service for low-income customers. They have built a truly remarkable organization that has revolutionized not only eyecare in India but our conception of what is possible. Some statistics:

Of the 37 million people globally who are blind, 15 million are in India
Aravind has served more than 3 million people since inception, and currently serves more than 300,000 per year
The majority (60-70%) of Aravind’s customers pay a reduced cost or nothing for eye surgery
The average medical doctor performs 300 surgeries per year; the average Aravind doctor performs more than 2,000
Among other inspirations, Aravind’s founder Dr. Venkataswamy attended McDonald’s Hamburger University to learn about standardization and quality control.
Interocular lenses cost $200, so Aravind decided to manufacture them themselves, and now sells them for $3 apiece (at a profit)
15% of all ophthalmologists in India have been trained by Aravind
Aravind is profitable

When we talk about scale, innovation, doing the impossible, creating massive change to fight preventable illness, this is what we mean.

A closing thought, shared by Dr. William Foege (who among other things is credited with creating the strategy that eradicated smallpox): philosopher Soren Kierkegaard tells a parable of two robbers who entered a jewelry store and stole nothing; the only thing they did was switch the price tags between the costume and the real jewelry. The customers never noticed.

So too, Dr. Foege opined, in the modern world the price tags have been switched. We ascribe the highest value to a small group of people who receive exceptional, unprecedented levels of monetary reward, and consistently undervalue the work of nurses and teachers and social workers and people who live lives in service of others.

In closing, a video about Aravind:

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School teaches

April 15, 2010April 14, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

That expertise is out there and that it is narrowly defined.

That we should narrow our focus and specialize.

That if you, the student, don’t know the answer, that there’s an expert who knows better than you.

It’s a sharpen-your-number-2-pencils mindset. It’s lessons from last centuries’ economy. And I worry that as we try to improve education we’re focused on bringing as many people as possible up last centuries’ standard when what we need is 21^st century aspirations.

It’s easy for me as a parent to find which schools are most likely to produce high SAT scores and good college admissions – easy to find schools that do a good job of teaching kids to do well on tests and get into other schools.

What if you want to find the schools that are best at fostering creativity, curiosity, and right-brain thinking? Where do you even begin to look?

Closing thoughts from renowned photographer Platon from fear.less:

I came to realize that it’s actually irrelevant how anybody else does it if you’re looking for a formula to apply to yourself. The truth is, everyone’s journey is different, everyone’s personality is different, and everyone’s talent or weaknesses are different.

Amen.

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How change happens, really

April 7, 2010April 6, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

What I was taught in school and in the early days of my career:

analyze – plan – budget – convene – write fancy document – present – get approvals – get buy-in – hold some more meetings – adjust budget – communicate and roll out the plan.

How it really works:

sense – dare – dream – share your dream with a few people you trust – get the resources – ask for permission later

The challenge is, you can’t get good at the second approach if you’re spending all your time working on the first one.

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Habits, decisions, and arbitrary deadlines

April 6, 2010April 5, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

I started practicing yoga ten years ago – very intensively in the early years, a drop-off when I moved away from the first yoga studio I really loved, with a slow but consistent decline in the past few years as my life has gotten busier and my kids have gotten bigger. Over the last few months, things got so full that whole weeks were passing without any yoga at all, and it was affecting my sleep, my mood, how my joints felt, the works (all worse).

I know enough about yoga and about how the mind and body work to know, intellectually, that between practicing a lot every so often (that is, 2 hours every Saturday) or a little a lot (30 minutes every day), a little a lot is much better. Once a week feels virtuous, but thirty minutes a day is a habit, it’s part of my life, it builds.

But I don’t have this kind of time. I don’t have an extra 30 minutes (which always becomes 40 or 45 minutes), certainly not every day.

Or do I?

Last week, I decided the time had come to do something. So I decided then that the next day and every day I’d wake up 30 minutes earlier. No planning involved, no “I’ll get to it at the end of the day.” I admitted to myself that I needed to make an arbitrary commitment that was clear and time-delineated and non-negotiable.

It’s early days, but so far so good. It’s working because it’s clear, it’s simple, it’s something I can do right now. I’ve created a structure that works for me.

We are all filled with good intentions. There are lots of things we want to have in our lives but we don’t create space for them – because our lives are full, our days are full, and because it’s easy to do what we’ve done. We need help doing the things that we want to do, doing the things that will make us happy. We need a structure that will help us act.

One of the problems so many nonprofits face is that the issues we tackle are so big that they’ll be here tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. This is the perfect excuse for someone who genuinely cares to end up not acting – because of the gap between good intentions and good actions.

WE, the nonprofit professionals, feel the urgency today, but that’s because we live in our world; because we’ve dedicated our lives to this. For everyone who doesn’t live and breathe this, we need to translate this sense of urgency. When we talk to people and try to motivate them to act, we cannot simply say “this is important, I want you to help.” We need to communicate why we need their help NOW. We need to move that person to action – to help her do what she wants to do but isn’t doing – with a calendar and a deadline and things that will not happen if they don’t act now. (and “now” doesn’t have to be today, but now can’t be “someday” either. More than six months away is the same as “whenever.”).

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Which chorus?

March 10, 2010March 9, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

You’re probably hearing one of two choruses right now:

“Slow down! You’re not being practical. That’s not possible. I don’t get it and don’t see how we’ll get there. You need to make things smaller, more clear, more well-defined, more actionable!!”
*chirp* *chirp* *chirp* *chirp* (the quiet, soothing, pleasant, cricket-like background noise where no one’s telling you you’re crazy)

Number two feels so much better, is so much easier and cleaner, and the people you like and respect (your Board, your boss, your co-workers, your team) give you their stamp of approval. But hearing nothing but good, approving things most of the time is very dangerous indeed.

You get to decide: is the most important thing hearing from those closest to you that they approve? Or do you care more about breaking through? Because breaking through means doing something that they (even the “they” who love and support you) have never done before.

Even though they don’t mean to, those closest to you may be holding you back.

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The poverty box

January 7, 2010January 7, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Today I registered for a conference and had to check a box about my “area of interest,” so I check off “International Development / poverty.”

And then I realized why only 23% of U.S. philanthropy goes to international causes.¹ We’re stuck in this box. The one that has you pick from: Human rights / Conflict resolution / Women’s issues / Education / Healthcare / Infrastructure / Policy reform / Judicial reform / Poverty alleviation (CHECK) / Etc….

The “how” is so much less important than the “why” in making people understand how urgent this is.

The box I want to check says: “I’m in the business of creating a different world, one in which the 7 out of 10 people globally who are struggling for survival can instead become artists and engineers and teachers and entrepreneurs and CEOs and judges and architects and software programmers and Presidents and mothers who don’t worry if their children will survive to age 5. I’m in the business of realizing the potential of all of the 6.7 billion people on this earth, and not just the 2 billion who were born in the right place at the right time.”

Yeah, that’s the box I want to check.

NOTE 1: the 23% number comes from Jane Wales, and if anyone knows this statistic it’s her. I honestly thought the number was much lower. Does anyone have a source for this number?

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1 in 100

November 24, 2009November 23, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

At a dinner recently, guests were asked to go around the table and share what was on their mind. One guest said,

“I often imagine myself on a platform, waiting for a train, with 100 other people. And I think that I am the most fortunate of those 100 people, which makes me feel blessed and also gives me a tremendous sense of responsibility of what to do with that good fortune.”

At first when I heard this, I thought the good fortune she described was economic, which would make sense given the distribution of wealth globally: you only have to earn $49,000 to be in the richest 1% of the world’s population.

The facts on income alone are sobering. But I think there’s more to it, and it gets you past the 1% mark to the 0.1% mark or even the 0.01% mark – the knowledge that you are an agent of change, that the tools are available today in a way that they never were before that allow you to take all that you have been given and make an enormous impact on the world.

There has never been a moment in history when a single person can do more.

The knowledge of this simple fact, and the impetus to back it up, is the real 1 in 100 revelation.

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The real role of mentors and coaches

October 13, 2009October 12, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” goes the old one-liner.

“Practice.”

But practice what? Diligence and hard work aren’t enough – you have to know where to place your energy.

At first, the roadmap can seem pretty clear. You want to get good grades? The teachers will tell you what to study. Want to be a good analyst at your first job? Your boss and peers will tell you what to do, and it’s up to you to do it.

Most of this is about someone else setting up the rules of the game and you trying to win against that set of rules. And as you progress in your career, you decide which the skills and behaviors you want to master and you work to improve them.

For example, here’s the illustrative chart for how you get better at public speaking:

Skills 2

So if you want to become a public speaker (Aptitude), there’s a set of identifiable Skills (e.g. projecting confidence, engaging the audience, having a good and varied speaking voice, being a storyteller, etc.) that matter, and you might be good (filled in circle) or not-so-good (empty circle) at these skills and at the behaviors that support these skills. Simple enough, if you put in the effort.

And if you do put in this effort, if you’re a “sawgot” (someone who gets things done), you will over the years systematically pick off the skills and behaviors you need to work on to improve on the aptitudes you’d like to master.

This is likely a lifelong endeavor, and while it’s part of the answer it isn’t the whole story. At a certain point you need to get underneath all of this and find new points for leverage.

The “underneath it all” are your attitude and assumptions – both about other people and about yourself.

Skills 3

I think of the top three levels (Aptitudes / Skills / Behaviors) as “What I do and How I Act” and Attitudes/Assumptions as “Who I am and How I See the Word.” It’s Attitudes and Assumptions that are the the bigger leverage points if you can get to them; and these becomes increasingly important over the course of your life (since you’ve already come a long way at mastering behaviors and skills, right?).

More specifically, you’re carrying around a set of assumptions that colors your own sense of where you do and don’t excel, along with a story that explains why. So for example you might have decided long ago “I’m not a good public speaker because I’m not a creative storyteller.”

For both parts of this sentence (“I’m not a good public speaker” and “because I’m not a creative storyteller.”) you could be 100% right or 100% wrong (or somewhere in between). For example, maybe you’re only an OK public speaker but it has nothing to do with how well you tell stories (do people laugh at your jokes?). The assumption about why will color where you put in effort, and you might be completely misdiagnosing what’s going on. So you might be putting in lots of effort into “storytelling skills” when what actually happened is that you’re carrying around the wrong mental model of what makes for a good presentation (stand up and present a bunch of boring slides). It ain’t that you’re a below-average storyteller.

And this is where I think coaches and mentors come in. I used to think that mentors were mostly for “what am I going to do with my life” conversations, but I’ve found out that that most people, other than you, are very poorly placed to answer that question (the best they can do is give you information about the different paths out there).

But if you can build relationships of trust and honesty with people who know and respect you and who know more than you about (at least) some things; and if over time you can develop a shared sense of who you want to become; then you have the opportunity to dig in to this conversation at the level of assumptions – the story you carry around about yourself that informs all the time and effort you’re putting in to your own development.

What this requires of you is cultivating these relationships of trust plus a willingness to go all the way to your assumptions about yourself when talking to these people. This can be hard, because these stories, these assumptions we carry around, our personal narratives…these usually run straight to the core.

But imagine the impact if, in one conversation, someone is able to reflect back to you that just one assumption you’ve been carrying around for your whole life is plain wrong. If someone were, in a single comment, able to show you that the circles you thought were empty were in fact filled in, and vice-versa…that it’s the story you’ve been telling yourself that needs adjusting, not the things you do (which are just tactics, after all).

If I were a betting man, I’d say the wrong assumptions you’re carrying around are about something you think you’re not good at…when in fact you already pretty good or even great.

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Be a Sawgot (SWGTD)

September 2, 2009September 1, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Are you a “sawgot,” Someone Who Gets Things Done?

If you’re not now, what would it take?

With an ever-shifting economy, and all of the challenges in the job market, I can think of few skills more universal than being a sawgot. Because when it’s crunch time and something absolutely needs to happen, the people in charge look at each other and say, “OK, we need our ace right now. The game’s on the line.” And you want to be that ace.

Being a sawgot is about a mindset and an outlook: having the humility not to ask “why am I doing something that’s not in my job description?” and the wisdom to know that moment you’ve become the kind of person who reliably makes problems go away, you’ve become indispensable.

This is particularly valuable early in your career, when you’re looking to stand out. If you work in the kind of organization that creates opportunities and moves quickly, the sawgot’s ability to move a project forward, on time and without (visibly) breaking a sweat is the kind of thing that gets you noticed (and if it doesn’t get you noticed, go work somewhere where it does).

Speed, accuracy, an ability to ask the right questions to get enough clarity to do what is being asked of you…these are the starting point. There is also a trove of really basic skills that you just need to have – and which there’s no excuse not to have mastered by now. You:

Create clean, attractive, simple slides in Powerpoint: few words, great images, tell a story (this implies some facility with Photoshop).
Generally “do stuff” with ease in Excel (this includes formulas and pivot tables and some data analysis and text-to-columns and Lookups).
Write clearly, concisely, quickly, and at the right level of detail
Manage projects against deadlines, and get things done early
Never let things fall through the cracks
Know how to create content for the web (including poking into the code here and there if you need to) – and are comfortable creating and sharing multimedia quickly and easily
Reliably create narratives from a set of inchoate inputs / sources
Know just a little bit more than your boss about what’s new and useful in the world, including but not limited to the online world

The skills allow you to dance at the party, but the sawgot’s ATTITUDE gets you in the door. You don’t want to jump into so many things that you cannot do your day job, but if, right now, you’re not working on one or two things that you’d describe as, “this is outside of the scope of what I do, but it really matters that our team/group/organization/company gets this right,” then it’s time to put up your hand and say, “how can I help?” or “why haven’t you asked me to help?”

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Changing practice by practicing change

July 16, 2009July 15, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

New Year’s resolutions. Diets. Vows to arrive earlier to work. Promises to keep calm while in traffic jams. All worthwhile attempts at change that often fail.

Why?

“Change is hard,” right? Maybe. We try changing so rarely, so why should we be any good at it? Same schedule most days. Same people we work with. Same friends, same families, same food we eat.

It’s reassuring and productive to have a whole lot of habits. But we’re setting ourselves up for failure if we only attempt change when it’s something BIG: “I’m going to stop eating carbs.” “I’m going to get up at 6am every day and exercise.” “I’m going to become a great public speaker.”

Great if you can pull these things off. If it’s not happening, maybe you can make space for practicing. Practicing change, that is. Trying to change small, low-stakes things, and watching what happens along the way.

Here’s an idea: try brushing your teeth with your other hand for a month. It’s meaningless, it’s easy, it’s low stakes, and there’s no good reason you can’t pull it off.

Why bother? Because if you can do this for a month you might have more faith that you can change something more important. And if you fail (which you might), you’ll have a chance to watch when and why your attempts at change fall apart. Are you initially enthusiastic but then lose interest? Do you convince yourself it’s too hard? Do you just forget? Pulling this silly little thing off is your way to learn how to change – which makes it important and worth the follow-through.

(If you don’t like the idea of brushing your teeth with your left hand, here are some other ideas, all for a month: Arrive 5 minutes early for every meeting. Never complain. Answer enthusiastically when anyone asks you “how are you doing?” Look everyone in the eye when you talk to them. Sit quietly with your eyes closed for 5 minutes a day. Go to bed by 10 pm. Floss daily.)

Have fun with it. Keep a log of how it’s going. You never know what you might be good at if you practice.

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Tag: Change

What we pay, what we get

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School teaches

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How change happens, really

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Habits, decisions, and arbitrary deadlines

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Which chorus?

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The poverty box

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1 in 100

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The real role of mentors and coaches

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Be a Sawgot (SWGTD)

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Changing practice by practicing change

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