Ξ September 18th, 2008 | → 2 Comments | ∇ Op-Ed |
Change is the buzzword of the election, there’s no doubt about that. Obama has branded himself as the candidate of change and John McCain has even altered his campaign message to try and get a piece of that pie himself. In the past, elections have been split into concerns over war, economics, abortion, etc. But, for the first time it seems that whether we agree on policy concerns or social issues, Americans are in agreement that the old ways are not working. Everyone knows in their gut that extreme times call for extreme measures and the most dangerous thing for us right now would be to play it safe, put our heads down and meander forward along the same path. You don’t need to go very far to find evidence of this. The major media is adequately covering the outcry for a new way, a new kind of leader - and both Obama and McCain are posturing themselves as best they can to be that leader.
As Nicholas Kristof wrote back in January of this year, however, a whole different kind of change is taking place that will probably amount to more than either candidate could possibly muster. In his article, “The Age of Ambition”, Mr. Kristof outlines the incredible work being done by the young social entrepreneurs who are tired of waiting for politics to provide the solutions they are sick of watching on the news every day, “With the American presidential campaign in full swing, the obvious way to change the world might seem to be through politics. But growing numbers of young people are leaping into the fray and doing the job themselves. These are the social entrepreneurs, the 21st-century answer to the student protesters of the 1960s, and they are some of the most interesting people here at the World Economic Forum (not only because they’re half the age of everyone else).”
My company, Worthy Fashion, is in a small way a part of this movement towards creating the social change we want to see in the world. We’ve created a section of our website entitled “A Worthy Cause” that describes our efforts to help create financial opportunities for entrepreneurs in the developing world yearning to uplift themselves and their communities. To make sure everyone knows we’re walking the walk, we’ve recently decided to create a sliding scale of donation so that one product yields a 1% donation to Kiva, 2 products yields 3% and 3 or more products will produce a 5% donation. Once any of the loans are repaid the money is immediately recycled into a kiva-only account so that each sale (and each repaid loan) increases the total amount of money we are able to loan to these deserving entrepreneurs.
We’re truly proud to be a small part of the movement of our generation of using business to solve the problems we see all around us. Because, as Kristof so eloquently notes, “Only one person can become president of the United States, but there’s no limit to the number of social entrepreneurs who can make this planet a better place.”
Please check it out and tell your friends about it, it’s definitely a “Worthy Cause”.
Born in 1983, I fall somewhere between “digital immigrant” and “digital native”. These are the monikers aptly used to describe the two kinds of humans who went through their important developmental years either before or after that point on the digital timeline when the internet became a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. Digital immigrants have to adapt to technology, whereas anyone who’s seen a teenager these days can see that the digital natives have to do very little adapting to the machines they grew up believing had always existed. I grew up with Nintendo, didn’t have a cell phone until late high school and didn’t use the internet on a daily basis until college, so in some sense I grew up alongside these disruptive technologies and not before or after. I like to think this gives me a unique perspective on how these modern conveniences affect the way we think and how we look at the world. Although I’m more in tune with computers than most people at my parents age ever will be, I still find myself shocked whenever I see ten year olds with cell phones or hear about elementary school students doing anything on the internet besides playing Oregon Trail.
So the world is changing and it seems our childrens’ brains are changing as well just to keep up. Ages ago, humans evolved to use tools to adapt to the natural world, but now we find ourselves forced to adapt to our own tools. How did we end up on the wrong side of the stick? It seems like we’ve created a feedback loop of biology and technology, but sometimes I’m not entirely sure that our biological adaptations serve us as much as they serve to facilitate the runaway growth in complexity of technology. In some sense, I think we’re so enamored by our digital creations that we assume whatever progress we make is inevitably good progress and therefore the onus is upon the human brain to keep up. We’ve prostrated ourselves before the altar of the microchip.
The reason I mention all this is because I recently learned of Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child program. I was totally blown away by the scope and vision of the program - to provide the world’s poorest children with “a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.” The mind reels considering what sort of possibilities this can open up for these children and for the entire world. Like my last Op-Ed piece pointed out, who knows how many Einsteins and Edisons are waiting for an education in the developing world? For the purpose of giving these kids connection to the outside world, freedom to pursue their own intellectual passions and the resources to become autodidacts, I wholeheartedly applaud Mr. Negroponte. This program has the potential to transform the world in countless ways and I can’t wait to see the effects.
What gives me pause, however, is the concern that we will stop at the laptop. I’m concerned that sending laptops to Kenya will become the educational equivalent of dropping sacks of rice from the sky - well intentioned, but ineffective in creating long term change without some further human interaction. Even in the richest nation in the world, we’ve begun to find that computers in the classroom do not show any correlation to improved test scores. It’s completely commonplace today for American middle and high school students to have their own computers and yet I’d feel quite confident wagering that far less than half of their time on it is spent for educational purposes. Some circles of education are finding that computers in the classroom are actually having negative effects on the progress of students.
One factor in education, however, has proven to be extremely beneficial and most of the world’s best scientists, artists, politicians and engineers have cited it as having a highly critical impact on their own success. That factor is having a good teacher. Connection to the internet is extremely powerful and so is educational software, but absolutely nothing can replace the sort of passionate curiosity that can only be instilled by parents, teachers and mentors. In a recent New Yorker conference, the erudite Malcolm Gladwell proclaimed, “There’s nothing you can do to improve school more than by improving the teachers [sic].” More than class size, computers or any other resource, good teachers equate to good education. But, he went on to note that being a “good teacher” actually boils down to something quite ineffable, citing a recent study which showed that the best educated, most prepared educational experts performed on par with a random sample of ordinary people. I can’t say this for sure, but I feel very confident that this ineffable quality probably boils down to two things - passion and the ability to connect. I say this because I know that the teachers I learned the most from were always the ones who inspired and motivated me with their passion or through their connection to me on a human level.
So, let’s send laptops to Uganda and Cambodia. But let’s not forget that the people that built those laptops probably had a whole cadre of teachers and parents pushing them forward. If we really want to teach these children we also have to instill in them a passionate curiosity. Otherwise, we’re just giving them a window into another world.
I just read another great article on creative capitalism over at Creative Capitalism: A Conversation. It touches on something that I’ve thought about a lot recently: the perception of capitalism as a solution for poverty. Despite the fact that capitalism is by definition an economic system, I think for many people it is a gut reaction to instinctively judge it as though it were an ideology. Proponents of capitalism point to the incredible wealth created and the growth of the middle class in the countries that have benefited from it, while opponents highlight the sweatshops, the environmental disasters and the endless pursuit of cheap labor that has devastated small town America. When you get right down to it, capitalism is capable of producing both incredibly good and incredibly bad results. You can build a house with a hammer or bludgeon someone to death with it, but this does not make the hammer good or bad. I don’t think capitalism is any different.
In the past century capitalism has done an even mix of good and bad, but individuals tend to focus on only one or the other. If capitalism is truly to be used as a tool for eliminating poverty we must treat it just like the hammer - with respect and with an understanding that it’s our responsibility to ensure it produces positive results. As Kyle Chauvin points out in his essay, we have already seen that the benefits of capitalism have already begun to creep beyond the borders of western nations into places like South Korea, Isreal and Peru. So, we have good reason to believe that it is a sound strategy to continue to promote the growth of this economic system in the developing world, which has borne the brunt of the negative side effects of capitalism in the past century. But, we cannot forget that simply spreading capitalism isn’t enough. We must spread ethically and environmentally responsible capitalism. The choice between global prosperity and poverty lies in the way we approach this issue.
Evolution, for some reason, is a touchy subject. Why it’s touchy I’ll never understand because I can’t imagine a better reason for standing in absolute awe of your preferred deity than if he/she/it had a hand in this most beautifully flowing process that gave rise to everything around us…or perhaps your god is that process. But, let’s leave religion aside (as much as possible) to consider just evolution itself for one second.
We’ve all got a general concept of what the process entails: the strong organisms survive to pass on their genes, those genes continue to be expressed and so every species, through its interactions with the greater ecosystem, is in a constant state of refinement towards the end of being better suited to survive and procreate. Where evolution gets really interesting is at the very tip where we find ourselves today.
This is a time when humanity is more interconnected and organized across the entire planet than ever before. Years from now we will look back with fascination at the way our species is coagulating on the internet, slipping and sliding across time zones, forming into groups and splitting like cells and generally merging into one great big organism unto itself. People move about the globe at incredible speed just like blood cells coarse through our veins and ideas are transferred just like signals from our brains fly along our nerves. We are more dependent on each other than ever before and more affected by the successes and failures of cultures halfway around the world as well. Somehow, we haven’t assimilated that concept yet.
Taking a brief glance over our shoulders, we can see that, in the time that has passed since the Enlightenment, humanity has increasingly seen itself as separate from and superior to nature. The health of our very home and the wellbeing of our own brethren have taken a backseat to the project of human progress. There’s truly no other explanation for the present state of pollution and mass extinction we have inflicted upon the planet than this grand illusion that somehow we’ve got no one to answer to but ourselves. We’re already begun paying the price for our self-imposed isolation from nature and the price is only moving upwards. I think that realizing our role in the grand scheme of evolution can help to solve the problems that we’ve caused believing we’re above nature.
The first step towards a peaceful symbiosis with the earth is recognizing that we are only one piece of the equation. We must recognize that as a species we’re not the general manager of the planet; we’re just another player on the team. Thankfully, it seems like this is beginning to happen. Books like The World Without Us are showing in very real terms that team earth will continue to play without us, and play quite well. In many cases the planet is better off. It’s a startling realization. It will take time, but it seems like we’re beginning to come to terms with this idea.
Being at the leading edge of evolution as we are, though, we’ve got the intelligence to be the star player. We’re just not living up to our potential and we need to find out how we can. So, the second step we can take as a species is to make sense of all this interconnectedness and organize our priorities. We are splitting ourselves into pieces running in ten different directions at once. We need people like Bjorn Lomborg, renowned Danish economist, at the helm to put things in perspective (for more info check out this video of him at TED). He’s come up with a startling ranking of the most cost-efficient global problems to put our money and effort towards and it will probably shock you how incredibly inefficient we are as a group. Horrendous humanitarian crises like malaria and malnutrition could be checked off the list in years and yet they seem to be placed lower on the list than global warming, which will take exponentially more money to fix and the results will take decades or more perhaps.
If humanity is becoming a meta-organism than it’s a paraplegic right now. Imagine how much more efficient we would be, how much more effectively we could address grand issues like global warming if we had access to the billions of potential Edisons, Einsteins and Salks on the earth right now who are hidden behind curtains of poverty and disease. Just imagine how much more talent this meta-organism is working with because of the civil and women’s rights movements…it’s staggering. Now, consider that there are a billion people on earth living on less than a dollar a day. We’re nowhere close to accessing the full capabilities of the human race.
I’ve always been amazed by massive schools of fish and flocks of birds that zigzag through water and air, cutting back and forth in complete unison at lightning speed. I’ve always wondered how it’s possible that such seemingly “dumb” animals are able to act as a single unit with such grace and speed. At some point, however, they didn’t do this I realized. They learned it. They evolved to do this. Although it seems obvious, it’s one of those incredible epiphanies to realize that these creatures learned over time to move together like this as a pack. It’s astonishing what even the tiniest form of life can accomplish when it has to. I can’t even begin to imagine humans trying to do the same thing as these birds and fish, whose brains are a fraction the size of ours. But, we can learn to fly and swim like them in our own way. We can act together as a unit just like them and become much more intelligent, quick and graceful than we are now. It’s becoming an evolutionary imperative that we do.
Lately I’ve seen a slew of blog postings about a recent article in the NYTimes entitled “Big Paycheck or Service? Students Are Put to Test”. As you can probably tell from the title, the article focuses on the choice between money and service that is facing today’s graduates. It touches a social nerve that’s received a lot of attention as the infamous Gen Y, or Millenials, are beginning to enter the real world. Will they serve themselves or will they serve the world?
Having been born in 1983, I’ve paid particular attention to the fact that we are alternately praised for our work ethic and proficiency with technology and disparaged for our selfishness and lack of loyalty. I can understand how confusing it must be to our elders because I’m perplexed myself by the incredible range of behavior displayed by my generation. We obsess over our Facebook profiles, some of us even bring our parents to job interviews and then droves of us line up to go through rounds of rigorous application for the opportunity to teach in America’s most distressed schools with Teach for America. Some of us develop software that changes the world before we’ve finished college and yet binge drinking is at an all time high on those same campuses. It doesn’t seem like any label sticks for very long and with good reason. Any attempt to fit such a large and diverse group of people under a single umbrella is missing the point. We don’t share a single set of values. If American culture is as fragmented as it has ever been, why should it make sense for an entire generation to fit neatly into a single classification? I don’t think it does.
Labels are beside the point, though, because whatever you wish to call us the important fact remains that this is an era in which the decision to serve oneself or to serve humanity is as important as it’s ever been. There are more millionaires in the world than ever before and yet there are more global calamities sitting on our doorsteps as well, about which none of us can feign ignorance. There is incredible potential for lining our pockets and even more unprecedented potential to change the world. Which path will we choose? Will we prove to be selfish or selfless?
We can be both. Our career choice doesn’t need to be framed as a decision between salary and service. As awareness of climate change, poverty and other global problems grows so do the questions about whether these issues could be addressed more efficiently with an entrepreneurial approach rather than depending on non-profits. As I referenced in my last post, four Harvard Business School professors have recently published a casebook making just this point. Author Jane Wei-Skillern says that, “Societal problems are increasingly large and complex, taxing the ability of nonprofit organizations to solve them” and that “a new model for the social sector based on entrepreneurship would allow organizations to create more value with their limited resources and tap additional resources not directly under their control.”
It used to be that businessmen made billions of dollars and then donated the money a la Bill Gates; business and philanthropy were two separate and often conflicting realms. The networks of purpose driven businesses popping up all over the internet and the panoply of blogs devoted solely to social enterprise are evidence that this paradigm is changing. Microfinance is turning poverty into an investment opportunity and groundbreaking alternative energy companies are producing solutions to both peak oil and climate change.
Phrases like corporate social responsibility, environmentally sustainable business, and serving consumers at the “base of the pyramid” would have been met with quizzical faces when our parents came of age, but are now the latest thing in the corporate world. Many of these changes have come about because of the wrongdoings of the past, but the important thing is that they are happening. MBA students around the world are more aware than ever before of the responsibility they have to address these issues and they’re doing so at conferences like Net Impact.
During my childhood the images I associated with big business were never good, mostly the tar covered seals of the Exxon Valdez spill and employees streaming out of the Enron headquarters. My generation grew up with the notion that big business created the problems and then the non-profits did their best to clean it up. That was life. Perhaps this resignation was what led us to think that our career could give us money or the chance to make a difference, but not both. But times have changed and even though we can be self-centered at times we’re an adaptive bunch it seems. We’re starting to realize that perhaps it’s not that business is bad, but that business has been done the wrong way. Maybe it could be truly groundbreaking if we did business the right way. Maybe we can have our cake and eat it too. How millennial of us.
I just read another fantastic story over at Worldchanging.com (click here for story). If you didn’t click that link to read the story here’s a brief synopsis. “Green” has gone big, but it doesn’t seem to have lived up to expectations. Emissions are still going up and all we’ve really done is to create a “green” fad. Though awareness has certainly been raised and the public is more ready to act than just a decade ago, this “green” movement is failing because it’s mostly been a marketing campaign so far and hasn’t engaged the kind of values that would support a sustained commitment to solving environmental problems. As the authors put it, “What previous campaigns have missed is that the world we hope to build as we progress towards sustainability is not just a world that offers a better quality of life, it’s a world that’s more in alignment with the sort of fundamental values (from concern for our children to connection to nature to a sense of duty) that most define us as human beings.
I think that the message Steffen and Steinberger are getting across is fairly universal. When you act out of a genuine desire for change, with a strong vision of the world you wish to create, progress will come naturally. Acting out of guilt or shame never produces results nearly as effective as acting upon a positive vision of compassion or idealism. One reason that I think Kiva has been so unbelievably successful is because it does take the more positive route. People are motivated because the one to one lending promotes a sense of human connection and compassion. Kiva is an unbelievable model to follow for any business trying to promote positive change because they’re acting from genuine values. Lenders are not scared or coerced into action, they are impelled by their own humanity.
A recent article in Slate magazine makes a dire prediction for charitable giving – it may go the same way as the rest of the economy. Citing drops across the economic spectrum in donations to non-profits, the author notes that charitable giving is a lagging indicator. The article quotes Robert Evans of EHL Consulting Group as saying that this basically means, “…in the minds of some, philanthropy is a luxury. You pay your bills first, and then start making charitable gifts.”
This got me to thinking about the whole notion of giving itself. Although giving seems to be an inherently selfless act, isn’t it somewhat illuminating that as soon as the economy takes a slight downturn so does giving? If giving is so selfless shouldn’t the numbers behave independently of economic indicators? In another great Slate article from about a year ago, Tim Harford cited two studies that showed altruistic behavior is positively affected by selling lottery tickets rather than asking for cash directly and that average contributions from males increased significantly when approached by attractive white girls.
Not only does our giving turn out to be more selfish than we thought, but we tend to make bad decisions when we do. We’re not so good at reconciling the fact that we should be prioritizing the problems we can solve over the ones we simply wish we could solve. A great example that may annoy some is that global warming is actually one of the least cost effective philanthropic efforts to throw money at. If you don’t believe me check out this TED video featuring Bjorn Lomborg who gives a much more fascinating and in depth analysis of the top twenty humanitarian issues and ranks them in order of easiest and cheapest to solve to the most expensive and time consuming.
As eye opening as these facts are, I still think humans are basically generous when they can and should be. I’m continually overwhelmed by the outpouring of support elicited by natural disasters like Thailand’s tsunami. But, it does occur to me that these insights on human behavior highlight a few obstacles in harnessing the altruism of the general public through traditional charities. Firstly, their giving is dependent on the health of the economy. Secondly, as a group we don’t make the best decisions. Lastly, our giving can be distracted by things like lottery tickets and hot girls….can you blame us?
This is not an attack on charities, but recognition of the fact that perhaps we can find a better way to organize our approach to global problem solving. What if we lived in a world where businesses were expected to have eradicating poverty, eliminating water-borne diseases or reducing illiteracy as a primary focus of their mission statements? What if when the economy took a downturn it didn’t mean that giving had to stop? During the last few centuries we created a marketplace that seemed to funnel money into all the wrong places. It can’t be that hard to create one that funnels it into all the right places. With enough informed and passionate business leaders, I don’t think it’s impossible to create an economy of giving rather than one of taking.
Tiger’s unbelievable performance at the U.S. Open seems to have solidified his position in America’s pantheon of athletic demigods. The folks at Nike apparently pulled the dusty Ouija board out of the closet for a commercial that seemed to summon his late father’s voice with the eerily prescient proclamation to his son, “you’ll never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life”. After his long march to what may become the most memorable victory in golf history, the press fell to their knees in reverence. Reporter after reporter, perhaps still under the spell of his father’s hypnotic words, wrote of the “steely gaze”, the focus, and the “cocoon of concentration” that the man seems to inhabit. I admit that his ability to steadily hold a goal in sight until he achieves it does seem almost superhuman considering the age of manic advertising, fast food and even faster social upheaval that we live in. Not to mention that he did the whole thing with a stress fracture and a bum knee.
Others wrote of how the unbelievable match-up between the relatively unknown Mediate and the unbeatable Woods had restored purity for at least one day to the province of athletics. A sports obsessed nation, we’ve become accustomed to feeling let down by the steroid abuse and profligate behavior that characterize contemporary professional athletics as much as much as we’ve become used to being let down by our politicians. Tiger and Rocco reminded a nation just how riveting good, honest competition can be.
What I hope doesn’t get lost in the media’s trumpeting of Tiger’s focus and the David versus Goliath story is Rocco Mediate’s incredible character. While Woods certainly deserves every compliment he gets for what he has achieved, the lesson we learn from Rocco is all the more valuable precisely because he is the opposite of Tiger. He’s an everyman. He’s a guy that had every right to complain that some of the best years of his career were taken from him by a back injury that nearly brought an end to his career when his back pain returned again a few years after surgery. Yet, ESPN’s Gene Wojciechowski aptly described him as a “45-year-old walking smile”. He had been in golf purgatory for years and was just happy to be having fun again.
Sometimes I wonder if we idolize our athletes so much that it’s spilled over into our approach to life away from the course. I hope that it hasn’t caused us to sit around and wait for the Tiger Woods of the world to solve the problems galloping headlong at us while there’s an army of Roccos just waiting in the ranks for an opportunity to prove their mettle.
Rocco’s temperament made me realize just how grateful I am to live in a world where for the first time we don’t have to wait for the big guys. The power of the internet has allowed little guys a chance to compete, whether they’re a small business in Oklahoma or a family in Kenya receiving a microloan from across the world. When we pool the talent and passion of every Rocco out there that just needs an opportunity we will end up with far more progress than one Tiger could ever give us. We need people like Rocco to show up every now and then to remind us that, as cliché as it sounds, an extraordinary world can only be built by all the ordinary people.
