Monthly Archives: December 2011

Dec 31 2011
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Career

4 Steps to Choosing a “Good Career” (Part 2) – Feeling of Impact

Key Ideas from “4 Steps to Choosing a Good Career (Part 1)” Post (Dec 28, 2011):

  • To be able to choose a “do good” career that will suit us as different individuals, there is now more than ever a multitude of career options in areas including social entrepreneurship, impact investing and CSR or sustainability. At the same time, confusion for graduating students and mid-career professionals has equally grown since little has been done to explain how to choose between various options.
  • I proposed a 4-step process that is meant to help both students and professionals navigate their decision-making for the right “social impact” job. The first step, which I dubbed “scale of impact”, is to decide how much impact really you want to have, whatever the change it is you hope to make. Knowing this extent of your vision will be helpful in narrowing down the type of organization you will consider joining (or launching), i.e., some organizations will be more likely to reach your personal impact ambitions than others.
  • However, that is only half of the work. In this post, I cover the second step, which deals with really trying to understand to what degree or “how” you need to feel the impact you will be making on a day-to-day basis to be happy.

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Dec 28 2011
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Career

4 Steps to Choosing a “Good Career” (Part 1) – Scaling of Impact

Key Ideas:

  • You are an experienced professional in the middle, or a student at the beginning of your career. For whatever reason, you have decided you now want to “do good” with your career… or “more” good than you previously have, whatever that means. But you don’t quite know in what area and in what capacity. Whether or not you are deeply passionate about a particular issue area, e.g., education, healthcare, energy, human rights, sustainable food, etc., you just know you want to have a (more) meaningful social impact in your area of choice.
  • However, the options can be bewildering. Either they all kind of sound good or, more likely, they all kind of sound the same. Should you go into nonprofit? Join a social enterprise? Try your luck with corporate social innovation aka “CSR”? How about impact investing? How about consulting for sustainability? What’s wrong with just a good old “traditional” for-profit job? The list goes on.
  • If you are the student, you may ask where you should start. If you are the experienced professional considering a change, you will ask how to choose between a host of options before pouring in your remaining heart, time and energy.
  • In this four part post series my goal is to propose a simple, yet hopefully useful approach of evaluating and picking what may be a suitable do-good career option for you. Using it may save you some time and disheartening experiences along the way to becoming and remaining a changemaker throughout your life.

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Dec 26 2011
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Development, Lists, Reflection, Social Enterprise

Respecting the Poor – What you should and should not expect from “doing good” unto others

Reference:

“10 Things We’ve Learned About Tackling Global Poverty” (Acumen Fund) – published on Acumen Fund’s blog in December 2011

Key Ideas:

  • Impact investing pioneer Acumen Fund celebrates its 10 year anniversary of leading a trend that started from just a handful social investment funds back in 2001 to almost 200 impact players in 2011. The eco-system of engaged donors and investors supporting innovative NGOs and social entrepreneurs worldwide continues to grow as we speak. As part of its reflection, Acumen Fund has included a “Top 10 learnings” list on its blog in its quest to fight global poverty.
  • The list Acumen “has found to be true” is as follows:
  1. Dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth.
  2. Neither grants nor markets alone will solve the problems of poverty.
  3. Poverty is a description of someone’s economic situation,
    it does not describe who someone is.
  4. We won’t succeed in the long term without cultivating local leaders,
    local money, and strong local communities.
  5. Great people, every time, no exceptions.
  6. Great technology alone is not the answer.
  7. If failing is not an option, you’ve ruled out success as well.
  8. Governments rarely invent solutions, but they can scale what works.
  9. There is no currency like trust, and there are no shortcuts to earning it.
  10. Patient capital investing is built upon a system of values.
  • Reading this reminded me of a fundamental but often neglected aspect in the business of “doing good” that we all had better be very clear about to remember why we do what we do, and not least also to save ourselves a lot of grief and “sinking heart” feeling later on. Hint: it’s got to do with people.

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Dec 24 2011
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CSR

How much CSR is there in BoP? – Junk food for the poor under fire

Reference:

“Peddling Poor Products to the Poor: What’s Our Responsibility?” (Grant Tudor) – published on Next Billion on December 9, 2011

Key Ideas:

  • For years, it has been a priority for large consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies like Nestle, Unilever, etc. to create and distribute special products designed for the “Bottom of the Pyramid” (BoP), or very poor population in emerging markets. In fact, this BoP market has been hailed to be a beautiful opportunity that would allow firms to innovate through packaging, distribution and product features, create revenue growth, and meanwhile meet the needs of the poor through access to more and better goods.
  • However, the sharp rise in non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in recent years appears to be a consequence of what some could consider irresponsible marketing, coupled with product offerings that are not just low in nutritional value but can cause serious health problems if not consumed in measured amounts. Take for example Nestle: its Milo brand chocolate cereals packs 34g of sugar per serving. Coupled with how widespread Nestle brands are in emerging markets like Africa (anywhere up to 80%), this makes them in the eye of some critics likely culprits for the rise in NCDs.
  • Thus, what is the responsibility of multinational companies, such as CPG giants like Nestle, towards ensuring that their products sold to the BoP in emerging markets promote more benefit than they do harm?

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Dec 22 2011
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Career, NGOs, Social Enterprise

Deferring “Good” Careers (Part 3) – Fixing the “pay” mentality

References:

Key Ideas from “Deferring Good Careers (Part 2)” Post (Dec 21, 2011):

  • Although we should keep highlighting, showcasing and offering them up as inspiration, we should at the same time move away from the prevailing culture of idolizing the very few individuals that start social enterprises and other do-good organizations and instead focus more holistically on how we can attract and retain top talent to push these organizations to the next level
  • Once we look underneath the human resource structure of such organizations, we realize how limited actually the pool of available positions is for top talented but not as proven people. We in fact discover what I referred to as the “middle layer” made up of functional jobs and other work-horse positions that are realistically the entry point for the majority of young people looking to do-good nowadays

In this Part 3, I want to think about one aspect of what it takes to attract the right talent to the available pool of positions by focusing specifically on compensation, which I would like to show to be a major obstacle for building more world-class, sustainable social enterprises and NGOs that want to scale their impact ever more.

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Dec 22 2011
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Career, NGOs, Social Enterprise

Deferring “Good” Careers (Part 2) – Defining the available job pool

Key Ideas from “Deferring Good Careers (Part 1)” Post (Dec 20, 2011):

  • Philanthropy may be a subject of passion for those who already have made or sit on a good deal of money, but for the rest of us it should not be as relevant because (1) there are not enough of us with a lot of money and time to worry about where to put them to the best use and (2) philanthropy is not a full time job; it in fact detracts from the harder, more important idea we should think about, which is how we can incorporate a significant portion of our “do good” intentions into an attractive, life-long career instead of relegating it to mostly a by-thought or feel-good hobby in our spare time (or retirement)
  • The questions we left with were (1) how should a young person choose between making more money sooner and engaging in “doing good” later, vs. pursuing sooner an occupation that promotes his or her ideals of “doing good” and is meaningful, but potentially sacrificing building wealth in the long term? and (2) how much ought this “doing good” thing be valued both by employees and employers?

In this Part 2, I will now try to set up the conversation by first examining what the actual availability of positions is we are talking about. In Part 3, I will then attempt to qualify the career trade-off at stake and focus on the problem of compensation within this space for available positions.

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Dec 21 2011
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Career, NGOs, Social Enterprise

Deferring “Good” Careers (Part 1) – Why philanthropy is not a career answer for us

Reference:

“Could Silicon Valley Rethink Philanthropy?” and “Rebooting Philanthropy in Silicon Valley?” (Claire Cain Miller) – published in The New York Times in December 2011

Key Ideas:

  • Yet another set of articles expounding on the encouraging trend that the new generation of “young rich”, especially around Silicon Valley, engage more and differently in philanthropy than previous generations that followed the trend of “make money first, then give away much later”
  • Close-up is on Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, daughter of a real-estate billionaire, wife of Netscape’s co-founder, teacher of Strategic Philanthropy at Stanford, and latest would-be philanthropy evangelist who strongly believes that we need to not only increase number of rich young people giving, but also how effectively they do this (using business principles, being more methodical and rational, etc.)

My view:

  • As I write this I actually received a free copy of Ms. Arrillaga-Andreessen’s book “Giving 2.0” with my last Stanford Social Innovation Review issue. It still remains unread on my table.  The theme reminds me strongly of “Philanthrocapitalism – How Giving Can Save the World” by Matthew Bishop a few years back. I also passed on that book. Let me explain.

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Dec 21 2011
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Justice & Society

Law does not mean Justice (d’oh!) – Occupy Wall Street’s core challenge

Reference:

“Occupy Wall Street Times Topic” (The New York Times)

Key Ideas:

  • As everyone who does not live under rock is aware of, this marks the third month of the  “Occupy Wall Street” movement that has spelled mass protests in America and many other corners of the world at this point, with the end not yet in sight
  • The cause of the movement is fundamentally an outrage about unequal economic conditions and a collective demand for more fairness. The original claim in the U.S. is that “The 99%” of the population was contributed their tax money, which was then used by the government to bail out “The 1%”, i.e., banks, insurance firms, lobbying corporations, and the general financial establishment under the notion of “too big to fail”. The insult, protesters explain, is that during all this time bankers and other “one percenters” keep receiving fat salaries and big bonuses. Implicitly, they are able to do this because their companies were saved by bailout money in the first place. Meanwhile unemployment and foreclosures continue to frustrate the “ninetynine percenters” – everyone else.

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Dec 20 2011
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NGOs, Philanthropy

Philanthropic Laziness – Why nobody cares about evaluating nonprofits

Reference:

“Nonprofit Watchdogs: Do They Serve the Average Donor?” (Ram A. Cnaan and Kathleen Jones, Allison Dickin, and Michele Salomon) - published in Nonprofit Management & Leadership #21, 2011, summarized in Stanford Social Innovation Review Volume 10, Number 1, Winter 2012

Key Ideas:

  • So-called nonprofit “watchdog” organizations like GuideStar, Network for Good, Charity Navigator, the Better Business Bureau and the American Institute of Philanthropy exist essentially to provide objective evaluations of nonprofit organizations so donors can make better informed giving decisions. They attempt to create more transparency and attention paid to actual performance and hope that donors will use their ratings of nonprofits to give to the “most deserving”, thus creating a more efficient philanthropic market

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Dec 20 2011
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Philanthropy

Giving Ego – Should HIV receive so much attention?

Reference:

“Does Global Health Funding Respond to Recipients’ Needs? Comparing Public and Private Donors’ Allocations in 2005-2007″ (Daniel Esser and Kara Keating Bench) - published in World Development #39, 2011, summarized in Stanford Social Innovation Review Volume 10, Number 1, Winter 2012

Key Ideas:

  • There is no question that private foundations, especially large ones like Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are contributing huge sums to fight good causes
  • But, Esser and Bench ask, why do diseases like HIV command so much interest and money by these foundations, although such diseases rarely register as a top national health priority for the affected countries? As an example, HIV/AIDS only contributes to 3% of total disease burden in Asia but was second most highly funded category

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