Good Generation

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.

My view:

• First, I am well aware that it is potentially not useful or even harmful to attempt to draw clear boundaries on what we qualify as “doing good” and “socially redeeming” – and what not. In fact, I consider this important enough that I may address it in a future post. However, for the sake of argument, let us agree for now that we can somehow adequately group various activities into their “degrees of doing good” for illustrative purposes

• What follows is a 4-step approach I would like to suggest in order to figure out what career option to pursue, if your main objective is to “have social impact”. I will deal with each step in a separate post in this  career-related series:

• Step 1: Scale of impact - how much do you think you have to achieve to be satisfied?

• Step 2: Feeling of impact - to what degree (how) do you wish to feel or experience the impact you will have in your day-to-day work?

• Step 3: Need prioritization – decide if Step 1 or Step 2 is more important to you

• Step 4: Reality check – give it your best shot at the occupation that fits your prioritization once you have accounted for “reality” constraints

Step 1: Scale of impact

• No matter where your motivation to do good comes from on the spectrum from “true altruism” to “stroking my ego”, it is helpful to think about how large the impact is you would like to achieve. Measure “large” by any unit of impact that makes sense in your area of interest, at least on an order of magnitude. It could be something relatively tangible from “number of people (no longer) affected by disease X” or  “number of homes built for homeless” to more aspirational goals like “a world where no child is left uneducated” and “no more dependence on fossil fuels for our energy needs.”

• I would not be surprised if you find this exercise rather difficult. You may even find it completely irrelevant, but trust me that it is part of the process. Let me explain. The reason why I would like you to still attempt this exercise now, is that the scale of your impact and personal ambition can do much to inform you about the type of organizations you should eventually consider joining or starting. That is, if you assume that by employment, rather than loose affiliation with a particular public or private entity, you directly share in the results of the impact the organization eventually has.

• This is true for community-based NGOs that exist mostly for defined, usually smaller geographies, as well as for multinational corporations with global footprint. While it is true that today many social problems require collaboration between organizations to be successfully solved, it does not likely change the fact that you as an individual will be working for one organization full-time, with most of your pride of “impact ownership” affiliated with not “THE” partnership but achievements originating from your own company or tribe.

• From my own experience, I co-founded a Japan-based, for-profit social enterprise with some friends that enables people with autism to apply their unique abilities through the right training and the right environment to create excellent software testing solutions for clients. The scale of our impact is objectively speaking relatively small, since we only have capacity to train a few dozen people and then need to carefully invest in and monitor their career and personal development.

• However, for none of us it was particularly important that we reach millions of people across the world with autism anytime soon. We cared about proof of concept foremost and took a long-term view. The goal then was to provide a model that works, change the lives of people in need, restore and preserve their dignity over a lifetime, and in the process inspire a broader social acceptance by employers of hiring and developing people with disabilities across industries worldwide.

• Note that this does bring out an interesting issue about the preferences of today’s do-good vanguard, especially engaged funders like certain foundations and impact investors. This shows especially in the many social business plan competitions around the world, many of which we entered, where we encountered many judges strongly biased towards enterprises that feature “more scalability”, i.e., can affect higher numbers of lives as quickly as possible on the timeline. What I personally consider an obsession with scale fails to acknowledge, more often than not, that numbers and scale are just one dimension for evaluating the effectiveness of do-good organizations.

• Equally valid criteria are creativity of the change model, its ability to be replicated by other entities (which will bring scale) and that you may have very limited ability to move quickly given the complexity of the issue you are trying to solve. In that sense, “human condition constraint” issues such as developing models to find, employ and train people with autism are not so easily “scalable” in high numbers unlike microfinance, which is mostly “operationally constrained,” , i.e., you can boast much quicker how many people you are able to lend X dollars to because your metric of impact measurement, loans given or repayment rates, is easier quantifiable and explained to people unfamiliar with your business.

• In summary, before diving into the options available to you, please do spend a good amount of time thinking about the causes you are passionate about and when “enough impact is enough” for you to feel happy, successful, satisfied, or whatever you call the desired end state. Think about if and how much it matters to you to affect large numbers of people or parts of the environment. Think about if you are perfectly happy (for now) if you just help the people in your neighborhood, region or greater community, or if you have to crusade for every single one of those millions starving at the other end of the world to get their daily bread. There is no judgment of right or wrong to this, so you must be clear on how righteous you are genuinely feeling.

• Next, in part 2 of this series, I will discuss the second step in the process, which deals precisely with evaluating the “feel of impact” you require to be happiest eventually.