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Jan 20 2012
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Career, Impact Investing, Lists

A 6-Step Impact Investing Career Checklist (Part 4) – “Targets” or: What to Invest in?

Key Ideas in this Post:

  • Impact investing is the latest hot topic in the do-good community around the world. At its core, the idea of actually “investing” in social-purpose organizations and achieve both “social and environmental” and “financial” returns for money, as an alternative and complement to philanthropy, gets people excited. Whether you think it’s just repackaging of old ideas or a legitimate paradigm shift, this “field” has undeniably gotten significant attention in the last five years.
  • In Part 1 and Part 2 of this 5-part series, I proposed a 6-step mental checklist that may help you navigate your career in this field, and I started with elaborating on the first two items dealing with identifying opportunities and becoming more aware of your actual role on the job.
  • In Part 3, I discussed the importance of  understanding what type of people and personalities manage impact investment funds to determine compatibility with your own style, but also to give you a sense how the negotiation may be influenced by their background.
  • In this Part 4, I will suggest the importance of sensing whether or not your impact investors know what types of organizations they want to invest in. This will tell you something about your potential work environment and the long term viability of the fund you are considering joining.

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Jan 18 2012
13 Comments
Career, Impact Investing, Lists

A 6-Step Impact Investing Career Checklist (Part 3) – “Personalities” or: Who Runs the Show?

Key Ideas in this Post:

  • Impact investing is the latest hot topic in the do-good community around the world. At its core, the idea of actually “investing” in social-purpose organizations and achieve both “social and environmental” and “financial” returns for money, as an alternative and complement to philanthropy, gets people excited. Whether you think it’s just repackaging of old ideas or a legitimate paradigm shift, this “field” has undeniably gotten significant attention in the last five years.
  • In Part 1 and Part 2 of this 5-part series, I proposed a 6-step mental checklist that may help you navigate your career in this field, and I started with elaborating on the first two items dealing with understanding why people seem to care about impact investing, identifying current opportunities, becoming more aware of your actual role on the job, and remain cautious because career development is probably currently not a priority for the majority of impact investing firms but those with most money, scale, and years of experience (which is very few).
  • In this Part 3, I will discuss the third component in the checklist, which involve understanding who you are dealing with as the so-called “impact investor”. I will claim that the personalities of people running impact investment firms nowadays spans a certain spectrum and may or may not be a good fit with you depending on your own preferences and needs. Understanding this will help you probe in your interview and during your research phase to better gauge if a particular firm is the right place for you. Trust me, this is definitely not much talked about when all the media nowadays report and debate on impact investing on its theoretical and abstract features, while paying on average rather little attention to its human level. Let me ask: while impact investing managers can talk passionately about the people their investments help all day and all night, how many can articulate where they see their employees move within their organization in five years? Lastly, do not be surprised if you see a strong theme around money and attitudes towards it. I write about them at length in this post because it is somewhat of an impact investing “dirty little secret” and not discussed because we are supposed to talk about doing good here, right? Well, what I would simply like to do here is to draw the connection between personalities and the way they lead people to interview and negotiate with you sometimes in rather strange, seemingly counter intuitive ways.

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Jan 16 2012
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Career, Impact Investing, Lists

A 6-Step Impact Investing Career Checklist (Part 2) – Defining Your Role

Key Ideas in this Post

  • Impact investing is the latest hot topic in the do-good community around the world. At its core, the idea of actually “investing” in social-purpose organizations and achieve both “social and environmental” and “financial” returns for money, as an alternative and complement to philanthropy, gets people excited. Whether you think it’s just repackaging of old ideas or a legitimate paradigm shift, this “field” has undeniably gotten significant attention in the last five years.
  • Last time, in Part 1 of this 5-part series, I proposed a 6-step mental checklist that may help you navigate your career in this field, and I started with elaborating on the first item dealing with identifying opportunities and reflecting a little on why people are attracted to impact investing to begin with. I distinguished between two types of jobs, with the first group related to the actual impact investors deploying funds, and which include (1) venture-capital/private-equity like funds (e.g., Acumen Fund, Good Capital, Equilibrium Capital Group, Imprint Capital Advisors, Root Capital), (2) specialized institutional investment funds (e.g., Calvert Investments), and (3) engaged foundations (e.g., Skoll Foundation, Omidyar Network). The second group consists mostly of (1) consulting firms (e.g., FSG, Arabella Advisors, etc.), (2) capacity-building foundations (e.g., Rockefeller Foundation), and (3) associations and standardization bodies (e.g., GIIN, MaRS).
  • In today’s Part 2 post, I would like to talk about the typical, characteristic roles that young professionals may play for each type of company and shed a little more light on the R&R one could reasonably expect, although of course acknowledging that in real life everything always depends case by case. On a sidenote, I will also argue that we have to look into the issue of career development, because as I see it, the relative early stage of the industry has in some ways also led to a neglect of providing career visibility to non-senior executive employees of impact investing firms. I would claim that in today’s environment, most company leaders are more concerned about finding answers to subject-matter related questions like impact evaluation, proper screening, deal-making, knowledge piece creations, or publicity. Also, as impact investment funds, out of initial necessity, laterally import managers from the corporate world or from senior positions in nonprofits, the question of how to offer a compelling path for junior and mid-level employees to stay long-term and become executives themselves is arguably not a priority. Hence, the implicit demand to subordinate individual development to the greater social mission, in my opinion, is ultimately a danger and career threat in the business of “doing-good,” and I don’t think impact investing is any different than other do-good jobs in this regard, until time and experience tell us differently.

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Jan 15 2012
4 Comments
Career, Impact Investing, Lists

A 6-Step Impact Investing Career Checklist (Part 1) – Find Your Opportunity

Key Ideas in this Post-Series:

  • Impact investing is the latest hot topic in the do-good community around the world. At its core, the idea of actually “investing” in social-purpose organizations and achieve both “social and environmental” and “financial” returns for money, as an alternative and complement to philanthropy, gets people excited. Whether you think it’s just repackaging of old ideas or a legitimate paradigm shift, this “field” has undeniably gotten significant attention in the last five years.
  • The key benefits, if impact investing can deliver on its promise, are clear: (1) shift mindsets to finally expand the definition of “return” to be more inclusive beyond simple financial metrics, a significant step towards a happy triple-bottom line world will be made, (2) open the floodgates of capital worldwide to help do-good organizations find diverse funding streams through all stages (but especially growth stages) of their development, (3) support philanthropic and development money flow as current main funding sources, and (4) raise standards of quality, transparency and accountability for impact as these new investors demand more rigor and effectiveness from their investees in a measurable way.
  • That said, impact investing is still very early stage and both confusion and lack of agreement prevails on many fronts, raising questions such as: (1) how much financial return is enough?, (2) how do we measure social returns?, (3) how do we prevent mission drift as profit considerations become more important?, (4) what type of organizations exactly are we investing in and (5) is there enough pipeline and liquidity, i.e., enough worthwhile organizations to invest in?

There have been many books and articles, and of course entire conferences like SOCAP dedicated to trying to answer these questions year after year. Meanwhile, the buzz is large enough that we have quite a few people now interested in working on those jobs. But how many of you know what these jobs are about? What assumptions are you making and what expectations do you have? Are you sure about that?

In this 5-part series, taking as usual a career-relevant angle for you, I try to offer a 6-step mental checklist based on personal experience and my current knowledge of impact investing, so that you can (1) better understand what type of opportunities there are currently, (2) ask some meaningful questions to your prospective employer and, most importantly, (3) ask yourself if this is what you want, before you sign the dotted line and join the fun. As always, feel free to weigh in with your own experiences and questions in the comment box for all readers’ benefit.

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Jan 08 2012
5 Comments
Career, Reflection, Social Enterprise, Social Entrepreneurship

The Limit of Social Entrepreneurship – Room for heroes, not for followers

Key Questions in this Post:

  • Is social entrepreneurship a “calling” or can it be a “career choice”?
  • What’s there to do for wannabe social entrepreneurs without a cause?
  • What happens if we all become entrepreneurs?

Every day as I peruse the web for the latest and greatest news on social innovations, I cannot help noticing what I could call an obsession with social entrepreneurship. More precisely, an obsession of funders, investors and all kinds of umbrella organizations to highlight the importance of individuals starting their own socially do-good company and then scale it and change the world. While I once started my own journey in the social sector with a curiosity about and an admiration for the accomplishments of social entrepreneurs, I have come to realize over the years that we are starting to forget something really important. We are forgetting (drumroll) … all the other people. Call them ingloriously the “followers” if you want. Or call them the teams, the supporters, the “also were there” people.

Let me put it differently: hardly anyone would dispute that it takes a certain type of character and personality for someone to become a social entrepreneur. One that will be successful in the long term, at least. Also, in any given population, it is probably fair to say that only a minority is cut out to be social entrepreneurs. Thus, it would seem that we could categorize people in this space into (1) those who will actually go and start their own organizations and (2) those who are strongly interested in being involved with social entrepreneurship but may not want to be founders themselves. There is no word today for the thousands of people, especially young people, in this latter category. For this article, forgive me for calling this group the “armchair entrepreneurs” who have not yet found their place in the social innovation world, but love to read about it, talk about it, and plan for their great debut.

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Jan 03 2012
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Career

4 Steps to Choosing a “Good Career” (Part 4) – Reality Check

Key Ideas from “4 Steps to Choosing a Good Career (Part 3)” Post (Jan 3, 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. The second step I called “feeling of impact” and recognizes that although we may all have “doing good” in common as a general idea or intention, we still have distinct personalities and preferences that determine at what level we need to feel the impact we are making. In the third step, “need prioritization,” I suggested that there may be a general trade-off between being able to be maximize scale of impact at a given organization but not being able to feel our impact as meaningfully in our daily work in the same place.
  • In this final post of the series, I would like to finish with the fourth step, which is how to think about incorporating our unique individual life circumstances in our career decisions.

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Jan 03 2012
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Career

4 Steps to Choosing a “Good Career” (Part 3) – Need Prioritization

Key Ideas from “4 Steps to Choosing a Good Career (Part 2)” Post (Dec 31, 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.
  • The second step I called “feeling of impact” and recognizes that although we may all have “doing good” in common as a general idea or intention, we still have distinct personalities and preferences that determine at what level we need to feel the impact we are making. I tried to group “do-good” jobs in two broad categories according to the way people eventually experience impact and tried to argue that each person usually belongs to one or the other, but not both types of groups. Hence, identifying which category you belong to by virtue of how you wish to experience impact is yet another important variable to find the right do-good career.
  • In this post, I would now like to examine in the third step how to think about our needs and prioritize, especially between the two previously introduced concepts of scale and feel of impact.

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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 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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