In a recent book I reviewed, the authors Antony Bugg-Levine and Jed Emerson ask an important question: should impact investing be considered an “asset class”, i.e., the view favored by some bankers or wealth managers in search for new business?
The other view is this: should impact investing otherwise not be considered a “transformational paradigm” by which all our investments should be subjected to their social + financial returns? Is that even possible, practical, or desirable?
Of course I have my own view, and I am interested to take that discussion further in the future but for now, I would rather love to get YOUR opinion which view you favor. Feel free to leave commentswith your rationale.
Results are immediately visible as you click!
As always, please do feel free to share any suggestions for future polls you may find interesting to learn more about your fellow Good Generation comrades and their views on various topics. I’d be happy to pick up on some of these ideas in the future.
Mulla, Mulla, Mulla: What’s the $ Reality of Social Enterprises?
In a previous Weekly Ponder that dealt with how much “impact” we expect doing good to have on our wallet, the poll results suggested the majority of people do actually care about “doing good and doing well” when it comes to working for social enterprises or NGOs in terms of expecting to make a good living, too. Not only did they care, but they also seemed to agree that the level of pay seems relatively low and unattractive at present.
I’ve since then had a chance for a few good conversations with fellow Good Generation members here and there over a cup of coffee or dinner on the subject of compensation. We agreed that while NGO studies have been around for a while, there exists too little transparency and research in the relatively recent field of for-profit social enterprises on what salary levels currently are and whether this has been adequate to attract and retain talent lured by the call to “do good and do well”. More enigmatic even to me is what the expected progression should be for someone within 2, 5 or even 10 years of working for a social enterprise. The assumption of some people remains that a social enterprise should pay better than the traditional NGO because it’s more like a “business”. Interesting! But is it true?
It appears as if the post reflecting on the nature of ego in social entrepreneurship got more than a few people thinking this week. Before we finish that series later with Part 2, I was curious to see if we had people honest enough to participate in a very simple survey – to find out how much of our do-good activity is truly for the poor, the disadvantage, or the helpless planet vs. for what one commenter called “#1″, “Numero Uno” (ourselves).
As discussed in the article, it seems that when people get involved in this whole ego conversation it tends to result from the fact that there are two schools of thought around this whole “ego in social impact” business. In the first camp, people care only about the results, the accomplishments themselves. In the second camp, people care not just about the results but also about why someone is doing something. In this specific instance, some of us can get very annoyed or upset when we realize that a do-gooder like a social entrepreneur has a proven strong motivation for attaining fame, recognition and a sense of “achievement” instead of bearing the “good of others” as her first reason. Others, on the other hand, could not care less what kind of person does the work, as long as the mouths are fed, the homeless sheltered, and the homes rebuilt.
No matter in which camp you fall, this week’s poll is about finding out if anyone would ever admit to being more driven for an inner sense of accomplishment and pride in oneself instead of the purely charitable motive. While some people would be aghast to assume anyone would ever NOT do it for the noble purpose, others roll their eyes about those so “naive” to believe that we could really do something just for the benefit of others. Sorry, if the answers do not leave much wiggle room this time (smirk)!
Results are immediately visible as you click!
As always, please do feel free to share any suggestions for future polls you may find interesting to learn more about your fellow Good Generation comrades and their views on various topics. I’d be happy to pick up on some of these ideas in the future.
Achieving Sustainability: How Much Do You Really Care?
To round out this week’s orientation on the blog around sustainability, capitalism, and what it all ultimately means, I was curious about how some of us rationalize or privately deal with the challenges that an increasingly less sustainable world poses. Personally, I ended this week’s post on the subject of zero-growth with an assertion that unless we somehow “overthrow ourselves” and change our assumption that more “stuff equals better lives” – instead of just blaming today’s corporations – we are inevitably heading towards a bad, bad place.
The practical reality of this appeal, as expected, is that it is of course significantly easier to articulate a problem and call to action than to actually, well, act on it. Assuming you buy into the idea of “overthrowing ourselves,” how would you propose we do this? How are you doing this already? If actions measure the degree of our “caring”, … how much do you really care, at the end of the day, that our way of life is guaranteed to be unsustainable, which will force either us or our children in our lifetime to make drastic, likely painful changes to what some of us consider necessary conditions for comfort and happiness?
But this week’s poll is not about understanding your recycling habits or asking for the number of organic tea labels in your pantry. More specifically, I am first interested if you agree with my assertion that the core problem of sustainability is based on our explicit demand for more goods, and if a change in this demand would have a greater impact than all corporate sustainability efforts combined. If you agree, then I am curious if you would be willing to change your habitseven if nobody around you would. No judgment here, but I personally suspect this route is tough at best, if we look at it honestly.
As always, please do feel free to share any suggestions for future polls you may find interesting to learn more about your fellow Good Generation comrades and their views on various topics. I’d be happy to pick up on some of these ideas in the future.
Achieving Sustainability: How Much Do You Really Care?
To round out this week’s orientation on the blog around sustainability, capitalism, and what it all ultimately means, I was curious about how some of us rationalize or privately deal with the challenges that an increasingly less sustainable world poses. Personally, I ended this week’s post on the subject of zero-growth with an assertion that unless we somehow “overthrow ourselves” and change our assumption that more “stuff equals better lives” – instead of just blaming today’s corporations – we are inevitably heading towards a bad, bad place.
The practical reality of this appeal, as expected, is that it is of course significantly easier to articulate a problem and call to action than to actually, well, act on it. Assuming you buy into the idea of “overthrowing ourselves,” how would you propose we do this? How are you doing this already? If actions measure the degree of our “caring”, … how much do you really care, at the end of the day, that our way of life is guaranteed to be unsustainable, which will force either us or our children in our lifetime to make drastic, likely painful changes to what some of us consider necessary conditions for comfort and happiness?
But this week’s poll is not about understanding your recycling habits or asking for the number of organic tea labels in your pantry. More specifically, I am first interested if you agree with my assertion that the core problem of sustainability is based on our explicit demand for more goods, and if a change in this demand would have a greater impact than all corporate sustainability efforts combined. If you agree, then I am curious if you would be willing to change your habitseven if nobody around you would. No judgment here, but I personally suspect this route is tough at best, if we look at it honestly.
As always, please do feel free to share any suggestions for future polls you may find interesting to learn more about your fellow Good Generation comrades and their views on various topics. I’d be happy to pick up on some of these ideas in the future.
How many of you know how it feels to be tweeting with your image being nothing but a cute but somewhat unprofessional-looking “egg” (the default picture)? How many feel the egg seems to be a true measure of inadequacy in an unfair world where pictures do speak a thousand words?
Existential angst aside, I do feel it is time for this blog to get an image or face that a non-designer like myself cannot give it. Our Good Generation deserves this face – lest you think that an egg can somehow adequately represent you, ahem.
That said, this is a friendly shout-out to see if among you readers or your networks you know of anyone who may be THE person to give GG it’s first logo. And because we proverbially want to start small, a logo that will fit into a Twitter account image and can then be used for a Gravatar would do just fine for beginners!
For “The Chosen One,”, I have no stashes of money or outsized honors to bestow upon you, but I do have the power of true gratitude and a publicly posted thank you on the blogwith credit given to you.
Thanks so much for responding to or passing the request! I would love to discuss with anyone interested some ideas and see what comes back. You can have anyone email me under the “contact” form on the menu tab.
One of the themes I alluded to in Weekly Ponder #3 had to do with the idea that quite a few of us in the Good Generation currently tend to be members more in “thought than deed.” In short, quite a few of us are working at jobs full time that, whether we enjoy them deeply or not, we may have a hard time defining as technically “doing good”. We may be “doing cool” or “doing nifty”. We may also just “do less bad.” But if we are going to be honest with ourselves, during a private moment, it would be a true statement that we have chosen for one reason or another to “defer doing good” on a full time basis.
I don’t know if that is a good or a bad thing. Many times, it might simply be the reasonable thing. And I don’t know if that is good or bad, either.
I just know that at some point, some of us stood at Robert Frost’s famous spot where “two roads in a yellow wood diverged” … and we chose the path more traveled. Despite all the motivational graduation speeches we have heard in our lifetime expounding on the virtues of taking the less traveled road – whatever that means for each of us – we consciously chose not to.
Why is that? What still keeps you back? Are the reasons back then still valid today? Do you have regrets? Do you think “it” – whatever that is – will still be there when you are ready in a few years? How many of us are doing this?
That is what this week’s poll is about: learning why some of us deferred their inner urge to do good more full-time instead of part-time or “dream time” (in our minds only)… and if we are going to be okay with that in the long term.
As always, please do feel free to share any suggestions for future polls you may find interesting to learn more about your fellow Good Generation comrades and their views on various topics. I’d be happy to pick up on some of these ideas in the future.
The Good Thermometer keeps track of what our Good Generation community is interested in reading and talking about.
Please take 30 seconds for 3 clicks and tell me what you like most, and what you would like to see more of in the future. You can instantly see current results.
I will run the Good Thermometer once a month starting today and hope to get as many votes as possible to get a representative sample of our community members and learn what makes you come back regularly.
Thanks a lot again for swinging by, hope to see you again soon!
(FYI, stay tuned for Part 4 of this week’s “Impact Investing Career Checklist” series coming up shortly)
Weekly Poll #6: 
