Tag Archives: ESG

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
3 Comments
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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