Strategic Philanthropy – Personal Edition

…accomplishing philanthropic goals requires having great clarity about what those goals are and specifying indicators of success before beginning a philanthropic project.

-Paul Brest and Hal Harvey, Money Well Spent (7)

In Matthew Bishop’s recent talk on Philanthrocapitalism at the Stanford Business School, I asked him during the Q&A session whether his argument of “how the rich are saving the world” suggests that those of us in the philanthropic sector truly interested in making a difference should attempt to make lots of money instead. Bishop responded by giving a Guy Kawasaki-esque argument that people should do what they are passionate about and that if you intentionally “try to become a billionaire, your chances of success are none.” He argued that Bill Gates and others didn’t set out to make billions of dollars (see Gates’ 1994 interview with Playboy on About.com) – so the advice Bishop gave was for those of us thinking about what careers to choose was to “follow your passion.”

While I’m sympathetic to the context in which Bishop gave his answer (what other than a cliche answer can you give when asked a pointed question in a speaking engagement), I think the idea of “following your passion” is somewhat of a hand wavy answer. If you only have one passion in life and a strong notion of predetermined destiny, then you may have no choice but to “follow your passion.” But what if you believe you have free will and choice over your preferences and could see yourself being passionate about multiple things? Then the advice of following your passion seems less useful.

Personally, I’ve been standing here at a crossroads in my life, contemplating which path I want to choose. Before, when I was in school, I thought my options after graduation were fairly limited; the fear of almost every philosophy major is underemployment, with the running joke that the only option for us is flipping burgers or graduate school (with law and medical school rounding out the top choices). But traveling to China, working for Blueprint, and reading more prolifically has given me more confidence (for better and for worse) that my options are much more than flipping burgers and law school.

Between the four options I’ve been considering (entrepreneurship, philanthropy, academia, and law) why should passion be the criteria I use to choose? Furthermore, since I’m passionate about all four, how would “following my passion” help me make a decision. Perhaps it really is about choosing what I’m most passionate about, but again, if I can choose what I’m most passionate about, then I need some other criteria for choosing what I’m most passionate about.

For most people, choosing a passion is a combination of things. Many of the chic in the social entrepreneurship world subscribe to the “doing good and doing well” philosophy, where both doing good (helping people) and doing well (living a materially nice life) are both integral parts of finding their passion. The problem with this philosophy (which I’ll critique in more detail on an upcoming post that combines my broken car window, the discussion of financial compensation in the nonprofit sector, philanthropy & guilt, and a post about ethics & happiness that I’ve been wanting to write since China) is that doing well can and often does impose a constraint on doing good. What would you do if you could do more good at the expense of doing well?

I’m a big fan of Michael Jensen’s idea that organizations need single objective functions to function properly (in contrast to stakeholder theory, which doesn’t provide adequate guidance – I’m just not a big fan of his conclusion that the single objective function ought to be profit). On an individual level, I also think a single objective function makes sense as well (the thesis of one of the best-selling non-fiction books of all time, The Purpose Driven Life, is basically a recommendation that people create single objective functions for themselves – in this case developing a relationship with God – to guide all of their actions).

So, in thinking about all the considerations of various career opportunities (law school provides a starting salary security blanket of $165K+, academia provides a nice community, philanthropy provides a way to influence millions if not billions of dollars in capital, entrepreneurship provides a direct way of helping the poor), it has been exceptionally important for me to identify what my objective is. To aid my decision making, I find myself adopting a loose utilitarian framework, with the goal of helping the most number of people and special emphasis on improving the position of the least well off. Thus, with a single objective in hand, the tens and hundreds of factors related to each career opportunity only become relevant when considering the question “Will this enable me to help more people?”

However, identifying the objective is only one step in the right direction and insufficient by itself. In order to truly be strategic with my life, I will need to develop a theory of change on how I will create social impact in improving people’s lives, in the same way that the best organizations do.

So, in a future post, with the knowledge of Acumen Fund’s BACO in one hand and the Kellogg Foundation’s Logic Model Development Guide in the other, I will be attempting to breakdown my options and the social impact assessment of each.