Here's an interesting article from Fast Company magazine that poses a question for all non-profits to consider: What is the role of a non-profit? Is it to run as an efficient business model serving a "core market?" Or is it a service model serving those who do not necessarily qualify as a profitable market niche for traditional business? What would be the take on this by a servant-leader?
BY Gregory FerensteinTue Sep 6, 2011
The grandson of the legendary investor aims to bring some private-sector savvy to the growing world of mega-philanthropy.
Howard Buffett is attempting to unify the scattered world of independent nonprofits through his grandfather's multi-billion dollar investment strategy: Invest in a portfolio of smart people and let them flourish. Having just taken the reins as Executive Director of the family foundation after holding posts in the White House and Department of Defense, Buffett has ambitious plans to pay the world's savviest nonprofits to collaboratively tackle the full spectrum of food security, from third-world farmer education to public policy.
"My grandfather, in part, has been so successful because he has identified the best human capital for managing businesses," Buffett tells Fast Company. Emulating the strategy of investing in people who have proven strategies, the younger Buffett is building a coalition of already-successful leaders in each niche of food security.
The approach, he hopes, will become the standard for his family's growing network of mega-philanthropists: rather than dolling out cash to independent, uncoordinated actors with the most heart-string-tugging story, they could take on an entire social problems (like food security or breast cancer) by systematically lining up nonprofits to tackle each part of the causal chain, from federal policy to victim resources.
Getting Rid Of Redundencies
"If you are an NGO, doing the exact same thing as another NGO, and that other NGO is doing better than you're doing it, then you are in business for the wrong reason," Buffett says in an exasperated rant against the individualist nature of charities. Overlapping operations, he says, not only waste money through redundant overhead, but keep brilliant minds occupied with logistical distractions that sap their potential impact.
"We will give you money to execute your mission," Buffett says, "if you work together and identify the most cost-effective and successful ways to achieve that."
Meanwhile, looking at the entire causal chain of a crisis is key to revealing missing links in the solution, such as political or logistical hurdles that are essential to success, but not appealing enough to raise dollars.
Buffett learned the importance of interconnectedness after witnessing efforts to save forests be thwarted by starving locals. "They're going to cut down the forest, burn the trees, and then try to grow food on something that has horrible productivity value," he says. The horrific conditions led the foundation to not only shift from environmental stewardship to food security, but to the current strategy of solving problems as a closed ecosystem. Now, the Buffet foundation sponsors everything from an endowed political science chair at Texas A&M that studies conflict and hunger to public awareness campaigns.
A New Take On Evaluating Philanthropic Impact
"Emotion is not fungible, so to measure success through the emotional feeling we get from doing something is not an effective way of measuring," says Buffett, who needs a way to objectively evaluate the unwieldy volumes of grants proposed to his own foundation. But, unlike money, he says, "there is nothing that exists as a universal measure of impact for a philanthropic endeavor."
To make the tough comparisons between education, hunger, veterans, or disease eradication, Buffett designed an "issue agnostic" survey of scope, relevancy, cost-efficiency, and risk of any proposal.
The first question, for instance, is "Assuming we are successful, how many people would we reach directly with the funding of this gift?" Proposals gets 3 points for affecting +1 million people, 2 for greater than 100,000, and 1 for less than 100,000. Those proposals with a less ambitious scope can secure a coveted spot on the portfolio team by being particularly unique or cost-efficient.
He maintains that the measure helps him balance caring for the needy with the harsh realities of inefficient programs. "There's absolutely nothing wrong" with emotion, he says, admitting that the crisis of global food security has a particular effect on him. "My fear is when emotion clouds rationality."
Selling Suffering
"In the philanthropic world, the problem is the product, in the business world, the product is the solution." says Buffett, who argues that NGOs are forced to "sell suffering." The needless focus on sappy narratives often overlooks sophisticated solutions that can't be easily marketed with a T-shirt-clad celebrity holding a small child.
As an example, he notes, hunger-stricken continents are perfectly capable of offsetting their own crises , since famine and food surplus hit neighboring countries in the same year. If food-swap agreements were in place, the surplus country could donate food when they have more crops, knowing they'd get reciprocation in an inevitable drought.
"I see this as sexy," he says, half-jokingly. Buffett argues he's able to harness these kinds of sophisticated solutions because of his foundation's unique approach to objective measures and a broad-spectrum tackling of whole social issues.
A Business-Minded Approach To Philanthropy
Frustrated by the bureaucratic restraints of government and inspired by the nimbleness of the growing social entrepreneurship industry, the 27-year-old Buffett aims to bring some private sector savvy to the philanthropic world. He hopes his coalition strategy will encourage nonprofits to consider their "comparative advantage," and that his universal measure of "impact" can be as fungible as money. Finally, he aims to move charities away from selling narratives to selling solutions.
He even imagines a world were nonprofits can acquire one another. "You want to bring this back to the business world, there are no incentives for philanthropic organizations to merge," he says, adding that there are no easy legal means by which nonprofits can combine their resources as for-profits do.
Buffett was raised to blur the lines between nonprofit and for-profit: He is the product of a billionaire grandfather who has both pledged to give most of his money away and maligned the concept of inheritance as perpetuating "members of the lucky sperm club."
Yet, grateful for the opportunities his family gave him, and the legacy of giving his grandfather catalyzed, Buffett aims to make this exceptional charitable philosophy a mainstream belief for his generation.
"Our old definitions of success were wealth, power, and fame," he says. "We need to see those as a means to an end, and those need to be impact."
Check out "Who's Next" for more profiles of the new big thinkers.
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Christina Keller, a business unit leader at Cascade Engineering, has been working with her father, Fred Keller, chairman and CEO, for two years. Fred Keller started the company in 1973 next door to his dad's business, Paragon Die and Engineering. Fred Keller says he is happy his daughter is excited about the business.
Bing Goei and his son, Jason, run Eastern Floral."It's always been part of my dream to create a business large enough that my children can be involved in if they want," Bing Goei said. The two have been working together since Bing Goei bought the company in 2001.
Ayn Rand's Philosophical Influence on Neo Conservatives and Her Arguments Against Christian Morality
In a recent conversation with Larry Spears, President of the Spears Center for Servant Leadership, I asked how he thought Robert Greenleaf would react to the notion of "Objectivism" the philosophy espoused by writer/philosopher Ayn Rand. Larry found the idea intriguing.
Here's an article that explores how Ayn Rand might view current events:
Republished from Gorevidalnow.com
“This odd little woman is attempting to give a moral sanction to greed and self interest,” Gore Vidal saidof Ayn Rand, writing for Esquire in July 1961, “and to pull it off she must at times indulge in purest Orwellian newspeak of the ‘freedom is slavery’ sort.”
The mindset of Rand’s followers has not changed over the decades. “She has a great attraction for simple people” Vidal said then, “who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who dislike the ‘welfare’ state, who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts. For them, she has an enticing prescription: altruism is the root of all evil, self-interest is the only good, and if you’re dumb or incompetent that’s your lookout.”
Even so, then as now, Rand had a large following. “What interests me most about her,” wrote Vidal, “is not the absurdity of her ‘philosophy,’ but the size of her audience (in my campaign for the House she was the one writer people knew and talked about).”
Vidal also described Rand as “a rhetorician who writes novels I have never been able to read.”
In the 50 years since Gore Vidal penned those words, the cult around the philosophy of that “odd little woman” has grown both in size and influence.
Today, the best-known Republican propagandists — Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck — have praised her. GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is a Randite, as is the Republican Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was both an acolyte and close friend of Rand in his youth.
But her philosophy is most influential in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, where her number-one fanboy is, hands down, Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and author of the GOP’s signature kill-Medicare budget bill.
“The reason I got involved in public service,” Ryan once said, “if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”
What is it about Rand’s philosophy that Ryan finds appealing? “Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism,” Ryan has said. “And this to me is what matters the most: it is not enough to say that President Obama’s taxes are too big or that the health care plan does not work, or this or that policy reason. It is the morality of what is occurring right now; and how it offends the morality of individuals working for their own free will, to produce, to achieve, to succeed that is under attack.”
How important is Rand’s philosophy to him? “I give out Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents,” Ryan has said, “and I make all my interns read it.”
Ryan is a practicing Catholic, according to his official biography. But here we have him handing out copies of Atlas Shrugged, a paean to godlessness and anti-Christian values, as Christmas presents.
Remember that Rep. Ryan is supposedly one of the big thinkers on the right these days. As a die-hard devotee of Ayn Rand, he has to know that she was adamantly opposed to religion in general and Christianity specifically.
“I don’t approve of religion,” she once stated, flatly. Elsewhere, she decried religious faith as evil. “[Faith],” she said, “is a sign of a psychological weakness … I regard it as evil to place your emotions, your desire, above the evidence of what your mind knows. That’s what you’re doing with the idea of God.”
She was particularly scornful toward the foundational premise of Christianity, that Jesus sacrificed himself for the sins of others. “According to the Christian mythology,” she wrote, “[Christ] died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the non-ideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the non-ideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture.”
The prospect of a schism between Randites and religious fundamentalists in the Republican Party has been around from the beginning. Here is Vidal describing it in 1961:
But there has been no schism. Quite the opposite. And the fact that Republican evangelicals, who are instructed by Christ to feed the hungry, house the homeless and heal the sick, have embarked into these dangerous waters so quietly and without hesitation is telling. If they are at all disconcerted by the Randites’ push to cut government assistance for the poor, elderly and infirm and reallocate those taxpayer dollars as subsidies and tax breaks for the Republican Party’s corporate sponsors, they have kept their concerns to themselves.
So how did conservatives reconcile the opposing creeds of Christian selflessness and Randian selfishness? As Vidal noted in Esquire, they simply redefined morality:
The unlikely partnership of Bible beaters and Randites was on display earlier this month at the Faith and Freedom conclave convened in Washington by Ralph Reed, the former head of Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition and alleged money-launderer for the Republican conman, “Casino Jack” Abramoff. One of Reed’s featured speakers was the Christian/anti-Christian coalition’s point man, Rep. Paul Ryan.
Greed is no longer simply good. With Ralph Reed’s blessings, it is now holy. Vidal continues:
What Vidal could not have known in 1961 was that Ayn Rand’s ultimate lesson would be, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
At the end of her life, suffering from lung cancer as a result of a two-pack-a-day nicotine addiction, Rand quietly renounced her philosophy of selfish self-reliance. According to the Oral History of Ayn Rand by Scott McConnell, founder of the media department at the Ayn Rand Institute, after the American capitalist medical system had wiped her out financially, she used her married name, Ann O’Connor, to apply for and receive Social Security and Medicare.
Yes, in the end, when Ayn Rand found herself in the unfortunate position of those she’d built a philosophy, not to mention a career, castigating — when it was she who was elderly, broke and ill — she availed herself of the crown jewels of American socialism.
Vidal concluded his Esquire “Comment” with a warning that in retrospect seems to presage the rise of her cult at the core of the American empire. “Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy,’” he wrote, “is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society. Moral values are in flux. The muddy depths are being stirred by new monsters and witches from the deep. Trolls walk the American night. Caesars are stirring in the Forum. There are storm warnings ahead.”
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