What You Spend Is What You Get

I often ask people, “What’s the biggest problem in the world?” If you don’t know your personal answer to this question, please stop and take a moment to think about it. When you know what the biggest problem in the world is to you, keep reading.

Did you say “potato chips and soft drinks?” No one ever does. Some of the most common answers I hear are water, energy, poverty, intolerance, and war. But did you know that last year, PepsiCo spend over $50 billion in their business of distributing drinks and snacks across the globe? Compare that to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) budget last year of just $5 billion.

You may not think of your potato chip purchase as a driver of human behavior, but it is. PepsiCo has built factories all around the planet; hired some of the smartest engineers, scientists, financial minds, and management experts; created an IT infrastructure that spans the globe – all to support the purchase of potato chips by you and billions of other people. It’s because you spend money on snacks and drinks that drives PepsiCo to create this amazing infrastructure and to organize these incredible resources.

Are snacks and soft drinks ten times more important than global health? They why do we spend ten times as much through PepsiCo than we do through the WHO?

Whatever your biggest problem in the world is, here’s how NOT to solve it: try to convince people to spend their potato chip money on your world problem instead. Trying to change powerful forces like capitalism or culture is a recipe for wasting time and energy. If you want to solve a problem quickly and effectively, use existing forces to accomplish your goal.

That’s where most non-profits take a wrong turn. They reframe the question like this: “How do we arrange for money to be spent on problems we care about like World Health, rather than on problems we don’t care about like Potato Chips?”

It’s the “rather than” that’s the error in thinking. Instead we need to ask the question in forms like these:

• “Can we get people to spend money on World Health every time they spend money on potato chips?”
• “Can we get potato chip companies to spend money on World Health?”
• “Can we create powerful financial incentives for investors that will motivate them or their companies to invest in World Health?”

Guess what: the answer to all these questions is, “Yes!”

There are many ways to leverage existing forces to solve world problems. My favorite is to teach companies that they can make bigger profits if they will partner with world-problem-solvers under a model I call Good Returns (see Scaling Social Ventures).

So I ask you again, “What’s the biggest problem in the world?” Each person has their own answer, so to make it easy to write about here let’s just call it Your Opportunity for now. Now I challenge you to think about Your Opportunity using our new approach: can you get people to spend money on Your Opportunity every time they spend money on coffee? Can you get a glass cleaner company to spend money on Your Opportunity? Can you create powerful financial incentives for investors in a fast food chain that will motivate them to invest in Your Opportunity?

The answer to all these questions is, “Yes.” Now, go do it. Don’t delay, Your Opportunity is here.

If you read my blog, please shop at Soap Hope where we carry everything good for body and home. Every dollar of profit is invested into programs that enable women to lift themselves from poverty.

If you appreciate my ideas, please write on your blog or Facebook right now about Soap Hope and help me solve the biggest problem in the world – poverty in women. You’ll be busy tomorrow, so write a post now!