Stand-Up

Everyone knows the classic joke about the man who complains, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this,” and the doctor says, “Well don’t do that.”

Think about it for a second – why is that funny to us?

The doctor’s advice is actually completely practical. But we all understand the doctor is ignoring the actual problem, and that makes it funny.

So – have you heard the one about the poor villager and the cause marketing business? The villager says, “We have no opportunity.” The business says, “Here, have these shoes.”

This time, it’s not funny. Not only is the problem being ignored, the prescription is creating side effects.

The reason people are without shoes is because they are in poverty. Shoelessness is, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” Dumping shoes on the problem is, “Don’t do that.” A real doctor – and a real social entrepreneur – will spend time to understand the root cause, and work with the patient to cure the condition.

Social entrepreneurs have a natural impulse to help others. But when you take large-scale actions, it’s important to look at the side effects of your activity.

What are the side effects when you give away masses of shoes in a poor area?

– What happens to the people who make shoes in the region? What about the people who make the leather or fabric for them? The people who bring them to the village to sell?

– What happens to a child when she wears shoes for six months and then outgrows them, and there is no replacement?

– If only half the children in a village receive free shoes, what is the impact on the other half?

Real, sustainable solutions to poverty focus on empowerment – which in practice means information and access to basic resources. If a social entrepreneur wants to make a healthy impact, she focuses on sustainable ways to increase access to water, nutrition, education, healthcare, capital, employment, and legal rights – the necessary foundations for sustainable prosperity. A family with access to these foundations will buy their own shoes – the right shoes for them, at the right time for them.

It’s important to follow our impulse to help others. It’s also important to be wise about how we go about providing that help. To address the right problems. To use tools of empowerment, so that those in the grip of poverty can stand up their own lives and their own communities. No joke.

The Easy Way

I once told my friend Lucy something I secretly had been thinking about for a while.

I told her I wanted to get rid of the few things I keep around in life, and move to the Dominican Republic to work for Esperanza International – an anti-poverty institution that I love and admire.

I’d spend half my time at headquarters, helping to improve operations and fundraising. And I’d spend half my time in the field, working directly with the women who are empowered by Esperanza.

It’s so compelling to me. For the rest of my life I would know that I had helped, hands-on, some of the most vulnerable people in my human family. I would forever have those memories, being shoulder to shoulder with the women and the field workers, changing lives. I would have the incomparable experience of helping to build a first class poverty fighting institution.

Lucy is one of the most practical people I know, so I thought she was going to tell me that wouldn’t be very wise for my career or retirement plans. But that’s not what she said at all. Her eyes flashed, and she spoke sharply, so I would remember it.

“Salah! You’re being selfish!”

It wasn’t the reaction I expected after just explaining that I wanted to get rid of all my worldly possessions and move to another land to help impoverished women.

Lucy said, “You’re mixing up feeling good about what you do with actual impact. There are many people who can go help the women of Esperanza. There are less that can help improve the operations of Esperanza, but there are still a lot. But you told me that you are working on a business model that could enable thousands of entrepreneurs to impact the lives of millions of people around the globe.”

“Your problem,” she said, “is that you are scared that you might fail. If you strive for something really big and really difficult, the likelihood of failure is high. You might waste precious years in your effort to create a platform to empower millions of lives. You might be left with nothing to show for your work. But if you don’t make the attempt, you will certainly not achieve your potential.”

“If you go to the island, the likelihood that you will help a few people is very high. It will certainly make you feel good. But you will be squandering any chance you have at making a big, worldwide impact. There’s nothing wrong with that – but see it with clear eyes. It’s selfish.”

If you are a social entrepreneur, I hope you have a Lucy in your life. Whenever I have a difficult decision to make, I remember what she showed me that evening. It helps give me the courage to go all-in. It keeps me from accidentally taking the easy way.

Thanks Lucy!

I’d like to hear your stories about risk taking and impact. Comments are open, or e-mail me at salah@soaphope.com, or connect with me on Facebook.

Solving The Puzzle

Jenny is VP of marketing at a $150 million company. Each year for the last three years, her CEO has given the senior team a set of measurable goals. They get a huge bonus when they meet the goals. Every year they’ve met them.

Some of this year’s key goals:

– $30 million in new revenue.
– Double the number of small-business customers.
– Do this without impacting profitability.

Jenny is confident she will meet the goals this year.

And that’s how I know the people in Jenny’s company are passing up a huge opportunity to improve our world.

Huh?

That’s right. Follow me:

Jenny’s company has a simple but powerful formula for financial success that works every year:

– The CEO sets goals that are easy to measure (all numbers).
– He fully empowers his team.
– He pays them a big bonus when they succeed.

The goals are like a puzzle – they only fit together in certain ways, and when the team solves the puzzle they get a big reward. They bring all the creativity and hard work necessary to solve the puzzle.

Last year’s puzzle included, “Do this without impacting profitability.” It would be easy for Jenny to generate the new revenue by lowering prices, or running a massive ad campaign. But the puzzle is harder than that: she has to find ways to reach new customers without spending too much or lowering margins.

Remember, Jenny told me she is confident she will reach her goal. She’s done it three times before. The team has already come up with multiple creative ways to go after new customers.

Now, here’s where Jenny and everyone else in her company is missing an enormous human opportunity.

Jenny’s company will make no measurable impact on any of the biggest challenges in our world: poverty, clean water, clean energy, conflict, education, disease. The company has no social focus at all.

Why? Because there’s no social impact goal tied to their bonus. It’s not a part of the puzzle. Jenny won’t spend any time on it. None of the team’s creative potential will go toward it.

My critic says, “But Salah, it’s not the role of a business to solve social problems. Whatever energy they would use to solve social problems could be used to make more money, which is the purpose of the business. You’re just making the business less effective by injecting extraneous requirements.”

That’s a fallacy that is preventing us from using the vast human capacity in businesses from making big strides toward solving our world’s greatest challenges.

Let me show you how:

Give Jenny this extra goal: “Reduce the number of children who are hungry every day next year by 1,000.” The last part of the CEO’s puzzle is still, “do this without impacting profitability.” Jenny can’t just donate a million dollars to meet the childhood hunger goal, any more than she could just lower prices to meet the sales goal.

The worst possible way to meet this goal is to figure out how to earn more money as a company and then donate the money to organizations that feed children. That will cost over a million dollars. If that were the only way to solve the problem, I would have to agree with my critic.

But that’s not how Jenny is going to solve this puzzle.

Jenny is going to develop creative solutions that integrate the goals – just as you would approach traditional company goals. She will use the social goal as a tool to help meet the financial goals, and use the financial goals as leverage points to meet the social goal.

She might use the requirement about childhood hunger to create new opportunities and tactics for marketing and selling. She might bring opportunity to customers and vendors around the childhood hunger goal that result in a financial benefit. If Jenny is effective, her team will develop a strategy that doesn’t treat the social goal as separate, something outside the main plan, something to figure out at the end. She will use the social goal to help solve the total puzzle.

If Jenny’s CEO will create a social goal that is measurable and clear, and make the team’s bonus dependent on it, he will find what I and other social entrepreneurs have found in our own business experience:

– Brilliant new creative marketing ideas arise from the team.
– New partnership opportunities emerge.
– New dimensions for business appear with customers and vendors.
– A new kind of passion and creativity ignites inside the organization as employees start to see that their work every day is human, not just financial.

Every day millions of people go to work to solve the puzzles presented to them by their company leaders. And almost none of those puzzles include working on the most important problems in our world, because leaders have made the mistake of thinking that the social goal will diminish the business results. That’s an error, and it’s leaving an enormous amount of positive social change on the table.

I challenge every company leader to try this experiment. At your next goal-setting time, add one measurable social goal to your puzzle. Give it teeth: make it as important to the bonus as everything else. Make it impactful: work on the most critical social problem you can. Help your team understand that this goal isn’t a tactic – it’s not a corporate sponsorship donation or a volunteer day. It’s to be integrated into the plan and leveraged, just like the financial and operational goals are.

See the results for yourself. You will never go back, and your whole business will become a part of solving the real puzzle: how our society will cooperate to address the greatest challenges in our world.

Good Returns = Good Incentives

One of the special benefits of the Good Returns model is that it causes all the parties in the model to be incentivized for desirable outcomes.  A quick recap of Good Returns:

A business invests 100% of profits into sustainable non-profit organizations each year, for a rolling one year term, in the form of an interest-free loan.  The non-profit uses the cost-free capital to increase the reach of its sustainable mission (for example, providing more microloans to women in poverty, or issuing more low-cost student loans in Africa, or providing low-cost medical services in Guatemala, or … ).  At the end of the next year, the original funds are returned to the business and the process repeats itself.

Here are some of the interesting structural outcomes that Good Returns creates:

– Management is motivated to maximize profits. The company’s management team is motivated to drive the company’s bottom line, just as in any traditional capitalist business.  This incentive is a big advantage over non-profits, which often burn money and other resources because they are not required to generate profits to survive.

– Non-profit partners are motivated to become sustainable. The vast majority of non-profits are unsustainable – they must continually raise funds from donors in order to survive. In order for a company to invest in a non-profit and be assured of the return of capital, the non-profit must be sustainable, or at least have a segregated sustainable program. Good Returns will drive more non-profits to develop sustainable programs.

– “Mission-fudging” is eliminated. In many traditional for-profit social enterprises, the management team must be incredibly strong in its convictions about the mission, because every dollar spent on the mission is one less dollar in profit, which results in lower compensation for the management team.  It’s simply not realistic to count on large numbers of people to give up personal gain for mission on an ongoing basis.  Under Good Returns, every extra dollar of profit is an extra dollar toward mission, not taken from it.

– Investors will come. In its first year in business, Soap Hope had more than 45% month-over-month revenue growth on a fraction of the marketing budget that a traditional startup would require.  How did we achieve this growth? By the passion of our customers for our mission – they communicate virally to friends, family, and through online social networks. If a company can create significantly more leverage from its marketing budget, it can drive higher return on capital for its investors. We plan to prove this assertion through the financial results from Soap Hope and other early Good Returns companies.

I’m curious to see what else we will learn about the structural benefits and drawbacks of the Good Returns model over time.  Please share your thoughts and experiences with me.

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Many people have asked how they can help. I ask for and welcome your help:

• Purchase your all natural soap and body care products from Soap Hope – it’s less expensive than in the store, even with shipping
• Use Soap Hope for corporate gifting and personal gifts
• Connect me with national radio and tv personalities if you have those relationships
• Write about Soap Hope on your blog
• Share the Soap Hope fan page on your Facebook wall
• Tweet about us as often as you are willing

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Coming Soon:

Non-profits: I’ll be writing a post for you about many different types of programs that non-profits can implement that are all sustainable.

Investors: soon I will write a post about how down the road dividends will be insured against loss while they are doing their one year of service.

Good Returns: My intention is to develop Good Returns as a stand-alone organization that provides certification for sustainable non-profits, financing programs to mediate timing differences between companies and non-profits, an insurance guarantee for invested funds, a brand that companies can use to attract and retain customers – I’ll discuss this and more in an upcoming post.

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Thank you for your loyalty and support!

Regards,

Salah Boukadoum
Co-Founder, Soap Hope