At just about every gift-economy talk I deliver, a timid hand raises itself half way, followed by a sheepish "Can I ask you a personal question?" remark, and then the million dollar question -- "How do you pay your bills?" For a generosity entrepreneur, it's a question that doesn't require an answer. For the rest, it warrants a curious inquiry.
"How do you survive?" Deep relationships, call it social capital. "How do you build social capital?" By giving unconditionally. "Does what-goes-around really come-back-around?" It does, for me. "But what if it doesn't for me?" You suffer for a bit and soon enough your patterns change. "What do you get by doing this?" To be in constant state of giving, while also receiving; you always feel connected. "When you live off gifts, aren't you just externalizing the costs?" To take just one breathe, we're killing beings; so I don't know how to exist materially without externalizing some cost. "Do you know others who do this?" Monks and nuns across all traditions have been doing this for decades. "What does the world look like, when we're in a gift-economy?" Consider indigenous cultures, anywhere in the world.
Coupled with stories and research, one can make a pretty compelling argument. Yet, the CharityFocus innovation (if that's the word) has been to port this into an organizational paradigm. So how can an organization (or a movement) be gift-economy? I usually cite three requirements:
It's been a while since I last read a full book, cover to cover. You get the gist of a paragraph, look up relevant footnotes in hyper-link fashion, and move on to the next tidbit of information consumption. And it turns out that I am far from the only one doing this "power browsing".
Everyone's at it. The ubiquity of text on the Internet means people are reading more, but it also means that we're losing the ability to actually read entire books (and hence contemplate complex arguments that take more than a soundbyte), our attention is scattered and our concentration is diffused.
Some are now wondering if Google is actually helping process that information or flattening our intelligence to the level of artificial intelligence. :) “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off,” Google Founder Sergey Brin said. In a great article in the Atlantic, Is Google Making Us Stoopid, Nicholas Karr responds:
Their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
Perhaps we need to focus on meditation dot calm, if we are to make any signficant progress.
This past weekend a small group of friends in Manhattan decided to try sharing smiles by providing food to the homeless. It all started with one member of our group noticing that there are so many restaurants in the city that have excess food left over after doing business and simply end up throwing it away. The thought was (like our friend Robert Eggers) to get a few restaurants to agree to giving us the excess food and allowing us to give it to those that could use it.
The process turned out to be not that easy. Apparently there are laws in place preventing this type of work from happening. Because it is hard to manage the quality of food when it leaves restaurant premises, the city does not allow this type of service -- they worry about someone getting sick from the food and suing the city or the restaurants.
Not to be deterred, one of our group-members somehow convinced a couple local restaurants to go against the grain in the name of service, and Saturday afternoon we were near the homeless shelter in midtown doing our best to hand out the gifts we received.
By the numbers, we gave out something in the neighborhood of 100 meals, but the process and the feeling associated with it was much different than our previous exploits with lemonade or cookies.
In the last month or so, we've had couple of major interviews. Two of them, in Reader's Digest and Better Homes and Gardens, have been consciously anonymous. Now, as magazines go, Better Home and Gardens has the second highest circulation in the US, and Reader's Digest is number 3, so it's a pretty significant pass on "branding" and outreach and the whole shabang.
That's a curious pattern. By the mere virtue of being organized, there is some centralization, which implies some sort of a brand; what happens when a brand works in the anti-brand direction? If you do this early in the game, you won't get organized at all (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). If you don't do this at all, you become a behemoth of aggregated power (which typically tends to corrupt) and/or become very personality driven (which has a different draw than being purpose-driven). If you do this mid-game, in the context of a network economy, it's not clear what will happen. And we're on the way to finding out. :)
I didn't do the Better Home and Gardens interview, but I can talk about my conversation with a Reader's Digesteditor -- she was blown away! And ironically, because I had nothing to take, it just amped up the trust level, the focus was really on the content and by the end of the conversation, we were talking about the potential of a regular kindness column and she was asking me off-the-record questions like, "So what does the world look like, if everyone does a little bit of this gift-economy?" It was no longer an editor-interviewee dynamic, the power dynamic shifted from the interviewee feeling like a prized winner to the editor feeling like the recipient of humble service, and it made the whole interaction more human, personal and subtly far-reaching.
From our end, we did this because it's a process that resonates more deeply with our values. Anonymity for its own sake, though, has its share of problems -- as journalists often argue, anonymous sources don't fly as credible citations; just a mention on this blog mildly breaks anonymity; anonymity can often be a facade for cowardice. Taking ownership and accepting credit certainly has its own merit (Bo Lozoff once went on 1.5 year silent retreat, because he didn't have the humility to graciously accept a compliment from a prisoner).
Still, from an organizational design perspective, our behavior throws a bit of a monkey-wrench in the traditional paradigm. Maybe we lose out on opportunity to cash-in, maybe we stay a bit smaller, maybe we gain credibility and it powers more word-of-mouth, maybe it's just silly. Either way, CharityFocus is uniquely poised -- with its social capital driven infrastructure -- to experiment boldly. :)
I just read an article on hyper-milers like Wayne Gerdes, who gets 59 MPG in a regular Honda Accord!
On a midsummer saturday in a sprawling Wisconsin parking lot, about a dozen people are milling about a candy-apple red Honda Insight. They're watching Wayne Gerdes prepare for his run in Hybridfest's mpg Challenge, a 20-mile race through the streets of Madison. Wayne is the odds-on favorite to win the challenge, in which drivers compete to push the automotive limits not of speed and power—a desire those gathered here consider old-fashioned and wasteful—but for the unsexy title of Most Fuel-Efficient Driver in the World. [...]
I'm thinking that hypermiling consists of driving like a 90-year-old in a mobile sweat lodge, but I'm about to find out I'm wrong. Really, really wrong.
It's a hilarious (but sincere) article on the art of saving some gas. :) Can't say that I would adopt any of Wayne's techniques but it had me crackin' up for sure!
Long live the 4 P's of marketing: product, price, place and promotion. Jerome McCarthy created them in the 60s, and b-school lineage popularized them since then. But now Seth Godin -- who gave us a significant scholarship to one of his workshops last year and is often considered a modern-day marketing genius of sorts -- has got a modern version of it:
Data -- observe what's happening already. Pickup on the trends and figure out how you can be useful.
Stories -- define what want to be. Your story is the vision, the brand. Create an ethos around it.
Products -- manifest form of your story. Be the story, live the story.
Interactions -- reach out to community. Make your offerings relevant. Adapt, engage, co-create.
Connection -- the real bottom line. Connect to those you serve, build reputation, and create many-to-many platforms.
Losing the P-for-place is no surprise, in an internet world. But when we start losing the price and the promotion, things become quite interesting for gift-economy folks. :)
At the Stanford commencement (also on video) two weeks ago, Oprah tagged the grads (not the the 29K in attendance) with Eckhart Tolle's New Earth book (saying "I really wanted to give you cars but I just couldn't pull that off!")and ended with this inspired bit on service:
The lesson here is clear, and that is, if you're hurting, you need to help somebody ease their hurt. If you're in pain, help somebody else's pain. And when you're in a mess, you get yourself out of the mess helping somebody out of theirs. And in the process, you get to become a member of what I call the greatest fellowship of all, the sorority of compassion and the fraternity of service.
The Stanfords had suffered the worst thing any mom and dad can ever endure, yet they understood that helping others is the way we help ourselves. And this wisdom is increasingly supported by scientific and sociological research. It's no longer just woo-woo soft-skills talk. There's actually a helper's high, a spiritual surge you gain from serving others. So, if you want to feel good, you have to go out and do some good.
But when you do good, I hope you strive for more than just the good feeling that service provides, because I know this for sure, that doing good actually makes you better. So, whatever field you choose, if you operate from the paradigm of service, I know your life will have more value and you will be happy.
I was always happy doing my talk show, but that happiness reached a depth of fulfillment, of joy, that I really can't describe to you or measure when I stopped just being on TV and looking at TV as a job and decided to use television, to use it and not have it use me, to use it as a platform to serve my viewers. That alone changed the trajectory of my success.
So, I know this—that whether you're an actor, you offer your talent in the way that most inspires art. If you're an anatomist, you look at your gift as knowledge and service to healing. Whether you've been called, as so many of you here today getting doctorates and other degrees, to the professions of business, law, engineering, humanities, science, medicine, if you choose to offer your skills and talent in service, when you choose the paradigm of service, looking at life through that paradigm, it turns everything you do from a job into a gift. And I know you haven't spent all this time at Stanford just to go out and get a job.
You've been enriched in countless ways. There's no better way to make your mark on the world and to share that abundance with others. My constant prayer for myself is to be used in service for the greater good.
It's a title of a book by some radical feminists and social-justice activists. Of course, I loved the title, given that it aptly captures the gift-economy movement too, and looked a bit into it.
At $1.6 trillion, the US nonprofit sector is the fifth largest economy in the world, employing more than 10% of the workforce. Moreover, the growth rate has been unparalleled. What these nonprofit share is a state-assigned 501(c)(3) status. Charities were first issued this status because Congress determined that they provided services that government otherwise would've provided; but almost 88 percent of overall nonprofit revenues in 2005 came from fees for services, sales and sources other than charitable contributions.
Subsequently, there's a lot of grey area about what is cosher. Add to the mix that contemporary foundations, which fund 70-90% of social movements today, grew out a meeting with police authorities in the 1960s to supress anti-state radicalism ... and you can imagine that when an organization like INCITE links intimate partner violence with state violence, their foundation funding gets axed.
The million dollar question, then, is: how do you organize social movements without funding woes?
The first response is endowement -- gather up a few million or billion, and survive off the interest income. But if you look at those who do endowments well, one would struggle to justify what Harvard's $35 billion (yes, billion) is doing. Even beyond that, lot of organizations ought to be incentivized for coming to an end (after having, say, eradicated smallpox) instead of continuing into perpetuity. Liberal thinkers would also argue that foundations propogate the elitist idea of keeping power with the rich (when a rich person dies, you can either pay 50% estate tax to the government or create a foundation that is required to dole out 5% each year); when you accept that money, as Andrea del Moral argues, "Organizations that began as radical grassroots associations of individuals become corporations that largely copy the mainstream economy. They are professional, though not educated on the ground about the actual issues; organized, but not effective; compliant with tax laws, but not responsive or accountable to community needs."
The second response is, of course, grassroot organizing and staying grassroot. :) Fifteen years ago, that would've meant asking organizers to let go of scale. For many activists, though, that's a troubling argument -- they want to scale, affect large numbers of people, create a tipping point and change the culture for future generations. Fortunately for them, and everyone else, we can now do both -- be grassroot and scale!
I've been a big fan of Meg Wheatley's writings for years. Her organizational design thinking is as much insightful as it is rooted in a deeper awareness of being human; she has a really unique gift for naming the subtle in articulate ways. Off late, Meg's mantra has been: "Whatever the problem, community is the answer." Very close to the social capital approach of CharityFocus.
The mission statement of Berkana, Meg's organization that closely studies and participates in learning communities around the world, reads like this:
The Berkana Institute connects and supports pioneering, life-affirming leaders around the world who strengthen their communities by working with the wisdom and wealth already present in its people, traditions and environment. We define a leader as anyone who wants to help, who is willing to step forward to create change in their world. And we know that the leaders we need are already here.
Debbie Frieze, the president of Berkana and a good friend in recent years, invited me to join the Berkana board last month. While I wasn't able to make that committment, I did offer my help and learned something very curious -- Berkana wants to go gift-economy! At their last board meeting, after having studied various models, they came to the conclusion that the current nonprofit model is a dying organizational archetype and "gift-culture" is the paradigm of the future. So they are trying to embody it, and figure out what that'll look like for them and others.
That was one of those "wow" kind of ripple effects! When we started CharityFocus, I don't think any of us would've guessed that we'd play a pioneering role in reviving the gift-economy. :)
This past Saturday the New York CharityFocus posse met in beautiful Central Park to decide what we could do to make the city smile once again during the warm summer months. Last year, we handed out thousands of glasses of free lemonade to the hot, sweaty masses in Central Park. This year we’re back with more energy than ever and are thinking about a whole slew of potential projects to do over the next few weeks. Everything from giving out homemade cookies baked with lots of love, to redistributing excess food from restaurants to the homeless, to setting up a gift-economy pedi-cab rickshaw service for a day. The ideas and enthusiasm are endless.
