.. and an honest discussion about your conviction and focus.
“Change is so hard, nothing sticks, what can we actually do?”
Bullshit. You lack conviction or focus, and you know which it is.
When I look back at the last 8 projects I’ve done, the success the leadership achieved were all derivative of three questions;
- How do we align?
- Who are we going to be?
- How do we get it done?
It didn’t matter if it was:
– carving out scalable, profitable niches in law and construction
– leading European pension funds to move billions of dollars into less harmful assets
– buying, aggregating and regenerating vast swathes of farmland
And even this week;
“I’m successful, ambitious and busy – I want to help more people that I am able, whilst still making money, how can I make that happen?”
Well, that’s going to require aligning the existing team, defining who you are going to be for the near-term horizon, and creating a plan to implement it.
Then it’s about conviction, focus and funding.
Everything else is noise.
And you wouldn’t believe how ‘busy’ the people in those examples were, not only leading and managing multi-million dollar businesses, but also with their kids, elderly parents, marriages and personal health.
The difference is they recognised there was something they wanted to achieve, and that they personally lacked the bandwidth, connections, experience or capital to realise it on their own.
And being busy people, they are used to doing things well and quickly.
So no endless meetings; we came up with a strategy, took action, and got the outcome.
Conviction and focus are a choice.
50 NGOs + What is impact investing?
I was lying on a bench at the gym holding a barbell over my head on Tuesday when my earbuds said ‘Incoming call’ – I shook my head vigorously left and right to reject the interruption, though I was surprised by the caller ID!
A gent I hadn’t seen in a decade was on the line, and coincidentally 150 metres away from where I was.
To me he represents the quintessential impact investor; a phenomenal leader for his chosen causes, one who doesn’t take grant requests or receive donations, and has so far contributed to 850 projects in 77 countries, focused on Children, Animals, the Environment, the Terminally Ill and Aspiring Youth.
15 years ago I’d heard him speak and it brought tears to my eyes; if I had a minor claim to fame, it would be my hounding him to let me publicise the speech which ended up being seen 30 or so million times and being transcribed into 18 languages.
I also helped him present Sir David Attenborough with an award!
A few things really stood out from our catch-up:
- His wealthy friends are busy people, and they want to be virtuous and help the world, though he hears how they don’t want to pore over things; they just want some focus and direction.
With that focus, one gent bought an NGO a helicopter. That’s setting the bar pretty high, and I’m not saying we should compare our means and ability, though if you want to talk conviction, it sets a good precedent! - Time is the one ruler of us all, and no dollars can be exchanged to get it back. As we were talking about legacy, he shared the simplicity of his end game: a list of 50 NGOs, with an allocation for each from his estate.
NGO = Non-Government Organisation, usually a Not-for-Profit run to address social, environmental, human rights and similar challenges at local, national, or international levels.
50 NGOs?!
Yeah, he knows 50. I mean I’d wager he knows at least a thousand considering he’s done 850 projects in 77 countries.
Me, personally? I could get to 10 with a wee bit of effort, and you can always cheat and go look at the Australian Charities and Not-for-profit register; would you believe we have 66,238 in Australia?
So imagine my surprise when we were catching up on work over the last decade, and he was talking about his wealth managers badgering him to put money into shares, him wanting values-aligned investing and them offering up some index funds.
I mentioned being a member of the Responsible Investment Association Australasia (RIAA) for a few years, and my own dismay that when the finance industry talks ‘responsible investing’, they generally mean screening out a list of things you don’t, and then putting your money in an index fund that tracks those companies.
The rub with this is, if they are simply selling out of one planet- and people-damaging stock, it means that’s getting bought elsewhere, so it’s all a bit shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic if you ask me.
Then he blindsided me;
“Ahh Phil.. what is impact investing?”
And there it was – stark and obtuse, hanging in the air.
I’ve literally spent half a decade listening to a small fraction of the financial industry clamour that “if only we measured more, if only we could prove more, if only we had methodologies to assess against the Sustainable Development Goals” and on and on, we could change the world.
Whilst the rest of the industry simply took people’s money, pushed it into the most valuable stocks – like oil and gas when a war is on – and sat on their hands claiming they were obligated to work in their clients’ best interests, whilst taking a juicy percentage.
And this man, a bastion of creating impact at scale, hadn’t even heard of the term.
He was simply too focused, and had too much conviction, to bother slowing down enough to be labelled.
And let me be clear, ‘impact investing’ and other relevant labels have a place:
They each can play roles in often complicated financial engineering, though they might not be as important as simply doing something.
For example, last Thursday morning, a guy stood up in a room of 60 business owners, pointed at a man who leads a charity that builds schools, hospitals and community shelters for orphans in Vietnam, Philippines and Papua New Guinea, and declared loudly “We’ve agreed to give 2.5% of our annual profit to your charity”.
That kind of thing really fires up my bias to action.
You don’t need to buy someone a helicopter
In Freemasonry, there is the idea of “Pocket, heart and hand.”
You can give from your wallet, contributing to charity.
You can give from your heart, with empathy, supporting someone in a tough time.
And you can get stuck in with your hands, physically helping out.
So if you’re wondering what impact you can have in life, ‘pocket, heart and hand’ is a useful way to consider the 3rd question I asked when we began;
- How do we align?
- Who are we going to be?
- How do we get it done?
I wonder what you’d discover about who you want to be if you came up with your own list of 5 NGO’s that inspired you.
And if you share the leadership of a business, how would things change if you had the conviction and focus to get aligned on that, and then agreed to get it done?
Thank you for reading! I appreciate you – please click the heart and let me know you’re there!
Whenever you’re ready, here are three 3 ways to deepen your conviction and focus;
- Consider the case studies of how 4 other businesses chose to take on the world
- Study the framework that enables wealth to create impact over the long term
- Reply to this or give me a call on +61 402 017 700, and we can discuss what you’re aiming for and how to make it happen.
