TrueLife - Donald Summers - Scaling Altruism

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/Donald SummersIntroducing the illustrious Donald Summers, a man whose wit is as sharp as his business acumen. As a speaker, author, and social entrepreneur extraordinaire, Donald has navigated the tumultuous seas of altruism with a compass firmly pointed towards success.With the finesse of a seasoned captain, Donald founded Altruist Partners in 2006, a beacon of hope for nonprofits and social enterprises seeking guidance amidst the tempest of ambition. From the verdant forests of Seattle to the bustling streets of Washington DC and the fog-kissed alleys of London, Altruist has unfurled its sails to aid organizations in charting a course towards lofty goals.With a knack for turning dreams into reality, Donald has led his clients to astonishing heights, boasting growth rates that would make even the most seasoned financiers do a double-take. With a median annual growth rate of 25% and a return on fees that could rival the treasures of ancient mariners, Donald’s prowess in the realm of altruism knows no bounds.A graduate of Middlebury College and Harvard University, Donald is not just a master navigator of the social sector, but a learned scholar whose essays and commentary have graced the pages of esteemed publications such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard Magazine, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review.So raise your sails and set your course towards greatness, for in the company of Donald Summers, the journey towards a better world is as enlightening as it is entertaining.Questions  1. What pivotal shifts in nonprofit thinking inspired the development of the Scaling Altruism toolkit? 2. How does Scaling Altruism balance growth with preserving a nonprofit’s core values? 3. How does the toolkit cater to nonprofits across different sectors, and what philosophical principles guide this customization? 4. How does Scaling Altruism address managing disruptive forces within nonprofits while nurturing effective leadership? 5. How does Scaling Altruism encourage nonprofits to view themselves as agents of systemic change in tackling complex social issues? 6. What assurances does Scaling Altruism offer to nonprofit leaders regarding adaptability and resilience in a changing landscape? 7. How does the Investment and Partnership Scorecard reflect deeper philosophical considerations in assessing nonprofit alignment and impact? 8. How does Scaling Altruism embrace innovation and anticipate emerging trends in the nonprofit sector? 9. What role does technology and innovation play in Scaling Altruism, and how does it enhance nonprofits’ ability to catalyze meaningful change? 10. How does Scaling Altruism offer a unique philosophical perspective in the realm of nonprofit management literature, emphasizing stewardship and transformative leadership?https://www.amazon.com/Scaling-Altruism-Pathway-Accelerating-Nonprofit/dp/1394223455http://www.altruistpartners.com/http://linkedin.com/in/donald-summers-56654a6 One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles, The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope that your day is going beautiful. I hope the sun is shining. I hope the birds are singing, and I hope the wind is at your back. is at your back. We have an incredible show for you today. It's one we tried to start last week, but we're back with an incredible guest. Let me just go ahead and drop this intro on, everybody. I would like to introduce to you, ladies and gentlemen, the illustrious Donald Summers,

a man whose wit is as sharp as his business acumen. As a speaker, author, and social entrepreneur, were extraordinary, Donald has navigated the tumultuous seas of altruism with a compass firmly pointed towards success. With the finesse of a seasoned captain, Donald founded altruist partners in 2006, a beacon of hope for non-profits and social enterprises seeking guidance amidst the temptation, the tempest of ambition. From the verdant forests of Seattle to the bustling streets of Washington, D.C. and the fog-kissed alleys of London, altruist has unfurled its sales to aid organizations, in charting a course towards lofty goals, with a knack for turning dreams into reality. Donald has led his clients to astonishing heights, boasting growth rates that would make even the

most seasoned financiers do a double-take with a median annual growth of 25 percent and a return on fees that could rival the treasures of ancient mariners. Donald's prowess in the realm of altruism knows no bounds, a graduate of Middlebury College and Harvard University. Donald is not just a master navigator of the social sector, but a learned scholar whose essays and commentary have graced the pages of esteemed publications, such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard Magazine, and the Stanford Social Innovation Reviews. So raise your sales and set your course towards greatness for in the company of Donald Summers, the journey towards a better world is as enlightening as it is entertaining.

Donald, thanks for being here today. How are you? Thank you, George. I hope I can fulfill a small fraction of your generous introduction today. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, the pleasure's all mine. I like to set the bar high because I think that in the book scaling altruism, you know, a proven pathway for accelerating nonprofit growth and impact is what we're going to get into today.

But before we start diving into the nuances a little bit, I was kind of hoping you could unpack who you were before you became who you are today. Thanks. When I write about this in the book, I grew up suspicious of business and really unhappy and frightened about what finance capitalism was doing to the world. Oppressing people, driving our ecosystem to the brink, you name it. I studied art, literature, religion. I was very idealistic in college. and it took me years to find my pathway. I started teaching, and then I ended up in graduate school. It wasn't until the age of age 28. I ended up in a principal certification coursework in graduate school.

And they said, hey, if you're going to run a school, if you want to be a teacher and really help address inequality, you also need to learn business. You need to learn finance. You need to learn law. need to learn accounting. And I went in dreading this stuff. Like, oh, my God, this is terrible. And then when I got into the classes, I had an incredible enlightening, an epiphany. What if we could use these tools for good? I loved accounting. I loved the, you know, understanding how the world works.

And, you know, many years later, when I heard Bono, the U-2 lead singer, who founded, a major initiative to fight AIDS and poverty in Africa said, finance capitalism isn't immoral. It is amoral. You can use these tools for good. That was the founding of the start of my career as a nonprofit fundraiser and then an executive and then a foundation CEO and finally a consultant. I've been using a business playbook, an entrepreneurial playbook, in a space that is suspicious, of business principles, rightly so, that doesn't learn these practices because they're taught in business schools, not colleges of education, not colleges of social work, not schools of public policy. So we're trying to take the best from the private sector and merge it with the big

hearts and the wonderful people, the social sector, and scale altruisms. That's the origin story. I'm happy to unpack that, but it's been a very difficult journey of discovery and trying to bring these two worlds together for social good. It's fascinating. It reminds me of the hero's journey in some ways. I'm a big fan of Joseph Campbell and mythology. And, you know, in the beginning and the introduction, we talk about some pretty big numbers, like growth rates of 25% and, you know, huge returns on things. And you talk about making this transfer from the business world and learning all these things. But that sounds to me, and I think you quote in the book, that there's this transition from sort of a bravado, sort of an arrogance into humility.

And I was wondering if you could talk about, how does that, how does that that's probably first hard to talk about? You got to get to it. You got to understand. You got to own it. But if you could speak about that transition a little bit. Oh, first of all, this is hard. Without a doubt. You know, and I was using, when I got out of graduate school, I took a job as a fundraiser for an independent school that was using the, what I call the traditional models of raising money, events, auctions, gala, writing letters.

And when we use this business playbook, when we wrote business plans and engaged investors and, and really charted a much more sophisticated, powerful path, we took the school from raising a couple hundred dollars a couple hundred thousand dollars a year to five million bucks. And I repeated that success again for an organization that was working with the cognitively impaired. It was about to go out of business. It was losing $50,000 to $100,000 a year. We created a financial turnaround that generated three quarters. of a million dollars in six months. And today, the business unit that I founded for this organization's has generated, you know, over $50 million for the organization.

I did it again at a major university. I did it again at a community college. And I was, you know, seven, eight years into this fundraising enterprise. And I had hit every engagement out of the park. Right. And as I write about my book, And I now I understand why I was using a much more powerful toolkit than what was available. And I was really capturing some unrealized potential.

But because I had the success as an individual, I thought I could just lead other clients to the same success. And my first two, when I founded my consulting firm, I also achieved great success with my first two clients. So as I write my book, I had all the arrogance. of a nonprofit founder who sold her first startup to Google and made a zillion dollars and could do no wrong. And as I early in my consulting career, I took this growth and impact methodology, as I would later call it.

I bring this to nonprofit say you can grow, you can fulfill your most ambitious dreams of in-cap pact. This works, you know, and I said, it's not hard. All you have to do is follow this. And what happened after that was a lot of failure. I was still delivering, you know, benefit. But, you know, sometimes I'd get ejected like a virus from these organizations.

I'd rub them the wrong way. I didn't understand. I didn't even know what change management meant. I didn't get the right traction with the board. I made all sorts of mistakes. And I was really, you know, surprised and disappointed that. that, you know, for the first time in my career, I was really confronting a lot of failure. And one of my early mentors said, you know what?

Failure is just data to inform your strategy. Don't get upset. I was really traumatized. I'd never really confronted this professional failure before after years of being an impact agent. And he said, you know, you have to take the emotion out of failure. you have to use that data and say, you know, how can I fix this next time? So getting that mindset shift to like failure isn't bad, don't be embarrassed by it. The best people fail.

Turns out that was the best thing that gave me humility. I really became to understand that first of all, growth for any type of organization is hard. only 4% of for-profit businesses ever get to a million dollars a year. So shed the arrogance that growing any company, for-profit, nonprofit, is easy. It's not easy. Just because I was successful, I was probably lucky. I was in the right place and the right time. Yeah, the methodology was good, but I was not ready for prime time.

And it took me another 10 years of practice working with organizations around the world, succeeding sometimes, failing sometimes, but every time as I write in the book, I was like, I'd paddle my little methodological rowboat. And sometimes I'd get to the other shore. Sometimes I'd hit a rock and sink, right? And then I'd have to pull the boat out of the water, bail the water out, patch the boat. I had to make it a stronger methodology because I was merging, you know, the entrepreneurial world and the business world, but the social sector. And I was doing something very different. And I was also trying to do the entire organization, not just one issue. We weren't working on just fundraising or just board development or just program design or just execution.

We were trying to do a complete organization-wide acceleration platform, which I hadn't seen anywhere before. So we were doing something hard. I was introducing a new thought process, new language, new terms, things like KPIs and business metrics. and business intelligence and executive dashboard, introducing new concepts, financial projections, into a space that wasn't used to it. And I got comfortable with the failure, and it made me a better consultant,

made me much more humble. It made me empathize with the difficulty of running an organization. Non-profit leadership is extremely hard, just as for-profit leadership is. And ultimately, after 10 years, from 2006 to about 2016 was 10 years of repeated deployments with hundreds of organizations around the world making things better. And that led finally after, you know, about, I'd say about 10 years to some sort of stability.

We finally had a process that worked. And, you know, that led to a whole other set of challenges that we can talk about. Once you have something that's good, then you have to figure out how to grow it. You have to scale it. And I suffered many challenges and disappointments there, too. So I went through a range of failures and error correction, not failures, but error correction with the methodology itself. And then a whole other round of error correction on how to share it with all the nonprofits

that would need it. So the last 20 years have just, as I tell people, it's an exercise and tenacity. You just have to believe what you do. and you're going to get punched in the face, and you're going to have to wipe the blood off your nose and keep going. I love it. It's like that old Mike Tyson quote that says, everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face, right?

Yeah, and even these metaphors are uncomfortable in the social sector because it's all about being, you know, even just using, hey, you know, being a CEO is like getting punched in the face. How many nonprofit CEOs use that, you know, it's violent language. Right? Yeah. But it's tough. So we try to, it's whenever you're trying to do something in a new way, right? That's called Blue Ocean. You're trying to create a new market. You're trying to do something. You're providing a product or service that no one has before. Right. And in the field of fundraising, consulting, there's great people out there. There's subject matter experts in specific domains. They're good at governance. They're good at communications. They're good at marketing. They're good at. at fundraising. They might be good at, you know, introducing efficiencies. But what I haven't seen is everyone bringing it all together in an order of operations. So that's been my own personal challenge. And I'm glad to say, you know, I think we figured it out. And I'm glad to say, I think we figured

out in a way to share it in a way that's high quality and also affordable and also, you know, scalable so that anybody who's ready to go through this challenging. work. It's not easy. It's hard. But the pathway to success is known. And at least we have a way to do that now. And that took about 20 years. But it's good, you know, better late than never. And it's been an incredibly exciting journey. So again, thanks for the opportunity to dig into this with you today. Yeah. It's fascinating to me. And I love the way in which you shared your error correction, your failures, this walk from, you know, batting 500 to, you know, maybe striking out a few times. But it seems to me, and I'm curious to get your opinion on this, is it all, it seems like it's all necessary.

Like you have to be the guy that is the best and then become the guy that's the lowest. And I think it echoes your idea of the neurobalance team. On some level, you have to play all the positions before you can thoroughly understand. on what makes someone great at that other position. Hey, this guy's really good. His EQ over here. I know, because I did it a little bit, but this guy is really good. Let's bring him on.

Hey, this person over here, who, listen to the way in which they put these words together. It's beautiful. Bring them over here. You know, but you were the one of the first people in this book that I heard talk about this term neurobalance. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the strategy. Was it who you were that allowed you to see the people you need around you?

Or you could talk about that a little bit. Oh, like everything else, everything in the book I've came, I've discovered through trial and error. Right. Right. And I didn't even understand. So let me take a step back. Anybody can be good at something.

Yeah. Right. But you can't grow that. You can't share it. Like if I want to combat climate change, I can plant a tree in my backyard. That makes an incremental contribution. But it's not significant until I can get many people to follow my example. and we can plant a billion trees or 10 billion.

Same thing with social impact. There's all of these wonderful people out there with great ideas. They're programmatic experts. And they're delivering value, but in small amounts that are dwarfed by the size of the challenge. So then it becomes, how do we put teams of people together to take what we're doing, to take what we're doing, make it even better and grow. to many people or things or animals or places that need our work. And that requires a really sophisticated understanding of how people work together.

Right. And this is where the nonprofit landscape has not done the work. I would respectfully suggest that the for-profit sector has. The for-profit sector leaders are all about how I get teams of people performing well. There's a huge literature. It's what they teach in business school. what you learn on the job. There's consultants all about teamwork, teamwork, teamwork. And that emphasis on teamwork and getting people to really come together doesn't, it's not as strong.

I would, again, respectfully argue in the social space. And that's what this book is meant to address. One aspect of that teamwork is understanding that different people think differently. And there's thinking archetypes. And until we understand, understand the neurological differences behind how we see the world, we can never build an successful team. And it's one of these many discoveries. And I know because I suffered from it myself. I, because I have a neurological uniqueness that's like many people, but also different

from many other people, and I have neurological deficits, I'm never going to run a successful organization until I fill those deficits with people who complement my strengths. And the person who first taught this to me was one of the executives of Bank of America back in the 80s and 90s. Again, I learned a lot of stuff from social sector leaders and private sector leaders. And he says, you need to read a book by Itchak Idizis called Diagnosing Mismanagement. And you need to understand that people have four qualities. They can produce, they can create, they can administer and then they can integrate people. And he says, until you put a team together, an executive leadership team that has all four

of those capabilities, your organization is going to struggle. And I then went through my own exercise, was understood that, hey, I'm a great producer. I can get worked on and I'm an entrepreneur. I can create stuff. But I struggled with administration and I really struggled with integration, building teams, right? I was kind of like that sole, you know, that idealist who had a vision and wanted to work hard, but I didn't have the team building and the organizational capabilities. Lo and behold, that archetype is called a founder.

That's what I am and what I do. But, you know, now I understood, and now I understood from my clients that you have to have this visibility. And as you go through assessing organizations and figuring out what they need to have to accelerate, they should make sure that they have a neurobalanced leadership team. And here's the thing. This is one of many critical success factors. There's all these other ones too. It's confusing.

What do you have to have? How do you separate the got to haves? Like you will fail unless you have this. How do you separate that from the nice to have of like, oh, you'll do better if you have this, but you'll be okay if you don't? around building teams around, you know, it's this incredibly complex topic with how unique and crazy and wonderful humanity is.

What does the literature say? What does the science say? How do you make sense of all of that? That's leaders have to understand that whole body of knowledge of around management and team building and execution. In addition to being subject matter experts around homelessness or education healthcare or environmental conservation. You have to have both capabilities,

that management, team building, organizational development expertise and the subject expertise in your domain. And putting those two things together is very rare. And that's why we have people delivering great programs for a few people. But when they confront the difficulty of scaling it, you encounter this whole set of other things.

So that's where that neurological piece comes into play. And I can talk a ton about the individual things. Like, oh my gosh, I didn't know you had to have this. Right? And it's not until you don't learn that stuff until you try it over and over and over again and fail. And then finally figure out, oh, here's this solution that I didn't know existed. And you've got to constantly be.

So anyhow, I'm still. going through that process, right? And that'll never end. But at a certain point, it's like, okay, the toolkit finally came together. But the neurobalance team is wonderful. And I, again, in the book, I give all leaders, like, not, don't just read the book, read the sources. Read Jim Collins, good to great and great by choice. Read four disciplines of execution. Chris McChesney and his co-authors, incredibly powerful book. Read Yichakadizis. Understand the currents, the barriers in the space. You've got to read Dan Pilata. You've got to read Ken Stern's book. Wonderful, Doshin McGregor wrote this one book on roles. So we've also, my book brings together,

not just neuro-balanced teams, but all the other playbooks that we found to be most critical to moving organizations forward. Yeah. The way the book is written, it's like a guidebook in a way. There's all these different sections you can go. And, you know, if you, it's assess, aligned, plan, test, you know, fund, and then execute. And in some ways, I feel like I was reading the Carl von Klauschwitz of business management, you know, because there's all these campaigns and like strategies in there. And I think it does speak to the idea of strategy versus grand strategy, which is thoroughly understanding, okay, is this particular ailment in society a symptom of the sickness?

that plagues us. And if so, how? Like, you get into the nuts and bolts of that. And I'm wondering, maybe you could share a story of when that clicked. Like, you know, somewhere along the lines, you must have seen a piece of the puzzle click into the grand strategy. Can you share a story with us, like in the trenches when you began to see something like that happened? Well, my favorite story is the one I tell in the book. And remains one, just a, just a moment. I'll always be thankful for is I had the opportunity to partner with Janice Avery, the then CEO of Treehouse. Janice is a social worker by trade and exactly the kind of person who is matured into her field and launches an organization without formal business training because she recognized that

in working with foster youth, they had so many things that they didn't enjoy. that other children had just because they lost the parent lottery literally right and so she started her organization to give these children a future and give them the support supplement their lives and and my work with her really brought into bear that was when the methodology came together it was that aha moment when we finally figured out we had all the pieces of the puzzle and one of them was I think the biggest piece was the one of the many epiphanies I had with that engagement with Janice was permission to be simple. People think that to be something, if something's effective only if it's complicated or fancy, right? And at the time, the organization was trying to improve graduation rates for foster children who were graduating only at 40%

60% would drop out. They'd end up homeless, imprisoned, addicted, suicidal, terrible, unemployed, awful futures. And they brought in all these fancy people, sophisticated leaders from the Gates Foundation and PhDs in this and PhDs in that. And they designed this theory of change, this logic model. They were producing pages of documents. They were collecting 22 pages of data for every child they were looking at, right? How could that be wrong? We have the best minds and social impact. This organization spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to move the needle with all these fancy, brilliant people, right? And you know what they found? They didn't create a single percentage point of increase in graduation rates with all of this intellectual and

monetary capital. Right. And it wasn't you know the the nonprofit sector often takes an academic approach well let's what are the you know you've got to have a research evidence and what brought in the engagement was a practical approach like well 22 pages of data no one can read that your theory is way too complicated all right um you know we can only keep a few things in our head at once so what we've learned from the business world and the world of scaling is you've got to keep it simple and keep it focused. So we got rid of the 22 pages of data and replaced it with four pieces of data. Attendance, behavior, coursework, and a broader element called psychosocial development,

which we would move into. But hey, if the kid misses school, if the kid gets a grade, a D or F, or there's a disciplinary event within 24 hours, we're going to come in there and give that child support, love and a solution. All that other junk, throw it out. Get rid of it. That transition from complex, fancy, academic, logic, this, social change that, papers, studies, tossed it all out and said, we're going to focus on these pieces and orient everything that we do around this. We have to retrain people.

We have to put the data system. We have to make sure that we're being consistent and focused. that turned out to be the programmatic change. Now, there was financial changes, there were staffing changes, there was improvements in governance, many other things had to come together for this organization, but it was that, aha, keep it simple. Key performance indicator means you only have four or five of them. Focus on that, get rid of all the other stuff. When you have a ton of data, then everybody's version of truth can be the same.

You don't have to have the hard conversations. You don't have to have the sacrificial discipline. Everyone can think what they want and be happy. You don't have to make sacrifices. Getting to that level of discipline, we're going to focus on just these things. That engagement, that's what really makes the difference between social interventions that work. They're focused and they're very, very disciplined. and again, the organization had to, I'll do one more thing and then I'll, for example,

even after the organization focused on those four KPIs, it took incredible courage to stay on target because now that we identified those measures, we had to collect those measurements and see if they resulted in changes in graduation rates and see if we could make, for 12 months, we couldn't even. collect the data because the difficulties of putting the data system in, the difficulties of retraining everybody, the difficulties of putting in the new technology. We're only working with two or 300 students, but it was a challenge to even execute. And then when we did get the indicators, we wanted to get 95% intervention rates and we're only at like 13%. The numbers look really bad.

So we identified the model. Then the numbers were hard to correct. And then we'll color. and then when we did collect them, they looked bad. And most any other organization would be like, stop, cut our losses. This is not work. We got to chase the next thing. Janice Avery showed the courage, the tenacity, and the commitment to say, this is going to work. We just need to keep on it.

And slowly over time, and it took two to three years, the flywheel, as Jim Collins describes, it started to build. They started to prove that it could work. And they got the confidence. and then it actually grew. And within five years, the organization was driving graduation rates from 40% to over 80%.

Wow. No one else in the world had to be able to move. This is the most challenged population. Foster children have extreme levels of adverse childhood experiences that they're known. They don't have parents. They've often witnessed violence. There's drug and alcohol consumption.

They're traumatizing. by a foster care system that puts them in multiple placements. They don't have anyone around who loves them. Their caregivers are often overloaded. These kids have the deck stacked against them. And to create a social intervention that puts them on the path to success was amazing. And then what blew me away, George, after we published the data, people are like, oh, that's nice. Oh, good for you.

Good day Treehouse did it. And I'm like, you know, there's 400. 150,000 foster children of the United States. We're not all doing this right away. Right. I went to the Gates founding. Here's the model. Go do it.

The apathy. And I'm glad to say that now, this was back in 2012. And, you know, I read last year that other states are finally picking up this model. Right. And it's got the attention of the White House and it's slowly getting traction. Right. But this is the thing that still kills me, George. We've got an intervention.

Every child that graduates from high school versus one that drops out creates a million-dollar difference in public savings. Because of reduced incarceration, reduced visits to the emergency room, reduce this, this, this. Graduating from high school versus not graduating from high school makes a million-dollar difference. And this model works with any kid, not just foster kid. It's simple. Get them in school, give them the help to get good grades and support them so they don't have disciplinary challenges. Our entire public school could adopt this methodology and transform every low, every land. No one looks at the data and goes, this will work.

Now, if this intervention made lots of money, it would propagate across the marketplace in a heartbeat. But because it's creating social impact and the money it makes is actually saving, right people aren't tuned into what's happening the we have all this there's so much noise out there so what I realized is not only do we have to make these changes but we need to make a broader we need to make the world in particularly the United States aware that social impact can actually make these dramatic changes right so I'm still you know 15 years after the fact when are people going to pick up on the ABC Plus model for helping vulnerable children graduate from high school because it's immediately adoptable by any school. It's low cost. It leverages the resources in the

community. It's very simple to understand. It's been proven to work. So what's stopping you? And then, you know, what's stopping us from being really much more curious and rigorous about all the other impact efforts that are out there? So this is a space. where we need lots more work. It's so mind-blowing to me to think about the way in which I hear a couple, like I hear the word sacrifice into a lot of people that means giving up something. But in reality, it just means practicing first principles so that you'll be better later. You're not really giving up anything.

You're creating a better life later. And I'm curious if it's this, like what do you attribute this? this idea of people not wanting to. Is it that they are maybe a PhD or that they have this model that they really want to work and they're promising quick results? Is it a combination of all of these things? Like, if there's the evidence and we've done the hard work and we've seen the numbers over time create this level of success and savings for people, like what is the drawback?

And when you go to the Gates Foundation, you know, this model works. What are we doing? You guys care about people? Like, what is the drawback? Well, you know, people aren't wired for long-term outcomes. This is why we still have, you know, it goes back to neurology and evolutionary psychology. And I've been struggle with this. And I get really intensely frustrated.

Like, how come this didn't get picked up by the marketplace? Right. And then I have to remind myself because we're not wired to think that way. Right? You remember, may rest in peace, the author of Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kavanaugh, Daniel Kedlin just died. And he said, you know, most people use mental shortcuts and biases, type one thinking. Type two thinking, slow analytical work.

He said, people avoid that at all costs because it's hard. Right. Right. And then there's, you know, wonderful thinkings that talk about we're all wired for evolutionary status, right? And short-term outcomes, right? Because if you didn't, you know, kill the elk, you starve to death. No one's thinking, we're not wired for long-term thinking results. So, you know, you can bitch and moan all you want that, that, you know, we're not wired for success or you're going to do something about it, right?

And so I have to remember that the type of, and I think sacrifice is better replaced with the word investment. Oh, I like that. Right? Yeah. And that's what we call, we don't talk to about, and I write about this in my book, don't talk about, don't talk about, don't talk about gifts. Talk about investments. Something that's going to, you have to make an immediate investment of time, energy, money, and resources for an uncertain longer term payoff. And we know that people who succeed act that way. If you're stuck on short term thinking, if you're chasing shiny

objects and you're about immediate gratification, that dog doesn't hunt. You're going to be, you're going to be in trouble. It's the people that know they've got to study something and get really good at it so they can compete later, that they go to school so they can graduate. The problem is when you grow up in trauma, right? And you grow up in constantly in adverse circumstances, it wires your brain away from that. You don't believe investments possible. You have all these people in the upper classes criticizing those in poverty for their counterproductive behaviors. And if you put them through their same childhood trauma, they'd be acting the same way. Right. So how do we create the systems whereby we can bring everybody together, hey, think type two, not type one, right? Invest in these types of things. It's a grand challenge. It's not just in my space. And the realization that the challenges the nonprofit sector faces, investing in leadership, creating discipline and thinking long term, setting a distant five-year goal instead of what's our gala going to raise six months from now. You know, I'd rather.

have them say, where do we need to be in five years and how do we get there? And what is the size of our problem demand how much we grow? That type of long-term, sophisticated investment-oriented thinking, along with the tools to get there. You know, ultimately, we realize that this isn't for everyone, that it isn't easy, that only a small segment of the market is going to pick it up, those that already have that willingness to do the investment. And, you know, those people are in the most surprising places. You find them, you know, I met a clinical psychologist operating in Harlem delivering mental health services to those who can't afford it in her, in her Harlem neighborhood.

She's ready to go. She's joined our accelerator. She's off to the races. And she's running a tiny nonprofit of, you know, $500,000 a year. And she knows she needs to be at $5 million in two to three years. and she's ready to take off. You know, she doesn't join the fancy business accelerators or go to business schools.

But those people are out there that are ready to do the hard work, that are ready to do the type two thinking, that are ready to invest, as long as they have something that's credible that's shown to work. So I've gone from raging against the machine and, you know, being pissed off that, you know, the market isn't rushing to these known solutions to saying, hey, this is hard.

it's not for everybody. Let's build a community. Let's build a movement with the people who are ready for this, that are ready for the discipline, the investment, and who want to go big, who want to succeed, not just nibble around the edges of our social problems. It's fascinating.

It's an interesting way. It reminds me of, I think the name of the book was called like the spider and the starfish. And it talked about the idea of a centralized entity versus like an extended entity. And it sounds to me when you're able to reach out into communities and find the people that thoroughly understand the problems in their community,

then you have a real bridge to change. Then you really have a bridge to this, even though they may share some of the same symptoms of someone that grew up in poverty, this individual, like you were speaking about, they may have a unique understanding, of the linguistic problem. You know what I mean by that? We have the same language,

but sometimes we have like a different part of that language, like a pigeon of that language or something like that. It just really can narrow down and get down to the nuts and bolts of it. I guess if I transfer to a question here, what pivotal shifts in nonprofit thinking inspired the development of scaling the altruism toolkit? Well, again, it's been a journey. It's been, you know, 10 years of research and development, and it took me another five years to write the book, and we just followed what works. But if you look at the broad landscape, you know, the nonprofit landscape, this is about six or seven percent of our economy.

It's a two and a half trillion dollar industry. And some nonprofits, like when people say what's a, you know, I tell people here in Seattle, there's a non-profit. there's a nonprofit that's a multi-billion dollar corporation that earns in just gifts and grants $2 million every day the calendar year and say do you know what that nonprofit nonprofit is it's incredibly high performing it's one of the top institutions in its space in the world it and it's just a complete well-oiled machine for the most part and they say what is that nonprofit they say Gates Foundation? No. Gates Foundation doesn't earn any money. They're like a dragon sitting on a big bucket of money. They give out five percent at a time, right? We're not generating investment in

partnerships. The answer is the University of Washington. A public university is one of the highest performing, and I worked there for five years raising money for them. And it's an incredible institution. It embodies the power of a nonprofit model. It can earn money. People give it money. It can create it can get investments. It can spin off for profits and nonprofits, and it changes the world. It's staffed with sophisticated executives who earn large, big,

the university president makes a million dollars a year, and boy, does she earn it. Nonprofits can be big and powerful. Hospitals and universities, known within the spaces, the eds and the meds, are generally large, sophisticated organizations that don't give anything up to any other private sector corporation,

even though they're nonprofits, in terms of their sophistication, their impact, and their reach. What small nonprofits don't often realize they conceive of themselves as something different. We call it the myth of uniqueness. That nonprofits think they're a different animal. They think they're unique. We call it confusing your tax status with your business model. right oh because i'm running a community college you don't understand what we're doing because this is totally different oh because i'm running an animal shelter and you've helped uh you know a juvenile foster

care agency accelerate you don't know anything about an animal shelter oh we're a big environmental you know organization driven by science and you know none of these practices apply everybody thinks that their own, and this is normal, everybody thinks their own challenges are unique, right? And the big realization that we hope that these nonprofit leaders can make is, A, global sort of being hugely powerful and successful and solving problems, like our universities, we have the best university system in the world, the best public university and the best private university system in the world, by a mile. And we've got wonderful, despite what the news story says, our hospitals do incredible work, despite the structural challenges that they encounter. These are effective organizations largely. And all smaller and mid-sized nonprofits can grow to be that big someday.

And a small, this is the other thing that's crazy, George. We know that startup nonprofits can get big and influential. Wendy Kopp, as, you know, a woman, my age, age, your senior thesis at Princeton was Teach for America. And now it's a $50 million a year nonprofit, bringing the best and, you know, bringing great kids into these under-resourced communities. You have city year founded by a bunch of Harvard MBAs that are, you know, giving low-income kids across the United States wonderful transformational experiences. KIP is another nonprofit startup. My friend, Skelcham, has got an incredibly powerful homeless services organization.

called Housing Connector. This is an organization that started up a few years ago and they've already got found houses for thousands of people. Right. So what we're trying to do is establish that first of all, just because your nonprofit doesn't mean you face unique organizational challenges. Your challenges are put high performing teams together and grow your impact. Nonprofits have examples of work at scale already, hospitals, universities, right? There's success stories already where people long before I ever got into the scene started up a nonprofit and made it big and powerful. And it's this mindset, this culture of poverty, this fixed mindset, the zero-sum thinking that says, we're a nonprofit, we're born to struggle, we're born to be a martyr, we face unique cultural constraints. This is why I cite Dan Pilata's work in 2008 when he wrote the book.

on Charitable. He talks about our inheritance from the Puritan, you know, martyrdom. We can't, money's bad. We can't pay people. We have to sacrifice. You know, it's often said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. So, you know, most of the challenges come down to whether you think you can or think you can't, you're probably right. And the work that still has to be done is to let these incredibly bold leaders know that a pathway to fulfilling your boldest dreams exists. Others have done it. It's rare. It's hard.

But you don't take your current situation for granted. Don't keep doing the same things you're doing. For those that are courageous enough to try something different, the models exist, the pathway exists. And we just got to get into what the first practice in the book talks about is a growth mindset. That's the key change. Yeah, there's so many great quotes that you put in the book. And one of them is growth and comfort can't coexist together.

Yeah, Ginny Romney is former. Yeah, of IBM. All these people have solved it before. Right, right. This is hard, but the solutions are known. Right? And this was my epiphany. It's like, wow, just no one's put, you know, there's big management texts on running a nonprofit,

it, but you don't know, they don't show you actually how to apply this abstract skill, right? And also, they don't put it in a particular order. I talk about the order of operations is critical, right? And this is about the extent of my math knowledge right here, about fifth grade, right? Stop at ped mass, right? If you're going to solve an equation, you do the parentheses first, then the exponents, then the division, and so forth, right?

And if you do you can do the arithmetic right. But if you do it in the wrong order, you're going to get the wrong answer. And this was another major epiphany for me because I would come in as a fundraiser for these organizations and start working on their fundraising when I realized that they had tons of work to do before they're even ready to accelerate. They didn't they had to align around a goal. They had a clear strategy. They had to have evidence based interventions. They had to have, you know, a plan at scale. They had to have the right revenue strategy.

They had to do the product market testing. They had to get the right team. They had to hire the right people. And that's, again, another organization is the order of operations. That's why the book goes through seven phases. And it's numerically oriented into 50 practices. The first practice, do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

Don't even get to practice number two. if any decision makers on your team or your board have fixed mindsets. They're stuck. They're not ready to change. They're not ready to grow. Stop. Right. And another thing I talked about in the leadership,

unless you have an environment of psychological safety, where people can bring bad news and not have it be encapsulated or surprise. Only organizations that are understand that they can grow and that are ready to treat failure with a culture of inquiry. right? None of this other stuff will work without that. Those are deal killers. So how do you, you know, so giving leaders a sense of, hey, do this first and then this and then this. And if you skip, you're going to get in trouble because ask me how I know. Right. Right. Because I've tried to fast forward. I'm a very impatient person and I've tried to fast forward to get organizations to the money. You know, I did that for years. And sometimes I win, but then when I got my rear end kicked, right and I failed I said I got out of the order of operations so it's not just the content but you got to have it all and you have to do it in the right way and I think the book we're finding out that people are able to read the book and it's helpful for them I'm not

going to be so arrogant to say that I finally got it all figured out but I think it makes a contribution to not only the breadth of knowledge and the depth of knowledge and having it being practical and ready to implement like here's a template yeah here's an example from another successful nonprofit how they wrote a business plan how hey how they did their revenue strategy here's a set of protocols for your database that you need to use if you're going to follow the system right here's some other reading that you should do to have that resource rich practical pathway like ready to go um you know it still doesn't um replace uh you know you know it still doesn't um replace uh having someone like me on your management team, that's the next challenge is to figure out

how to get organizations to not just understand that this exists, but how to help them through the adoption. And that's the stage of development we're in now. The word meaningful comes to my mind. And you see it in startups with founders and you see it in nonprofits. But somewhere along the line, it seems to me that the idea of what's meaning and the idea of the mission, the do no evil, it loses its luster around short-term profits as things begin to mature. And I think in Steve Jobs books, he talks about the way in which when the marketing team takes over, the true vision and the true progress of what the company or what the team or what

the idea was moving towards begins to retract and lose its way a little bit. Maybe you can speak to that idea a little bit, the idea of meaningful and purpose. Well, first of all, the meaning that you get in the nonprofit sector, is what attracts so many brilliant people. So many committed people. And I'm not the only one who, you know, is scared of what's happening with, you know, the direction of the world. And, you know, particularly younger generations or growing up with the trauma of watching

climate change happen and watching the unjustness of our various systems. So that meaning, that's, first of all, what the nonprofit sector, you know, it's the problem solving the scheme. How do we stay centered on that? Well, right now, most nonprofits, non-profits, like most other for-profit organizations, they try to be mission-centered. Well, you write a mission statement. Okay, you write a mission statement.

Everybody in the organization to contribute, you have long meetings, you write a mission statement. Then what happens? Okay. Oh, going to go back to the status quo, right? We plan and we put the thing in the drawer and then we go back. How do you execute on that mission? statement to make sure that the entire organization succeeds, executes the mission. It's not just words on a paper or on a website.

That's exactly what the darned book is about. You can have a mission statement. Mission statements say what you do. Vision statements say what success looks like when you're done. And so we say if you have all the money in the world, there's exercises in the book. I have all the money in the world. and I've spent it in the most brilliant strategy, and we've achieved total success. Describe your world in concrete terms.

And get rid of the language around empowerment. Please don't use the word empowerment, right? Give me some specifics, right? The capital markets fund black and Latina women entrepreneurs at the same rate as white men. Right? I'm working with a client right now, Digital Undivided, that's trying to, to correct for the ridiculously, you know, sad loss of opportunity because capital markets continue to funnel most startup money to white men and are overlooking all this talent.

It's a business opportunity. It's a social injustice. So their vision is a world, a very specific world that's measurable, right? So you take and what their mission is, they train and fund and support black and Latina women, entrepreneurs. And the vision is a world where they're achieving success. success at parity. Then you need to pick a B-Hag. What's your big, hairy, audacious goal? Within the five years, where are you going to be? We're going to take the women. We're going to go from serving

X number of women to 10x. We're going to go from raising X amount of money to 10x that money. So the B-Hag is a specific step towards that vision and towards that mission. And then you write a business plan around it. Then you fund it. And then you create an executive dashboard with all your key performance indicators. So where are we specifically now compared to the B-Hag, which is a stepping stone honor to success? Making organizations mission-centered and keeping them mission-centered is about good planning and execution. It's about good management.

It's about not letting documents end up in a drawer, on a drive somewhere on a shelf. Everything is operationalized. transparent and it's accountable and everyone is accountable towards their piece in that. And you have to engineer all of that. And it's expensive and hard to engineer. So you have to only pick a few things. And if you're chasing new programs and, oh, we can get a grant for this. We can get a grant for that.

Oh, it's kind of on mission. Oh, we can do this. Oh, that feels really good. Oh, I really don't want to have that hard conversation with you about these programs are actually different because I don't like conflict. And you can have, I can have mine. Right? There's so many ways to get this wrong.

Yep. Right. I often, speaking of quotes, my favorite quote is from an author, you know, who's influenced my life deeply in that, along with millions of other people, Leo Tolstoy. In the opening line of Anna Karenina, he says, all happy families are alike. All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. So all organizations, I don't care what your tax status is, what your mission, they all tend to follow the same management practices and principles. They can have wildly different programs,

but how people can plan, finance, and execute a difficult goal tends to be very well known. It's all documented in the literature. It's just all over the place. It's hard to find, right? And there's a million ways to screw it up. And every organization that screws it up, screws it up in their own way. And believe me, I've been inside those organizations. And some I've fixed, some I haven't been able to fix. But really, understanding that there is an orthodoxy of performance, that there's a clear pathway. That's the key piece. Wow.

That's brilliantly said. It reminds me what happens when you fall off the horse? Speaking of Tolstoy, right? Exactly. And, you know, all of this is, you know, it's nice to boil it all down. You know, another favorite, and this is something too, and I'll talk about my own struggles. going back to your first question, you have to marry the goal and date your strategies. So here's the most embarrassing and uncomfortable thing that I've experienced personally and

professionally. And I want to go back to your original question about what we've learned and what are the uncomfortable things. So I described many client engagements where it was just unsuccessful, right? Didn't engage the board and goal, didn't have change management. Some clients I never should have even bothered working with because I couldn't fail to recognize there wasn't a growth mindset, right? I can't help you without a growth mindset. So all those mistakes. Once the process came together, like right about the time of Treehouse, like when we knew we could

solve really hard social problems and win, then I had what I was known in my book as impact strategy. I had figured out how to transform a nonprofit into a high growth, high impact organization. What I didn't have was a growth strategy. And if I look at the marketplace of nonprofits, there's 1.4 million registered nonprofits with a median annual budget of 500,000. They all need to grow. Of that 1.4 million, there's probably 2 or 300,000. that are they're actually suited for this type of stuff.

How do I go from serving five or 10 or 20 nonprofits a year to serving 5,000? Right? So this is eat my own dog food. Right? And here's what was brutal. And I'm still getting over this trauma. I'm scaling up all these other organizations to beat the band.

Hey, I can come in and, you know, I can point to the bleachers. call the shot and crush it. Right? And here's your impact strategy. Here's your growth strategy. I see, here's the model. Boom.

It's going to take a six to nine months to learn this. We're going to raise a couple million bucks. And you're going to be a program leader and we're going to 10x your impact. And you're going to be on your way to solving the problem. You could do that fairly consistently. Right. But doctor, heal thyself. If I'm so good at this, how come I can't scale up the delivery of this methodology

beyond the small basket of nonprofits brave enough to hire me, right? How do I get this out into the world to say this is something that everybody can adopt? How do I create the awareness? How do I create the operational capacity? You know, again, I can go back in my backyard and plant one tree. It's a hell of a lot easier. It's the same thing as planting a million trees, but it's a completely different challenge. So it was a constant source, and I tried since after the treehouse win, in 2013, I tried hiring people.

I tried every strategy known that I could think of to try and scale up our own operations. And it failed. Fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. You know, I go back to the metaphor. You know, I wrote a LinkedIn post about this a couple of weeks ago. I said, if you marry the goal and date the strategy, well, I had the impact strategy. I could help one nonprofit at a time or 10 nonprofits at a time, but my growth strategy, how could I scale up with the delivery of services?

Well, every strategy I dated for about 10 years, sat down with me, listened to me for about five minutes, then threw its drink in my face and left the restaurant, right? Like you're done. Like, let's forget about it. I couldn't get it to work. I tried partnerships. I tried marketing. I tried inbound.

I hired dedicated salespeople. I published. I was blogged this. you know, and zero, right? But take each piece of, and I was embarrassed. It's like the doctor heal thyself. What's wrong with me? Cobbler's children have no shoes.

I started to feel that, you know, am I an imposter? Is there something wrong with me? And then again, I had to follow my own advice, which I realize is hard. Don't take it personally. Take the error correction. You have to stay at it. Stay focused. keep trying new things.

And what I realized, what I needed to do was two things. I needed to launch an accelerator where I could work with large numbers of nonprofits at once, right? Launch that, tried that. That didn't work. It was really hard to attract multiple nonprofits to start a rigorous training program at the same time and do it with high quality and low cost. I got a couple cohorts through it, but that didn't get any traction.

And number two is I have to figure out how to make this methodology digestible. I had all these tool kits, all these presentations. I had to realize I had to write a damn book. Right. How do I put this enormity of everything that I've learned, this order of operations, all these practices, all these tools encompassing planning, governance, program metrics, business intelligence, financial, how do I put it into one book? That took me five years.

I went through three different editorial teams. I spent tens of thousands of dollars. Just barely, it was brutal. I wouldn't wish that experience my worst enemy. Thankfully, after the help of a developmental editing team, a small publisher called Bright Ray, I had a first draft. Then I developed that, got the partnership of Wiley, a top academic and business publisher,

who connected me with an incredible editor called Angela Morrison. Anyhow, years of effort. and developing the toolkit, I finally got the book done. And now that the book is done and basically open sourcing our entire methodology, other consultants can pick it up, who might be subject matter expertise in one thing, and now they have the whole playbook. Non-profit leaders can pick it up. I now have a playbook now where I can bring people onto a learning community

and they can go at their own pace. In June or July of this year, we're going to relaunch the altruistic accelerator. So anybody, even busy executives, they can pay $79 a month and join a nonprofit community. I have a nonprofit arm to my firm that's going to walk them through the book, how to learn the principles, apply the practices, get that peer support that they need, get a supportive community, get expert guidance, and walk them through a difficult journey of applying all these hard-earned, hard-won pieces of wisdom. And so easily it took 10, 15 years of figuring out the pathway of how to go from small groups to large groups, right? First you get your growth, you get your impact, and then you have to figure out your growth strategy. Super hard. And I'm just pleased to say that, you know, we're talking today because I'm making progress, right?

Yeah. Not spiking the football. We're not even close to having the impact that we aspire to yet. But the takeaway from that is don't ever quit. Don't give up. And I've had to learn, you know, we talk about humility and mistakes and difficulty. You know, as I write in the book, I have calluses on my rear end from all the swift kicks in the butt I've taken. Right.

And it's taken years and years. But I truly believe in the transformational power of disciplined management to, unleash this wave of social impact potential that these small to mid-sized organizations have. They just don't know exists. And now it does. So we'll see. I think this will work. And I'm going to spend the rest of my life pursuing this impacted scale.

Man, it's beautiful. It reminds me of that quote, like, slow at first and then all at once. So the same way that like sometimes seeds attach themselves to your sock or your animal's fur. and then it spreads that seed wide and then it grows there. But it sounds to me like you have people, this book is an invitation for people to do some not only learning and understand the playbook, but to also come and ask questions.

It offers them a pathway back towards you. And in some ways, I'm wondering, do you think that perhaps this book and some of the ideas of the nonprofits like Treehouse, this is in a way merging the idea of nonprofit and forcing the profit world to start, embracing a little bit more of the social responsibility? Well, I wrote an article years back.

It's still on our website about how the for and the nonprofit sectors are converging. Okay. Right. And there's a lot of obviously increased awareness among the for-profit community that their businesses aren't sustainable if they, you know, burn our planet up beneath this. So they're going to have to be more mission-centered. Too much of this work has just been lipstick on a page. pig, right? These businesses, oh, everyone's green and we're sustainable. And there isn't a

business out there that doesn't have a sustainability statement, right, that doesn't have a carbon reduction platform. Much of it is BS. Some companies are really making disciplined advances towards it. I love to cite, you know, seventh generation, Patagonia. But these companies get, you know, they end up being wildly popular because they actually share the values of their customers. People have strong BS detectors. They know if companies are trying, largely consents of companies are trying to shine them on. But you've got the rise of what's known as ESG, environment, social and governance reporting in the private sector. You have carbon trading markets, which were heavily involved in.

finance capitalism is fixable we can reform it i do not sit with the group of people that say burn it down revolution right that's not going to get us anywhere we just need to fix the tools that we have so in some ways i'm conservative that way small c um let's fit you know with good policy with good laws with strong regulation like what's happening at the FCC i i love I love this thinker called Matt Stoller. He writes a blog called Big. And he can point to monopolization and the takeover of our marketplace by behemots like Apple and Google and Amazon as being the cause of so much unemployment and misery. So yeah, we need to reform the for-profit space drastically.

Nonprofits are like research and development for the for-profits. nonprofits are where we experiment and where we come up with unique social problems. Yes, nonprofits can get really big, but they get big through partnership with governance and corporations, too. When I talk about nonprofit scale, I'm talking about scaling influence. I'm helping a nonprofit right now called My Green Lab. They were founded by a neuroscientist who was really upset. at the amount of waste and energy and water and pollution created by scientific research labs.

Scientists are good people, right? And she said, hey, let's create a sustainability agenda where we can teach your lab how to reduce its carbon footprint, reduce its water consumption, and decrease pollution. And they hired us back in 2020, and now we're making a few changes where we can reach the entire multi-billion dollar industry via a certification program. So you don't have to get huge. You don't have to turn your nonprofit into a corporate behemoth and make tens of hundreds of billions of dollars. If you have things like certifications or corporate partnerships or you can pass laws, you can experiment with something and show government the value of your experimentation,

you might be able to have a civil advocacy campaign. So nonprofit scale have a, happens in many creative, interesting ways. And I don't want your listeners to think that, oh, your nonprofit isn't big, isn't going to be successful until it's the size of a hospital or a university. Some need to get that big if they're involved with, if there's direct service that only they can do. But there's many ways to solve problems that are high leverage,

that are high return on investment, that involve partnerships with governments and corporations. And it's ultimately, you know, creating the type of teamwork and thinking outside of one's own assumptions and comfort zones that I'll get you there. It's really well said. I know, I heard a great quote one time that said when the instrument becomes institutionalized, it becomes corrupted. I'm curious. Like, you know, when you think about like a good idea, you know, you can have the science around carbon sequester. You can have the science around sustainability, but quite often it becomes company science. Like, how does a

nonprofit protect themselves from being cannibalized from this great scientific thing to the company science idea of, you know, if we take sustainability, for example, what does that mean? And how can a multi-level or how can a multinational corporation claim to be sustainable when their market, when their whole business model is built on excess consumption? You know what I mean? It's a great one. We call it perverse incentives. Well said.

Okay. I'm right. The amount of broken promises in the nonprofit space are the same as the broken promises in the for-profit space. Promises are easy to make and hard to keep. How do you not break your promise? There's terrible stories of nonprofits breaking promises, right? All you got to do is Google ProPublica's stories on the Red Cross. So, you know, people think, oh, all you need to do is get a business.

leader in there and you can, you know, turn a nonprofit around. Well, the Red Cross hired Gail McGovern who brought in an entire management team from AT&T a long time ago for the Red Cross. And ProPublica, an independent news, very, very well-regarded, award-winning independent, they do muck-breaking journalism. This is ProPublica saying this, not me. And I'm speaking to the Red Cross, attorneys who might want to intimidate me for saying this. But she has done, according to ProPublica, incredible damage to that organization. They have lied before Congress. She said, you know, oh, after the hurricane in Haiti that they built $6 million home, six million homes or some statistic to that effect, they'd only built six. I mean, like getting rid of half of their volunteer

infrastructure. So there's more than one example of business leaders going into nonprofits and saying, oh, you got to do it. You got to run this place like a business and completely screwing it up. Right. So I also don't want to be so simplistic to say that business leadership will figure it all out. The way to stay true to your values, the way to ensure that you are, walking it like you talk it, it's well known. And like everything else, it's simple and hard to do.

You have to be transparent and you have to be accountable. Right. You have to be completely clear on what your activities are. Right. One of my, one of our clients calls it

walking around in their financial underpants. Right. So here's our budget. Here's our everything. You can see everything that we're doing. We're just, you know, we're wide open.

And being a count. accountable, right? How do you know whether you're winning or losing in a real simple way that's clear? So, you know, it's natural for teams of people, again, this is a very human impulse, to take things, once you get comfortable with something and have new incentives come in and distort or pervert the mission. How do you prevent that? Well, again, be very clear about your outcomes and your current status and what success looks like and where you are onto that journey, stay fixed on that goal. Don't change the goal. Don't move the goalposts, right, and be clear and accountable on what progress you're making. And very few organizations have the courage to be transparent and accountable like that. And we find that this is an

incredible competitive advantage because so many organizations are fearful about showing, about speaking truth about the challenges that they're having. Running an organization, bad things are going to happen. You're going to make mistakes. But everyone wants to put this, as you say, a marketing sheet. Oh, everything's going great. Look at us. Look at our stories of impact. Look at our stock report. Everything's going great. And I call it a pretty door to a dirty room. Right. It's all this marketing BS. And when you get inside, you feel it's high turnover. People are frustrated. The leadership's embezzling. You know, it doesn't matter what kind of organization that garbage. goes on all the time. The best organizations are the ones that are truly transparent about the challenges

they face and their performance and they're accountable and they bring people together and they do something about it. Right. And in the age of information overload, you have to have very powerful tools and very good technology to capture all that information and share it with people and get actionable insights about how you improve. And it all comes down into a concept that was developed back in the late 90s by a scholar, Robert Norton, who wrote an article called the balanced scorecard. And this has been published in the Harvard Business Review. I think it was first published in 1998. Oh, you need to have a scorecard. How are we doing? Let's look at the scorecard. You can make a scorecard that's really complex and hard to read and ambiguous,

right? So it's not only you need a scorecard, but it needs to be simple, clear, powerful, and compelling. So the devil's in the details about how to do it right. So we found when organizations who pursue our methodology, if they can get to the scorecard phase and not all of them do, they get to the money phase and they go, oh, we're good. We got some money. And we don't want to do that accountability stuff. That's too uncomfortable. Right. Some clients who really know that, you know, if you don't want to be a pop and drop, if you want to report back to your investors, your partners, your government supporters, your corporate volunteers, you want to report to your board of trustees, you want to report to your employees, how you're doing, you've got to be clear,

concise, concrete, and compelling scorecard that says, here's our vision, and it's not some wishy-washy, feel-good vision of an empowering future that no one can measure, right? You set smart goals, specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, timed, right? You apply this discipline methodology. You go through the discomfort of not making progress like Janice in a treehouse. This is hard. We haven't done this before. If someone else would figure it out, we'd be doing their stuff and that are willing to sit with that discomfort and deal with bad news and feed that back in at the tenacity.

If you can, you have those personal characters, those qualities, that integrity and that mission focus, then you can create a scorecard. And if you follow that scorecard and you invest in that scorecard and that scorecard then improves your plan. As the book's process, it's a cycle. You assess your benchmarks. You align your team. You write a plan. You test the team. You fund it.

You execute it. You have leadership in the middle. But then you're going to go back to the plan because as you execute, stuff's going to go wrong. You're going to screw it up and you need to use the data, the performance data you collect to fix your plan, inform your strategy through the next round of funding. If you're willing to sit with that cycle and have that immediate investment for that long-term payoff and understand that it's going to take six, nine, 12, 18 months before we show progress, right? And you're not going to get whipsawed by some philanthropist. Where's my impact report? Right?

Some government agency going, where's the progress? We gave you a million dollars six months ago. If you can handle all those pressures, if you can get your team aligned around, then it works. Then that's what keeps you on mission, is having a good scorecard that you invest in. And, you know, that's, again, it's hard. I used to say this was easy. Boy, do I not say that anymore? What do you do?

Like, even though you are in a position where maybe some people that are beginning their startup, I think that this next question will apply to almost anybody. And I know that you've referred to Tolstoy and you obviously have some phenomenal quotes from MLK and so many awesome leaders in the book and stuff there. What do you do when everything around you looks like it's crumbling? When you put your heart and your soul into the relationships and you realize it didn't work. It's not really work. Like what do you what do you?

I think all of us find ourselves at times. if we're being honest and we're growing and we're trying, we find ourselves in these positions where it looks like everything is crashing. And you start asking why? Why? Why? What? You know, you get there.

What do you do, man? What do you do, in your position? Like, is there something? What do you turn to? Well, the first thing I did was have a breakdown. Yes. I'm not applauding that, but I'm thankful to hear that. Like, thank you for your making that.

I'll tell you more about my own story, right? when I describe my process of going through and having the stuff fail. So put yourself in, you know, think, so I have this proven potential to scale up programs to help millions of people. Like I did this toxic certification that took electronic waste from getting flooded into China and Africa, lowest income people that were getting cancer from picking chips out of. We created a certification process that moved huge pieces of the industry. we'd created this, all this good stuff.

And so I knew I had this power to help, right? Not some messianic jerk, but I'm like, wow, I can really help people. I'm living my best life. I can go into any nonprofit and I can help them. I can help them raise millions of dollars in design programs. And then I go into these nonprofits and because of my own mistakes, it failed. I failed to give them the tools because I was at fault. and I didn't know why.

The trauma, the mental trauma that I experienced from that failure was profound. And I didn't know what sort of stress I was putting on myself. And I took that burden onto my shoulders. How come I'm failing? I knew I could have helped that adoption agency scale, but they said they wanted to end my engagement. I'm like, oh, my God, I could see the impact right ahead of them. And I blew it up. So imagine years of that.

And I'm not failing all the time, but I'm just, you know, every time I'd fail to help an organization, I'd realize the cost opportunity. And after a while, I broke down. I woke up one morning to an intense bout of vertigo. The world was spinning. I had vertigo and kidney stones at the same time, like two of the most painful, horrible things. I was throwing up violently. I couldn't walk. And I'm like, what's happening to me?

And I was in my mid-40s at the time. And it was about 10 years ago. And I'm like, oh, my God. And I went to and I was missing meetings. I was working with a major blood bank at the time. And I was getting my butt kicked in that engagement, right? And like, what the heck's going on here? And I thank God, I ran into this balance specialist because I thought I had these little things in my ear, right, that are causing vertigo.

Because I don't ever get vertigo, by the way. And all you people out there with vertigo, I feel your pain is terrible. I had a childhood fear of throwing up on amusement park rides, and this is 100 times worse. And it could not function. And the balance specialist says there's nothing wrong with your ears, but you're a stress case and your brain is blue screening. Right? And I'm like, because he asked me, how do you deal with stress? I'm like, oh, I love stress.

Let's go for it. Eat stress for breakfast. And he's like, dude, you keep this up. you're going to have a stroke. I'm like, okay, I better change my lifestyle. And I got to figure out how to deal with all of this failure. And it's not about just figuring out intellectually what to do different. I realize that being a CEO or being a consultant, you have to be every bit of professional athlete.

You have to undergo complete mind and body and spiritual training and emotional and intellectual training. So I thought it was some sort of intellectual exercise. No, it was physical. So I changed my diet. I got rid of processed foods. I got rid of alcohol. I got rid of all bad habits. Not that I had many.

I underwent an incredible transformational experience with Vopassana meditation. Where you sat, I went to monk school and didn't talk or I did meditated eight hours a day in a Vapasana training course, extremely difficult. I fasted. I did a 10-day fast. I literally became a monk and adopted these ancient practices to clear the trauma out of my head. And then I started on a continuous exercise routine. So of all the difficult things it had to do and all the failure and trauma, you just have to say it's going to cause problems unless you deal with it. Right. Error is. And I had to drain. And I had to drain myself of the emotional failure, right? It's not, you know, what I'm trying to do is hard. And if I fail with a client, I just got to learn from that and not internalize the cost of my

own failure and let it stress me out. I have to go, wow, okay, what do I do next time? So that experience 10 years ago, the fasting, the meditation, the diet and the exercise, you know, I'm taking magnesium. There's all these little tips and tricks out there. in the realization that if I'm a CEO of my own company and I'm going to be counseling other CEOs, I have to train just like a professional athlete. I have to be constantly in training and having mind and body integration. That's what's enabled me to keep going. Thank God. Vertigo hasn't come back. I've been relatively healthy and I'm able to sustain it. I went back and did a vipassana refresher.

Talk about something that is incredibly powerful, but not for everyone, is a vipassana meditation. Same thing with a, I'm a big, big fan of fasting. But those are the things that enabled me to process my own trauma. I think it's the, you know, we've spoken a little bit about awareness and dimensions and integrity and business. But one thing I see that's aligned more so with the nonprofits, and individuals is sort of this return to spirituality.

And not like religious spirituality. Like you have to have a prayer circle at work, but a belief in something bigger than yourself. And it seems to me like the CEO of Treehouse, it's like the people that we're drawn to, or maybe that I'm drawn to when I get goosebumps like now, it's like this person that has an idea that is bigger than themselves, it's contagious,

it radiates its own faith in some way. And when you start talking about fasting, when you start talking about these repasa meditations, or some people are turning to microdosing these days, or, you know, this ritualistic approach. Like, that scares profits. That scares the business world. Like, ooh, these guys, how do you manage what you don't measure? This is a bunch of mumbo jumbo. But it seems to me some of the best leaders in the world have had this sort of spiritualistic practice.

And in my opinion, I think if the business world were to adopt more of that, I think it would be a better world. But I'm curious to get your idea on the relationship between spiritual nature, however we, you know, loosely defined and the business world. Well, it's about, you know, it comes down to what's the meaning of life, right? And I believe that the meaning of life is, you know, having something bigger than yourself and serving others before yourself. This is why, you know, it took me many years to come up with a name for my company.

Altruism. Altruism is the same in 36 languages. I think it's the same in Finnish, right? People understand, and you go through all the world's religions and philosophies and at root of that basic thing is love for other people, right? And that's what animates us. We know that this is the most powerful force in the world, right? But we have to operationalize it, right?

So we know that this is good. How do we build it in? And that's the great challenge before us. How do we build finance capitalism so it actually best? benefits everybody and doesn't extract. So it doesn't prioritize one group of people over another. And this is our higher calling. We've evolved from a group of primates that is status conscious and fundamentally violence oriented and status oriented. And we don't hesitate to kill other people to gain status and gain resources. That's our animal inheritance. And to me, the great

challenge of human history is using our higher selves to overcome that difficult inheritance and recognize that we have to transcend our animal natures and adopt this, you know, really understand what's driving us so we can adopt a place that's sustainable and equitable. That is altruism and boy, but the devil's in the details. How do you operationalize that? The nonprofit community was formed to embody this, right? some you know the cynics among us will say all it you know compartmentalize that stuff and keep it off to the side as window dressing yeah or that's where we you know live our oppressive puritan values while we you know rape and pillage in the for-profit space

but again i come back to my earlier statement i believe that we're making progress i believe martin luther king when he says the long ardo history bends towards justice when you're drowning in clickbait media We have media companies that are preying on our lower natures. And if it bleeds, it leads. And it's, you know, it's about social status on the social media platforms. It's about, you know, immediate gratification. It's about, you know, who's getting the most clicks when we're caught in these status games. And we're dividing people into red and blue and poor and rich and black and white.

We're succumbing to our lower natures. We're succumbing to our animal instincts. the happiest people, the most successful people, the most influential people, I believe, and I think history backs us up, the Martin Luther Kings of the world, don't succumb to their lower natures. They find greater purpose in helping others. And there's many examples. We have the whole rise of the social enterprise movement, right? Wonderful example of a, to bring it back to Earth, you know, a guy. named Ned found in a company, you know, 15 years ago to replace kerosene lights in the global

south with solar lighting. And he saved tens of millions of lives and built a hundred million dollar company, right? He didn't have to pick between profit and helping other people. That's the core of a social enterprise. So we have to, we have to figure out a world where the nonprofit and the for-profit sectors come together that, you know, it's, but these concepts have been around. It's called quadruple bottom line thinking. You know, it's the whole point of ESG. These concepts are already here. I'm not saying anything new.

We know we can engineer a world where we don't have to give anything up. We can create a utopia. We're fighting against, you know, there's a very small segment of the population. You know, out of every hundred people, you're going to have one or two that are sociopath, narcissists, that are going to burn everything down for their own good. and they're really smart people and they know how to manipulate human behavior to get their own ends. They're terrible people. They're born that way.

It's their neurological writing. They're not in, I don't believe in good and evil. I believe we follow our neurology and whatever traumas we've inherited, right? We're products of our DNA and our environment. You know, you're not inherently a bad person. But you take a, you traumatize a kid who's wired for, you know, to be a sociopath. and you put him as a CEO of a company and you're going to have problems. Okay?

So it's not an easy battle, but if we can somehow get people into leadership positions that aren't sociopathic, we can get people into government that aren't, you know, thinking about themselves that are truly mission-oriented, if we can protect and preserve democracy and keep improving them, and there's big battles to fight. You know, and we think about that stuff all the time. And, you know, because you're going to be effective, you know, pick your battles, focus on something we think you can solve.

Focus on one thing that you think you can, you know, really have value in. Don't get caught up into the big, you know, don't, as I tell our nonprofit, don't boil the ocean. It's not going to work. Oceans are already on their way to boiling. You need to pick something that you can solve right now and stay focused on that. And if we can all, like, pick the one little thing that we can do to activate our altruism will be, living the, you know, the principles put forth by John Wesley, the founder of the Wesleyan Church, do as much good as you can for all the people you can and all the time you have before you, right?

Principles of utilitarianism founded by John Stuart Mill. I mean, these philosophies and these means of fixing our problems have all been before us. I think our challenge today is that we're so drowning. The Internet and social media is getting so much power to the sociopaths and the narcissists. who can use the power of communication to bring our attention to our animal selves. How do we get people to activate their altruism? And I think that's the challenge. And I think most of us are good.

And I remain optimistic. I think we're partially screwed right now with climate change. A lot of these effects are irreversible. It's going to cause problems. I've got two kids. You know, next 10 or 15 years are going to be really nasty and it's going to cause a serious problem. But the good news is we're making progress, right? We're transitioning away, you know, and the same thing can be said for social justice.

The same thing can be good for poverty, for equality. If we don't look at the negatives happening now, we take that broader view and stay focused on, you know, helping others than ourselves. That's all you can do. Otherwise, you go nuts. Otherwise, it's a terribly tragic place. You have to be fundamentally optimistic. Yeah, I agree. It brings up an interesting point about, like, demographics.

And I'm wondering if we look at the way in which, you know, the self-selecting rise as to the CEO benefited sort of narcissistic persona, is that dwindling. On some level, when I look at the leaders around the world, like I see almost like the boomer class. And some level, if I get philosophical about it, it seems to me like what we're seeing, and I think it's backed up a little bit by the book called The Fourth Turning, but they speak about this idea.

If we look at humanity as an individual, as a person, a large part of us is dying. And perhaps these unrealized dreams of a class of people knocking on the door to the next phase is what's creating all this chaos. Like we're still living in these systems. And you look at the kids today that are like, I want to do something more meaningful. I'm not even going to work.

I'm just going to quiet quit over here because I don't want to do, I don't even want to be part of that. You know, like, do you think there's a sort of demographics playing out on a bigger scale and we're in this sort of transition phase? Oh, sure. I think we always have been. And I'm not, I'm an amateur historian at best. And I wouldn't even call myself historian. But if the reading I've done, it's like, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. We've been going through these transitions forever.

Yeah. You know, but we, you know, it's not linear. We go through these epics of rapid change. And I think one we can look back at very clearly is like the U.S. experience in the Vietnam War. Yeah. And, you know, the McNamara fallacy, Robert McNamara, kill more and we'll solve the problem. Here is a guy using data and business principles to try to defeat a peaceful agrarian society because of this imaginary threat of communism.

It was nothing altruistic about it. It was a power mad freak who exported 50,000 dead Americans to waste a lot of money. And with that type of upheaval that created, he created an entire generation, the boomers, the Vietnam era. He kicked off a wave of liberal reaction to that. and those many of those people became permanently progressive and they're still leading our progressive you know they became university professors you want to know why they're separated so left because they're all like grew up in the vietnam era they're still they have tenure right so we can see how these negative historical upheavals have created long-term consequences and that's a you know

you look at Martin Luther King, we're still living in Dr. King's legacy. And it's not linear. It comes back. And all it took was this unholy murder to happen in Minnesota for a wave of social protests. So I mean, the whole Black Lives Matter is an incredibly important reaction to that. So yeah, these things are, these are more for sociologists and historians to track. But in terms of where we are now, the one realization that I make is people aren't going to change until it's lighting their own rear end on fire. Right?

For years and years and years, it's like the scientific data, so one thing we think about all the time is climate change. You're altruist. We're working on climate bonds initiatives. We've done some of the most high-scale work on reforestation. my partner and colleague is a sustainability. We're actively in the front lines of trying to fight climate change and keep to the 1.5 degrees, which we already blew past, by the way. What is that, to go back to your question, what's going to get us momentum?

And yeah, it's the kids growing up with the fact that they're not going to have a world like ours to inherit, that the people in front of them, the older people are like, Yep, we're set in the world on fire and we don't care, which is basically our reaction. So I hope that they get angry. And I hope that they, we don't need a bloody revolution. We need smart people with new solutions. We can fix our system. We can decarbonize our economy.

I'm a big proponent of a managed transition. but that fear and that unhappiness at the current state of affairs is influencing the whole generation. Thank goodness, right? They're paying attention. But here's what, you know, here's the disturbing part of this. People really don't change their short-term thinking unless there's short-term motivation. Right.

So we're still wired for immediate short-term, immediate gratification. We know this. We want to do that. easy. We want to follow our biases and get our immediate gratification because that's how we're wired. Four and a half million billion years of evolution, 250,000 years, whatever the evolutionary pathway. We're not going to change that overnight. So the scary thing is climate adaptation involves making long-term investments and for things where the payoff isn't clear. So I hope that the incoming generation is ready to, that understands we need to make long term painful sacrifices

to ensure that future generations aren't living on a burnt cinder of a planet, right, to ensure that we actually have an ecosystem. I hope there's that anger. I'm seeing it with the young people I talk to, you know, and I'm seeing it in all of our, our clients. And we want to see the trauma of what's happening, translate into action as it did with the Vietnam generation, right? And other social movements, as it did with the, you know,

as the, as the Black Lives Matter is turning trauma into social progress. That, those climate kids, you know, I've got a 21 year old and an 18 year old as kids. And I've done. Well, you know, I'm scared to death for those guys, right? You know, I'm 55. You know, I'm going to start, you know,

we're going to, the sign really is not going to start biting in the butt, you know, your average, middle class, you know, American, someone in the global north, people in Bangladesh are the ones that are going to get flooded first. The people in the African subcontinent, the people in who are already on the verge of poverty are going to hear it first. And they're already experiencing these problems. When the climate crisis starts biting into the comfort level of most people, that's when I think we'll wrap change, right? The problem is by then it's going to be too late to head off the big crises And the worst of it because I don't really think we're going to see it's going to be an intellectual problem

It's going to be this big scientific thing that's out there for a little while We're really not going to see the pain and suffering of Day to day to day that'll motivate people to take the radical actions necessary I'm going to take a wild uninformed uneducated guests and say it's going to take a 10 or 15 years years. So I hope and pray that the generation coming up fearing this stuff, just like I grew up fearing the Cold War, like the Holocaust is a kid of the Reagan administration, right? I grew up fearing the Soviets. And today's kids are growing up fearing ecological collapse. I hope they can channel that in a good way and fix our systems. Because again, there's plenty of nonprofits out there.

you can, there's plenty of climate change specialists that know exactly what the transition needs to be made, but there's too many in people who are enjoying entrenched resources and they're threatened. They want theirs and they don't care about the health of others and or they disagree or obfuscate. So let's let's hope the kids come up and fix this place. So that's what, that's what we need. I think that's our grand challenge. And, you know, that along with so, but you can't get that. If it's a fundamentally unequal society and, you know, some kids are already coming up traumatized and repressed,

they're not going to be able to solve that challenge. So we got a work cut out for us, George. Yeah, absolutely. But I think books like scaling altruism, they're a playbook that speak to the ideas of change because it is taking people that may be born into a sector that has poverty or has trauma or even generational trauma on a level that most people may not know. And that gives those individuals the tools they need to construct a better life for themselves,

for their relationships, for themselves, the people they love and the planet that they're in. And it's, you know, I know we're coming up, coming close on time, but I wanted to switch back to the idea of the accelerator for a moment. When you bring someone into the accelerator or you bring in or you go in and you, if you do like a fractional job with someone, and you come into this company. Are you looking for certain traits in a leader? And if so, what are those? Wrote them down in the book.

There's six. Again, there's six personal qualities that you have to bring to this work. That if you don't have them, if you're missing one of them, it won't work. And if you don't have them or don't believe you can develop them, don't even bother beginning. First one is courage, risk tolerance. You've got to be in a place where you can be courageous. You've got to have resiliency, right? You've got to understand that if you do something courageous, you're going to run into problems and you better be resilient.

And closely related with that resiliency is optimism. You have to, first of all, go back to that growth. mindset you have to believe you can you have to believe you can make a difference you have to have the courage to give it a try you have to have resilience to understand that you're going to fail a lot then you have to have the urgency to move quickly you have to have the focus to be really specific about what you what you do and what you don't do and and then you have to have the discipline to actually execute. And it took many years to boil down.

And that's what we look for in our clients. And that's why I start that in the introduction. This book is not for everyone. The accelerator is not for everyone because this is a hard journey. It doesn't mean people without these qualities are bad, right? Everyone's got their own gifts. They can get into the world. But if you want to be a leader who's going to try something difficult in social change,

which is another order of magnitude, right? Optimistic, courageous, resilient, urgent, focused, disciplined behavior. Those are the six that we believe makes the right leader for this. And I think if I had to add a seventh, it would be humility. Jim Collins in his book, the first book that distilled, the most, it attempts to create a roadmap for companies to follow. It's very abstract and it leans on just principles and very hard to operationalize any of Jim Collins's principles. But he talks about the level five leader, often humble, intensely focused on the mission.

You know, what does that, what does that leadership quality look like? There's a huge literature on the leadership. But we try to boil it down to just those practices. That's what this is for. And what we've seen again is these leaders are, everywhere. You don't know where right now the the leadership programs tend to draw from a wealthy white male audience for leadership. You look at the population of Harvard Business School or Stanford. All those people are wealthy getting into these programs. You have to have to have

resources. They make lip service to, you know, financial aid, but, you know, take Harvard, three quarters of its students are for the upper, you know, five percent of society, right? These are, you know, they're teaching leadership to the children of the wealthy. And what I've seen in my work is that leaders are everywhere. And, you know, when, when I did an accelerator program that involved leaders from Vietnam, from Indonesia, from Honduras, from Brazil, from Uganda, and from Kenya. We ran an accelerator cohort for nonprofits that were trying to bring coffee farmers out of poverty.

And they needed to adopt the principles in scaling altruism. They needed to learn financial modeling. They needed to learn impact and growth strategy. They needed to learn how to write a business plan, how to run a pipeline, how to create a scorecard. They needed to learn KPIs and leading and lagging metrics. These are folks that English was like their third language. They had no formal business training whatsoever.

And there was an incredibly diverse group. It was one of the most powerful professional experiences in my life. We brought these together, brought this group together for a week of intensive exercise, and they all picked it up. I've never seen a group of these most diverse individuals learned these alien concepts from a native English speaker who was using idiom phrases like, I kept talking about spiking the football.

And they're like, what's it? Right? I kept talking about dancing in the end zone. And I'm like, oh, I forgot the fact that you guys didn't grow up watching Buffalo Bills lose super. Right? You know, and it's totally impressed me how smart and how engaging these people are.

And they're so far out of the business and management ecosystem and the talent development challenge of our business schools and all our current social impact programs. So that's what the book is ultimately about is getting the playbook into anybody who wants it. How do we democratize access to the tools that work? And that's what the accelerator is for, you know, with a minimal amount of money, How can we run a very high quality program that speaks to these leaders and gives them the long-term community and support, along with the toolkit and process? And we're building the accelerator not to just train people. We're building teachers.

My friend and mentor is a wonderful social impact leader. He's the former head of global philanthropy at Microsoft. His name, and he's a distinguished professor of social impact at the University of Washington, his name is Akhtar Bodhaw. And he wrote a book called Purpose Mindset, which talks about, touches upon our earlier conversation about how Microsoft uses purpose and social impact to animate its incredibly diverse workforce. Another very good example. Microsoft has really does a good job with its integrating social mission into its work. Anyhow, Aktar has to taught me many things.

And he said, don't try to scale up. Try to create a movement. Right? How do we create a movement? Right? That's what enabled, like, A.A. is a movement. It's a religion. They don't use any business principles.

It's all volunteer driven. It's completely centralized. Right? That's a movement. Right? How do the Black Lives Matters? Movement. You know, me too.

Great. There's a movement. tremendous forces for social change. How do we create a movement of social impact leaders who are using the most powerful tools, who aren't succumbing to the myths and the constraints of the nonprofit sector, who have access to high-performing people and adequate capital?

That's what the accelerator is about. I'll continue to work one-on-one with clients. I'm working with one of the most high impact nonprofits I've ever seen today. They started in 2018 and in 2023. They've transformed the lives of over a million people. You'll hear about them. They're called the Roundglass Foundation. Incredible organization, founded by an incredibly successful business entrepreneur,

Sonny Singh, and he knows how to drive organizational growth. and now he's doing it with a social enterprise, a wellness app that you can download on your phone, and he's driving incredible transformation on health, equity, sustainability, and prosperity for very poor, marginalized communities in the Punjab area of India. He's creating a model for the entire international development

organizations to follow. This is a guy that's actually solving problems at scale and he's doing it rapidly. Never see anything like it. The accelerator is about, hey, hey, you want to, this is possible. Now come on and join this community and work with people, have access to people who actually aren't struggling, who aren't, you know, stressed out. So many nonprofit leaders are doing their best and they're stressed. They're, they're suffering. They're, they're, they can't pay staff. A recent survey by the National Council of Nonprofits, like half nonprofits have, have, you know, waiting lists for their services and they have, you know, 30, 40 percent gaps in their staffing. The nonprofit community is really hurting right now. The number of individuals donating the

nonprofits has gone from three quarters to half. It's plummeting over the last decade. My friend Nathan Chappelle wrote a book called The Generosity Crisis Around That We got all sorts of challenges in the nonprofit sector So it's time to create a movement And that's what I'm tempting to do It's got to be good, it's got to work It's got to be low cost

It's got to be supportive It's got to be scalable And the book's the first step But the book is like an instruction manual To an F1 car If you haven't driven a race car before You can't just read the book And apply the principles

You're going to need some help So we're going to have to land the book, get the community support. I'll probably start with a group of 50 to 100 people. It'll launch this summer. Hopefully one day it can be large enough to really start solving problems at scale. Yeah, I would recommend anybody that's with an earshot of this podcast today, if you found a little bit of this interesting, we just barely scratch the surface. The book is called Scaling Altruism.

And it's a phenomenal book. I highly recommend everybody check it out. Is it out in all the bookstores right now? Yeah, all I have to do is Google it. And, you know, the other thing is we have a sign up going on right now. Altruist Accelerator.org. So Altruist, A-L-T-R-U-I-S-T-E-E-E-Selerator, all one word. Dot org.

That's the sign-up page for, the accelerator launched this June or July. So people who read the book and who want to apply the principles, there's tools, templates, guides, real world examples. And we're going to have a supportive community. We'll do weekly events. We'll have expert guest speakers. I'm going to be deeply involved in the community as well as the colleagues at my firm.

We're going to bring in social impact experts. It's super low cost. It's run by my nonprofit that I founded. Right. We're going to be charging people at 79 bucks a month to keep the lights on at the nonprofit and to fuel the, you know, bring in guest speakers and things like that. You know, so instead of having to, you know, pay tens of thousands of dollars a month for a fancy management consultant, you can get everything that a proven professionals learn and you can be a community of peers. And here's the thing. I didn't really become a good writer until I became an English teacher. I didn't really learn grammar and the rules of composition until I taught middle school grammar.

Right. And I learned the power of the phrase. If you really want to learn something well, teach it. You know, you can read something. You'll get 5% of it. If you do something, you'll get like 50% of it. If you teach it to other people, you really become, that's how you get mastery. So the accelerator, I want to create a movement of social impact teachers. So you come on the platform. It's not about learning. It's about teaching other people too. You'll learn something.

You apply to your own organization. You critique and support and positively, you know, shape the principles and practices of all the other people on the platform. And we're going to have a badging system. It's almost like a certification program. It's not going to be anything that sounds that clunky. But we're going to really recognize the people who learn and have that ability to help others. Hey, I've learned how to write a business plan.

I've given other people advice. And now I really have this skill. And that person becomes incredibly powerful. Right. So that's how we're going to scale up our impact. We're going to create teachers who know this methodology and who have the impulse to share it with other people. We're going to have a platform where we train those people and they can go out into the world and say, hey, this stuff works. Why don't you try it like this?

That's ultimately the aim. And so I'm trying to live my friend Akhtar's advice and don't try to scale up an organization. I've tried that already done work for what I'm doing. This is the pathway for us. We're going to try and create a movement of very powerful social impact leaders. We're using a toolkit that works. Yeah. I can see the wave forming and making its way towards the shore and moving it up.

So you talked a little bit about where altruist accelerator.org, but before I let you go, where else can people find you and what do you got coming up? You have some of the talks coming up or is there a different set of websites people can look at if they're interested in other parts of the system? Well, it's everything that I know and learned. I put it in one place. Okay. And I put it in the book.

Okay. And, you know, when I say it took me five years and hundreds of drafts and mulks, in multiple teams. Everything's in the book. It's got a glossary. It's got a list of additional resources. I'm trying to keep it simple. I don't want to give people a complicated ecosystem.

I want to say, here's the right place. Here's tools that can work. My email is in the book. Email me, right? Donald at altruistartners.com. You can send me a note if you don't agree with anything you've written or you have some ideas. So I want to be transparent, accountable to people. You know, I'm writing up a number.

another success story. We did this incredible intervention with My Green Labs, which is decarbonizing scientific workplaces. They're scaling up around the world. We're adding success stories. I'm incredibly happy. I'm diving in with both feet with this incredible team at the Round Glass Foundation to really create the leading edge model for international development in low resource countries. So I'm continuing to do hands-on work with a small number with my team of clients doing cool stuff. But what's next is just building up this bigger community and just trying to, you know, how do I scale it my own impact? I want to go from suffering and being traumatized at my own failures, right, to actually doing something that hopefully works. We'll see. Early indications are good, but that's what's next.

and I'm going to be very focused on that. I'm not going to do multiple things. I'm going to help have the highest impact that I can, both with individual clients and then with this community of social impact leaders. And that's all I'm going to be doing. Well, they say that the best predictor of future behavior is past relevant behavior. And I can't see anything but incredible success coming forward. It's such a phenomenal idea.

Everyone should go and check out the book. Donald, hang on briefly afterwards. I still want to talk to you briefly. But to everyone who hung out with us today, I hope you enjoy the conversation as much. as we did. Go down, check out the book, Scaling Altruism, send an email to Donald Summers, learn, live, and create the best version of yourself. The tools are right there for everybody. We live in a fascinating time. I hope everybody has a beautiful day, and that's all we got. Aloha.