Battleground 2012

With the campaign for the President of the United States in its final, fever stretch, I am proud to have published on iTunes a game that simulates the final eight weeks of a campaign.  I developed the game during the 2008 election cycle, using a map drawn on construction paper, individual cards for each state, and a pair of dice to give the game an element of chance.  My daughters loved playing it, and I made four other copies, for nephews and nieces, children of other friends.

So I met a game developer, the CEO of Secret Builders, and we built the game for the iPhone and iPad.  The game is simple but pretty instructive about the role of money in politics, the difference between the electoral and popular vote, the unpredictable turns of events on the campaign trail, and the central fact that the Presidency often comes down to only a handful of states.  

So while we wait out Hurricane Sandy and the candidates presumably head for Battleground states west of the storm, I encourage you to give the game a try.  A premium version with attack ads and a few other bells and whistles should be released this week.  The free game can be found at: http://bitly.com/TuL8Jf

Reverse Innovation

I've had the opportunity on a few occasions, and again this coming Tuesday in Toronto, to talk about what innovations I have seen in emerging markets from the Acumen Fund portfolio might have relevance in the United States.  Since we largely got rid of malaria in the 60's, have large scale irrigation systems for agriculture, and we have an effective emergency services in most of our major urban areas, investments like A to Z, GEWP and 1298 do not seem so relevant.

Other companies, like Aravind Eye Hospital, with its high volume, high quality, affordable eye services (not to mention its growing telemedicine practice) in India, or Bridge International Academy, with its affordable private education model in Kenya, are certainly examples that we can learn from as we look into new health and education models in the United States.  We even had one company in Acumen Fund portfolio, Voxiva, which has shifted its SMS based health information business from the global to the US, with its rapidly growing Text4Baby and Text2Quit programs.

But as I reflect on the companies that I have seen overseas, there are few replicable models that can port immediately back to the developed world.  Sure, money transfer businesses like mPesa (in Kenya) may inform how mobile payment platforms are built or how remittances flow in the United States, but  where I see the real reverse innovation coming from is in how those models emerged.

Unconstrained thinking about new ways of doing business.  Radical design innovations that place customer need at the center of the product development process.  Capital that is willing to take risks on blended financial and social returns.  Entrepreneurs with the empathy and skills to merge mission and margin, while navigating with a widely unpredictable public sector to build real value.  An impulse to start with a small amount of capital and adapt and build from the early prototypes.  

It is the model of social innovation, rather than the specific business models, that I am eager to adapt  the proliferation of social enterprises outside of the United States.

MDG 2.0?

We are within three years of the deadline the world set to hit the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).  While it is too early to declare victory or defeat, I fear that it is the 8^th inning, we are down by four runs, and poverty has Mariano Rivera coming in from the bullpen in to shut down the development All-Stars in the 9^th inning.  

While we have admittedly made substantial progress in the last decade in cutting extreme poverty in half, expanding primary school enrollment, particularly for girls, and improving access to clean drinking water, we are far behind where we need to be in other areas like improved childhood nutrition and access to sanitation solutions.  

Optimists believe we can still hit the goals if we try hard enough, pessimists are doubtful given the current economic crisis, and cynics think that we are fiddling while Rome burns.

At the United Nation’s last month, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon convened a “High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda” (I am not kidding about the name) to take stock of progress to date and outline options for new development goals. 

So what if rather than another top-down, large aid strategy, the HLPEPP2015DA (um, how about the HLP for short?) flipped development on its head and listened to what the poor want and need.  What if rather than setting out another eight broad, perhaps unachievable goals, they committed to finding the eight highest impact solutions with the strongest evidence linking use at the household level and economic development?

What if the MDG 2.0 had targets for adoption of clean cook-stoves to improve maternal health and enhance local sustainability?  What if another goal were to provide comprehensive affordable eye-care services, which have been proven to increase education and incomes?  Or, what about solar lanterns, drip irrigation, affordable primary schools, secure mobile banking services, etc.  In some cases, the market might take care of these services, and in others, like ARVs, vaccines or anti-malaria bednets, wide-scale subsidies may still be needed to make the products affordable.

And I am not even sure what the right eight products might be, but I am sure that the HLP can learn from the experience of Millennium Promise, the likes of the Poverty Action Lab and the portfolios of Acumen Fund and the Grassroots Business Fund, among others, as to what bundle of goods could make the most difference in the lives of the poor.   

Lets hope that a new development agenda, MGD 2.0, can learn from the experience of MGD 1.0, and that we start to see wide-scale, sustainable and efficient distribution of these high-impact goods and services making a measurable difference in the lives of the poor.    

Principled Leadership for Social Enterprise

At the SoCap conference, one hears the consistent refrains that the challenges that the world faces are daunting and growing, and that impact investing and social enterprise can and must play a role in meeting those challenges.  But there are also words of caution that impact investing and social enterprise don't get caught up in its own hype.  The Monitor and Acumen Fund "Blueprint to Scale" report and Omidyar's "Priming the Pump" blog series reinforce that a serious reflection is now happening in the sector about what is needed to solve sector-wide problems and how investment capital and philanthropy need to co-exist.

To navigate the next stage of growth for the field, I think we need a generation of principled leaders who are committed to not only solving these problems, but ones who are trained to deal with their complexity.  And I as I thought about the challenge of leadership, I reflected on a talk I gave to students at MIT last year where the theme was on "principled leadership". 

So what are principled leaders?

To me, principled leadership is a recognition that not only the generic traits of leadership such as courage, humility, self-awareness, the ability to listen are needed, but that in a complex world, the specific skills required to succeed in the non-profit, for-profit and public sectors are needed for ventures that increasingly work across domains. 

That principled leaders have the moral imagination of a nonprofit entrepreneur, with the ability to define a compelling mission, to generate resources literally from nothing, and to ask people to join them on a journey to solve problems that no one thought were solvable.    

That principled leaders have the operational excellence, the disciple and focus to manage an efficient and effective “enterprise”, be it social or not-for profit, that they have a keen eye for not only the financial margin, but also the social and environmental metrics of their business. 

That principled leaders understand how to influence policy and deploy resources ethically in the world of power and politics to promote not just their personal financial interests, but to create broader public mandates in the long-term interests of their shareholders, their stakeholders their country and ultimately humanity at large.

And that principled leaders not only consider what they do, but HOW they do it. In a winner take all society, principled leaders not only play by the rules, and not only do they help others onto the playing field, but they continue to refine the rules so that everyone on the field has a chance… not necessarily an equal chance, but a chance… of winning.