I would like to build things

"...know that your people will judge you on what you can build,
not what you destroy"
- US President Barack Obama, Inauguration Speech

By all accounts, Obama delivered a sterling speech today. While many expected him to strike a balance between 'celebration' & 'difficult task ahead', he focused a lot on the enormity of the responsibility in our hands, and the legacy to uphold.

The quote above was the one that resonated with me. In many accounts, it reminded of a change in my viewpoint over the last two years. Indicorps has a wonderful philosophy of working for things, not against things. It is something that we all lived by in the one or two years in the fellowship. It is a crucial distinction to remember when we immerse ourselves in the community, and choose to dedicate ourselves towards a singular issue from a myriad of complex problems that face the community. It is just functionally necessary for a grassroots fellowship.

My last two years at some point lifted me beyond the stage of a grassroots development worker. We built an organization. We became an institution. We stood for something. And we built programs for the long-run, focusing on areas of livelihood & healthcare, areas where we identified the most need & where we could deliver the most value.

We encountered many roadblocks along the way, and we overcame many of them. It made me realize one thing though: on a long-term basis, you will have to work against something. It is almost by definition of being a community worker. By trying to assist the disadvantaged, you are disrupting the source of power & relative status of the advantaged. The status quo rigidly follows Newton's first law of inertia, and will actively work in the interest of self-preservation.

I realized that societal change comes both from offering a carrot and wielding a stick. The people will remember what you changed, and the future will remember what you built, but behind the scenes, you will have to be prepared to destroy that which holds the people back.

I will always choose to work towards something, building things, leaving something behind. But my time in India has taught me to recognize and respect those who choose to work against today's problems.

Skill Fit vs. Culture Fit: Tallent challenges for social ventures

In this article on nextbillion.net, Univ of Michigan's own Moses Lee presents a common dilemma for social enterprises facing a talent crunch: For a job opening, you have to choose between two candidates. One that fits the job profile, but not the culture, and the other that gets the culture and has the will/passion for change, but does not have the right skillset. Who do you pick?

My response:

During the last two years, I helped found the Grassroots Development Laboratory (www.gdl.org.in) in Rajasthan, India. We finally gained momentum and started growing at the year and a half mark, and the talent shortage was our single biggest impediment to growth.

A few things that I've come to realize:

• NGOs/Social Ventures start because of the passion of a few individuals. It is important to stoke this early on. At this point, it is KEY to find someone who 'gets' the culture
• There IS a transition point where you have to grow out of your comfort zone, and become 'professional'. It is where the ideas and passion are no longer enough for the founders, the community you serve, or the donors who serve you, and they demand hard results. You will need people to execute the right things, the right way, and thus the skillset becomes important.

I think it is possible to misjudge this transition point too early. Organizational culture, and not financial viability, may be critical to surviving beyond the nascent stage, and stories of many NGOs would support this notion at least anecdotally. Understanding what stage you're in, and sticking to your priorities, is very difficult for any startup organization, especially when there is a talent shortage.

From early missteps (and subsequent right steps) we figured out what worked for us: the founders need to have a clear understanding of which stage they are in, what their priority is, what they want their organization's values to be, and orient prospective/new employees VERY clearly about these values. In a startup environment this seems so redundant, because everybody "knows" the values anyways, but the exercises can sometime stir up a hornet's nest. It is fruitful to be able to commit to something in writing, as well as define the limits/relative importance of these values by defining the extent to which we will demonstrate/practice/cultivate the values. For example: Does simple living come at the expense of efficient delivery? In what way? To what extent?

Of course, throughout this continuously transformative phase, the tough question may sometime not be what, but who: who are the founders, and thus, who defines the values of this organization.

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