http://www.ssireview.org/articles/ Strategies, Tools, and Ideas for Nonprofits, Foundations, and Socially Responsible Businesses en nicholas_jenna@gsb.stanford.edu Copyright 2010 2010-02-24T07:00:54+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/a_handbook_for_change/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/a_handbook_for_change/ In a world that is becoming increasingly complex, it was a welcome beacon to read the title of Chip and Dan Heath’s new book: Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. With great anticipation I turned to the introduction, where the authors promised to teach me how to change things at the individual, organizational, and societal level. The book’s premise is straightforward—successful change occurs when people change their behavior. A person’s behavior is driven by three factors: his logic and rationality (what the authors call the “Rider”), his emotions (the “Elephant”), and his environment (the “Path”). The best way to create change, say the authors, is to “Direct the Rider,” “Motivate the Elephant,” and “Shape the Path.” Most of the book is divided into three sections, each exploring one of these principles. Although the introduction provides the logic behind the principles, I sometimes found it difficult to bring them together into a coherent whole. For example, I found the second principle of change, Motivating the Elephant, insightful, but felt the need to return to the first section on the importance of Directing the Rider so that I could get a better perspective on the dynamic relationship between the… Nonprofit Management, Book Reviews 2010-02-24T06:00:30+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/a_mandarins_lament/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/a_mandarins_lament/ A mandarin, according to Webster’s Dictionary, is a “powerful official or senior bureaucrat, especially one perceived as reactionary or secretive.” Michael Edwards has had a long career that has featured top positions at Oxfam, Save the Children, the World Bank, and 10 years at the Ford Foundation. Although it is clear he is not a secretive fellow, those beliefs have been poured into his new book, Small Change. Small Change is a follow-up to, and an amplification of, Edwards’ 2008 monograph, Just Another Emperor? The Myths and Realities of Philanthrocapitalism, which was a hives-like reaction to the book Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save the World, by The Economist’s Matthew Bishop and Michael Green (who interestingly enough has had a career similar to Edwards’). Edwards makes no bones about what Small Change is about: “The claim that business thinking can save the world is a convenient myth for those who occupy positions of great wealth and power; and the constant celebration of rich and famous individuals is a dangerous distraction from the hard, public work of finding solutions, all of us together.” Edwards further states in the preface, “Social transformation is not a job to be left to market forces or… Corporate Social Responsibility, Book Reviews 2010-02-24T06:00:23+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/bearing_witness/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/bearing_witness/ In 1992, while browsing a bookstore in Washington, D.C., I picked up Looking for the Light. On the back cover was a black-and-white photograph, taken in 1933, of a beautiful 23-year-old woman with mesmerizing eyes and a tomboy style of dress. I developed an immediate crush on her, a photographer named Marion Post Wolcott and the subject of the book. Wolcott was a photographer for the Farm Security Administration during the 1930s, one of several photographers employed by the New Deal agency to document the impact of the Great Depression on the lives of Americans. Wolcott, along with Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and others, created some of our nation’s most iconic images. But Wolcott never became as famous as some of her contemporaries. That’s because, after taking several hundred thousand photographs over three years, she met a man, put her camera down to start a family, and did not pick that camera up again for almost 50 years. Paul Hendrickson, the author of Looking for the Light, summarizes Wolcott’s life as “a story about an artist who stopped, who let go of that gifted magical thing inside her until it was too late and the gift was lost.… Economic Development, Book Reviews 2010-02-24T06:00:16+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/inequality_makes_us_anxious/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/inequality_makes_us_anxious/ Why is inequality so bad? It’s not just that the poorest people in highly unequal societies may go without food, shelter, or other basic subsistence goods. It’s not just that extreme inequality makes it difficult for the less fortunate to participate fully in their country’s social institutions. It’s not just that lavishing mansions, cars, and jewels on a few lucky people violates some primitive sense of justice and what’s fair. Although inequality may well be problematic for these conventional reasons, The Spirit Level tells us that it’s mainly bad because it makes status differences more extreme and salient and thus generates insecurity about our worth and where we stand in the social hierarchy. We should dislike inequality, in other words, because it produces anxiety and because such anxiety in turn leads to chronic stress, health problems, and other undesirable outcomes. The great achievement of The Spirit Level is documenting that this inequality-induced anxiety has so many bad effects. It makes humans feel stressed and deprived and more likely to get depressed, smoke, overeat, or engage in violent behavior. It also leads to conspicuous displays of consumption, such as buying fancy cars, big houses, and luxury clothes, all of which serve… Economic Development, Book Reviews 2010-02-24T06:00:07+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/women_hold_both_sky_and_solutions/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/women_hold_both_sky_and_solutions/ Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof’s book Half the Sky is an absorbing narrative of stories that are rarely heard: a New Jersey teenager is raising awareness about the status of girls in poor countries, an Afghan schoolteacher is leading a learning insurgency, and a former first lady of Somalia’s hospital is saving the lives of mothers in Somaliland. These and other vignettes bring to life the struggles and courage of unforgettable women who are, as the book’s subtitle suggests, turning oppression into opportunity. Half the Sky begins by outlining the most egregious ways in which human rights are violated: trafficking and slavery, prostitution, rape and honor killings, and maternal mortality. The authors do not flinch from describing experiences that are horrifying testimony to the deeply rooted gender inequality that persists around the globe. The book also explores the reasons for such discriminatory practices—including attitudes toward religion and traditional cultural beliefs—effectively stoking the reader’s growing sense of moral outrage. We learn, for example, that the world’s leaders are effectively ignoring the 500,000 women who die each year either giving birth or trying to cope with unplanned births, by relegating maternal mortality to a “women’s issue.” After convincing the reader that this… Human Rights, Book Reviews 2009-12-30T23:43:01+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/are_you_talking_to_me/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/are_you_talking_to_me/ If you’re a born and bred American and you’ve lived in any non-Anglophone country, you may have realized after a time that the local people you met didn’t just speak a different language—they were really weird. They acted in all sorts of ways that struck you as irrational, frustrating, and eventually annoying. They stood too close to you, or too far away. Their voices were too loud, or too soft. They were vague about such basics as time, distance, and probabilities. And after months of this disorienting behavior all around you, you may have wondered whether you were going mad. In a sense, you were. You were suffering from what has come to be called “culture shock”—a sometimes-traumatic condition that results from the removal of familiar cultural cues. In its worst manifestations, culture shock can make you feel as though you’ve been detached from reality. This concept was brought home to Americans by returning Peace Corps volunteers in the 1960s and 1970s. Because volunteers had been immersed by design in local cultures, they brought culture shock to light for many Americans. Fortunately, even before the first Peace Corps volunteers were posted overseas, a cultural anthropologist named Edward T. Hall had… Arts, Culture, and Religion, Book Reviews 2009-11-19T06:00:00+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/an_environmental_provocateur/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/an_environmental_provocateur/ Stewart Brand, author of Whole Earth Discipline, is described on the book cover as an icon of the environmental movement. He actually isn’t and doesn’t want to be. Brand (who, in full disclosure, is a friend) has always been much more of an iconoclast than an icon. In Whole Earth Discipline, he combines his deep concern for the environment, his pugnacious search for windmills to tilt at, and his technological optimism to produce an intriguing, confounding, utterly Brand-type book. By that, I mean a full-throated assault on conventional wisdom, laced with enough ironic riffs and personal confessions of his own past errors to disarm most critics. Brand came to public attention 41 years ago by publishing the wildly successful Whole Earth Catalog, a practical guide for back-to-the-land refugees from suburbia. The catalog questioned virtually every attribute of 1960s middle-class suburban America and offered a telephone directory-sized, annotated compilation of equipment for rural self-reliance. Ultimately, the back-to-the-land movement proved to be vanishingly small, over-fond of drugs, and stuck in a historical cul-de-sac. In Whole Earth Discipline, Brand examines and embraces the scientific basis of some of the principal problems that scare the hell out of environmentalists. Indeed, his bottom line on… Environment, Book Reviews 2009-11-19T06:00:00+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/staying_vibrant_and_curious/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/staying_vibrant_and_curious/ I remember meeting John Gardner as if it were yesterday. It was 1989 and I was an MBA student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. I was sitting in a preview session of upcoming classes when a tall, graceful, elderly man in a gray suit and a fedora stood up to speak. His figure was lithe and his step was easy. He carried a sense of gravitas that made it impossible not to listen to what he had to say. “Why do civilizations rise and fall?” he asked. “Why do some people stop growing at age 30, just going from work to the couch and television, when others stay vibrant, curious, almost childlike, into their 80s and 90s?” I was hooked. I knew I needed to know this man, for it was clear to me even then that he would play an important role in my life. The grace and humility with which John spoke that day belied his powerful career. He’d been secretary of health, education, and welfare under President Lyndon Johnson, and president of the Carnegie Foundation. He’d written numerous books. And most thrilling from my perspective, he was an extraordinary social— and serial—entrepreneur, having founded Common… Social Entrepreneurship, Book Reviews 2009-08-18T23:00:01+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/good_guy_vs_good_guy/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/good_guy_vs_good_guy/ In October 2003, Sayyaad Soltani, the elected chair of the Council of Elders of the Qashqai Confedertion in Iran, gave a plenary speech to the World Parks Congress in Durban, South Africa. He spoke of the relentless pressure on his nomadic pastoral people in the 20th century: “Pastures and natural resources were seized from us by various governments. Our migratory paths were interrupted by all sorts of ‘development’ initiatives, including dams, oil refineries, and military bases. Our summering and wintering pastures were consistently degraded and fragmented by outsiders. Not even our social identity was left alone.” This speech, cited at length in Mark Dowie’s thought-provoking book Conservation Refugees, tells a story that is, tragically, repeated by indigenous people the world over. For centuries, governments, adventurers, settlers, and corporations have thrust aside anyone who stood between them and the resources and territory they craved. In Dowie’s version of this story, however, the villains are not big business or corrupt governments, but biodiversity conservationists. Those driven by the desire to protect biodiversity inevitably find themselves trying to do so in the remaining areas of undeveloped land, which is almost everywhere occupied by people making their living by hunting, gathering, grazing livestock, or… Environment, Book Reviews 2009-08-18T23:00:00+00:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/review_dead_aid/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/review_dead_aid/ As the global financial crisis unfolds, those least responsible—our world’s poor—will be most affected. Many have called upon President Obama to uphold his campaign commitment to double foreign assistance. But Dambisa Moyo’s book, Dead Aid, challenges us to think again. Although we can all agree that ending poverty is an urgent necessity, there appears to be increasing disagreement about the best way to achieve that goal. Born and raised in Lusaka, Zambia, Moyo has spent the past eight years at Goldman Sachs as head of economic research and strategy for sub-Saharan Africa, and before that as a consultant at the World Bank. With a PhD in economics from Oxford University and a master’s degree from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, she is more than qualified to tackle this subject. In Dead Aid, Moyo comes out with guns blazing against the aid industry—calling it not just ineffective, but “malignant.” Despite more than $1 trillion in development aid given to Africa in the past 50 years, she argues that aid has failed to deliver sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction—and has actually made the continent worse off . To remedy this, Moyo presents a road map for Africa to… Economic Development, Corporate Social Responsibility, Book Reviews 2009-08-05T21:22:00+00:00