Impatient Impact

“If you only had a year left to live, what would you spend the next 12 months doing?”

If your life were compressed into a week beginning Monday morning, based on current life expectancies, most students at the GSB are now on Wednesday morning. By Friday evening, we’ll be thinking about retirement and by Sunday evening, our time for positive impact on the world will have passed.

As graduation looms on the horizon for MBA2s, and MBA1s gear up for summer internships, these words serve as an important reminder. Most of us care deeply about improving the world. But we now face an important choice. Should we follow a traditional path, build financial security and wait for the “right time” to contribute years down the line? Or should we be impatient and try immediately to tackle the problems that matter most to us?

This is a question I asked myself repeatedly when I was 21 and in my final year at Oxford University. I was on the path of a traditional Oxford undergraduate, applying for corporate jobs in consulting and finance without a clear sense of purpose.

But everything changed after dinner with a close friend. We were sat in a dark, imposing dining hall in Oxford and she asked me — “If you only had a year left to live, what would you spend the next 12 months doing?” The question hit me hard but my initial reaction was clear:

I knew that I wanted to leave this world just a little bit better than the one I was born into. And so I told her — “I’d drop out of Oxford and spend 12 months fundraising for effective nonprofits”.

Then she asked me — “Why don’t you do that anyway, instead of applying for corporate jobs?” This straightforward challenge made me reconsider the conventional path I was on. I realized that I didn’t need to wait for some distant future to start making an impact. And that night, I applied for a job at Dalberg Advisors, where I would go on to work — supporting the restoration of 1.5 million hectares of forest, enabling a social enterprise in rural Cambodia to raise millions of dollars and supporting agricultural research into sustainable livestock systems to feed millions of people.

Impatience is often a word laden with negative connotations, conjuring images of haste and impulsiveness. In many settings, it’s associated with poor decision-making and a lack of long-term vision. But when it comes to driving social change, I believe we need to be more impatient. Impatient impact is about integrating social and environmental impact into our actions and decisions today, rather than viewing it as something to be pursued after achieving personal or professional milestones.

There are many reasons I’ve heard and have grappled with myself about why pursuing an impact career immediately after graduating from Stanford is the wrong approach:

• “Working directly on social and environmental problems is not well-paid or prestigious.” The impact landscape is changing, with more and more organizations operating at the intersection of the private and public sectors (e.g. impact investment firms) and offering competitive salaries to attract top private sector talent. While it’s true that some social impact roles might not offer the same salary as some corporate jobs, numerous studies show that it is a sense of purpose, not financial reward, that will lead to higher life satisfaction and happiness.
• “I can’t make a difference on big societal problems early in my career.” History and the GSB alumni directory is filled with examples of young leaders making significant impacts early on in their careers. Sam Goldman and Ned Tozun (MBA ’07) founded d.light while at the GSB and have enabled household access to renewable light and energy for millions. Jacqueline Novogratz (MBA ’91) is the founder and CEO of Acumen, a non-profit investment fund that has invested more than $150 million of patient capital in social impact organizations.
• “I’ll drive social change through contributing to economic growth” Waiting for the trickle-down effects of economic growth to generate social and environmental change is slow. And in advanced economies such as the US, many of the benefits of economic growth are likely to be captured by the rich. MIT economists Banerjee and Duflo argue that the relentless pursuit of economic growth since the Reagan-Thatcher eras in advanced economies has actually contributed to a rise in inequality, mortality rates, and political polarization. If you want to drive social or environmental change in an advanced economy like the US, chances are that working directly on the problem is likely to be a more effective strategy.

While I still struggle with some of these challenges associated with impatient impact, I know that the urgency of problems demands immediate action. So this summer, I’m working in Madagascar on a sustainable agriculture project, developing a training program for young farmers. Madagascar is the fourth most vulnerable country in the world to climate change and I hope that this work will help to improve the resilience of thousands of farms against extreme droughts and cyclones.

But the real question is — what will impatient impact look like for you?

Editor: Emy Makakalala