Gift Hub

Should Financial Advisors Listen to Clients - Deeply?

Interview with Ronnie McClure, CPA, PhD.

Listening for buying signals, listening for a chance to talk, listening to win a debate - yes. But listening so we can hear client aspirations and the emerging story of a life wending towards a distant goal? Why listen when what the client says might only get us off track. 

My sense is that since we don't listen, and since it is not in our best interest to listen (we are persuaders and managers of a track process) donors should make it a point to clarify their objectives before meeting with us. They should bring a little  memo stating their objectives. They might then slide it across the desk for us to initial. "By initialling, you indicate that the plan you create will support these objectives." What do you think of that, my fellow advisers? Crazy! Are you qualified to diagnose that? Who you calling insane?

"Your Final Exam Results are In," said God shaking his head sadly

Download Pop Quiz and Final Exam

For Interfaith Worker Justice, I put together this Pop Quiz and Final Take Home Exam. We may use the Quiz with the Board, most of whom are religious leaders. The suggestion is that they share the Take Home Final with their wealthy congregants. Answers to the quiz are provided. The Final, a high stakes exam, is scored at death by a higher power. No retakes, unless you believe in Reincarnation. 

Metrics, by Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary returned the favor by writing a roman a clef about Flaubert. She outsold him by 1,000 to 1. Flaubert claimed his was the superior work but his character shrugged. Sales are sales, she said.

Why Is my tongue black?

I am told on good authority that the best wine auctions are now held in China. They are bidding the best vintages out of the reach of most Americans, even the richest. Fortunately, bum wines remain affordably priced, which is a mercy. I only wish they did not turn my tongue so black. Or, maybe that comes from licking my boss and generous patrons boots. Checking my peers tongues, I conclude that I must either be drinking more than they or licking more because my tongue is the blackest, or at least among the blackest, right up there with Dirk who just got promoted to Senior Morals Consultant II. Next year if my results are better, I may make Senior Consultant II myself. We are targeting the morals of the poor on a special grant from Rooster Foundation. I will get points for every poor person I reform after the first three thousand. We are working on the metrics with Bridgespan now so at least it will all be handled quite professionally. I would hate to reform thousands and not get extra. Paying for performance is only fair.

On "coercive metrics"

Metrics Mania by Alison Bernstein. http://www.nea.org/home/50022.htm

Work for Free to Keep Social Services Going

In the wake of munipal cutbacks, ordinary citizens work for free providing essential public services. I have long felt, reading Bill Schambra at Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, that government has been crowding out these unpaid do-gooders. Those who held the job of librarian for $35,000 a year were blocking those who would do it for zero.  By reducing taxes on the rich we not only create many new jobs, in China, and great wealth for entrepreneurs, and those who regulate them, but we also create new opportunities for the middle class to exhibit the moral heroism we once associated with the deserving poor. As a moralist, I applaud the rich for creating these opportunities for us to show our public spiritedness in the face of adversity.

Market Street, The Road to Serfdom

Now a reputable moralist (Michael Sandel) asks if there are moral limits to markets. "He thinks we’re in thrall to markets." Here at Wealth Bondage, we strongly disagree. I myself have never been freer than while serving my boss, consuming merchandise, or sitting in my cubicle awaiting further instructions. Out on the street now, able to advance my own highest aspirations, I drink bum wine, and offer free advice which goes unheeded. I miss my cubicle where I had that other kind of freedom, where I knew my efforts were making a real difference. Most people I know feel the same. You can't impose freedom on them. They have to choose it. And they have. Market Freedom. They know no other.

Who is Calling Whom Insane here?

Long time friend, and reader of (among others) Dante, Tom Matrullo, writes apropos of a recent Gifthub post,

How much longer will USians indulge the polite fiction that the wealthy -- who seize the best assets of nature, of art, of time -- make it all good by sending accountants, lawyers and pony boys to tend the altars of philanthropy.

So, why, Tom, my Learned Fellow Colleague in the Dumpster of History, did John Dryden, Poet Laureate, and also an extrordinary satirist, write such Panegryrics as, Astraea Redux?

Oh Happy Age!

Oh times like those alone

By Fate reserv'd for Great Augustus Throne!

When the joint growth of Armes and Arts foreshew T

he World a Monarch, and that Monarch You

Did he actually believe that the licentious King Charles II was another Augustus, a demi-god returned from heaven? I am more of the opinion that even in those days a poet, indeed all scribblers, best served Justice by serving those who could offer social order, and preferment up some kind of Great Chain of Being, whether secular, ecclesiastical, military, or corporate. My problem is that having served our nation's Wealthiest with countless free and unsolicited no obligation or your money back Morals Tutorials, based on all the best models, from Antquity to the present, I have nothing more to show for it than the friendship of a few men and women driven as insane as I have been. Or maybe we, Tom, are sane and the press, Congress, Council on Foundations, and Philanthropy Round Table, just to name a few are morally insane? Come, come, Tom! We are as mad Lear's Fool without even a pony's hay to butter. Our very lives point the proper moral: Respect your Betters or Live Precariously!

"Does this so-called wisdom you teach, Sir, pay?,I am often asked by my Philanthropy Advisory Students. To which I truthfully answer, "Nay, it is the pearl of great price for which you must suffer greatly strewing it before swine." To which they respond incredulously, What swine? Soon fisticuffs follow and my training in that field is limited to bleeding.

US Wealth Inequality in an International Perspective

The New York Times cites two highly respected economists who say that our wealth inequality is shocking and forebodes a society like OId Europe.

Is High Impact Philanthropy an Insult?

Wildwoman, drawing on her experiences in the slums of Jakarta, on High Impact Philanthropy,

So, it says that they try to educate themselves, but it’s basically a bunch of rich people sitting in a room deciding that the little nonprofits and the people they serve do not know how to solve their issues. So instead, people with no experience in the field will solve their problem for them. They will make “high impact” giving a priority, giving in one particular area, to solve something they deem a priority.

It occurs to me that instead of letting a bunch of people removed from the problem take their theory of giving into their own hands, we might be better served if people receiving services, nonprofits and government worked more hand in hand, forging collaborations and best practices across the nation, sharing ideas, and forging goals collectively, instead of donors forging the goals.

My sense, Wildwoman, is that it is better, from a major gift fundraising perspective, to insult the intelligence of the poor than to offend the amour propre of the rich. The poor will take what they get, and show their gratitude, and get "results," or they will be passed over in the next funding cycle for a higher performing group of poor people. The rich have options. As a donor centered philanthropic coach my role is to be of service to those who matter most. Through High Impact Philanthropy through High Performing Nonprofits, my Hyperagent clients can dramatize their genius, posit and create the world we want (according to them), and save capitalism. Who am I to begrudge them their obscene fantasy? I work in Wealth Bondage laundering whatever they tell me to launder. The things I have seen! As I often tell the girls (of all ages, races, creeds and genders) when they complain of the systemic and ongoing abuse of power, The customer is always right, Honey. They pay for High Performing, give them High Performing. Maybe it is demeaning, but it sure beats working on the Supreme Court, or in Congress, or for the Ford Foundation Project on Social Justice and World Peace. If we are going to save Capitalism, we all have to bend over, frontwards and backwards, or there's others who will.

Why Business Won't Save the World

 

Strategic philanthropy is the new colonialism

Into the conference room stride 18 hedge fund managers, ages 23-28. In the next 19 minutes they will collectively give away 45 million dollars - effectively, efficiently, on time, on task and on point. How is this possible? Each has sitting before him or her a one page summary of 47 charities, and a cover sheet where each charity is given a score of 1-10. The task of the brain trust in the room is to decide which of the 47 numbers is largest. How is this possible? In the background floor upon floor of low paid hacks arranged in cubicles, stacked one upon another in a hierarchy has done the research, built the spreadsheets, and processed the data. This is philanthropy getting results, not with heart or ethics or some airy fairy theory of justice but with cold hard logic. These men and women rule us for good reason. Given any two numbers they can assess the magnitude and make an informed decision.

Yes, my version is satirical, but the reality is not much different, as depicted by Bridgespan in a paper about Best Practices of Strategic Grantmaking.

In a 48th floor conference room on Park Avenue, an elite cadre of investors gathers. They greet each other, swap a few stories about recent deals, and take their seats around a large marble table. It is 5:30pm, and the location is the headquarters of Tiger Management. But the investors are not here to talk about an upcoming takeover; tonight’s agenda is about helping to break the cycle of poverty in New York City. These investors are trustees of Tiger Foundation.....

Is that not embarassing, even to read it, much less write or swallow? The Case Study (Tiger Foundation: Profile in Engaged Philanthropy)  is written by for and about those who rule us, and with wisdom, taste, and self knowledge held in abeyance. Through such high level rooms walks the clerk delivering papers. That would be me. In an earlier era I would have been the porter driving Young Master to the train, where he will depart for Africa, bringing civilization to the savages, dressing for dinner, and bringing results - ivory, profit, and trophies (heads of tigers, lions, elephants) home to the Manor. Strategic philanthropy is the new colonialism. That it is often revolting - why don't we say so? I guess Arundhati Roy did. I don't because these funders are my Ideal Clients and I want some of their money. After the epic scene above, I in that same conference room convened a class on The Heart of Darkness. No one showed except the janitor and he was just there to empty the trash and turn out the lights.

The Philanthropist Going Upriver in Search of Ivory and Results

H. Peter Karoff listens to Yo Yo Ma discuss Bach and is reminded of gifted donors.  I reread The Heart of Darkness and am reminded of how to get results. It is hard to be an artist and lack self awareness, or sensibility, but to be a philanthropist? All is takes is money.

The Wealthy Give Modestly

Spend outrageously, give modestly, says my esteemed patron and personal role model, she who rules us all and rightly so. She says, Phil, Sweetie, this is a f...king Horation balance thing. Balance excess and modesty. Too much on the one hand and too little on the other. It is a happy f...king medium. On balance, I give and spend just right! To which I thought fit to respond, Yes, Mistress! As a Homme de Confiance and Morals Tutor to America's Highest Capacity Families, I have learned to err on the side of keeping my mouth shut, except to express platitudes, and selectively so at that. What I have learned on site visits to homeless shelters will keep me out of one, hopefully. (I was visiting a shelter recently with a $50 gift card to the Wealth Bondage Theme Park. My instructions were to bestow the card on a "deserving poor person." I recognized this for the test it really was and returned with the card. I could not find a deserving poor person. So, Candy, my patron, repossessed the card, tipped me 50 cents, and told me I was a good boy with a bright future ahead of me if I just minded my Ps and Qs and imitate her example in life. Remember to be virtuous and work hard!)

Legacy Planning as Life Stage

I am reading Erik Erikson and Thomas Merton, too, all of which leads to a deeper reflection on "spiritual autobiography," or the gospels of wealth. I am struck by these thoughts:

• The younger will have a hard time understanding the developmental and financial needs of clients at an age and stage beyond that of the planner, unless the planner has moral imagination (the chances of which are slim given the state of the liberals arts).
• A planner age 35-55, say, may be himself (or herself) planning for needs and wants in a condition of felt scarcity. The range of effective sympathy are self and family, with a nod towards God and Country. The criterion of success is more.
• A client or donor age 55-70 may have that stage of life (generativity, having kids, building a career, getting more) successfully and conclusively wrapped up. He or she may have moved on to the stage at which we look back on life to make sense of what has been accomplished so that we may look forward in hope, for ourselves, family and mankind. Erickson calls this final life work, "Integrity vs Despair" and sees its finest fruit as Wisdom, or what a Catholic might call "the discernment of spirits." Reminiscence and story telling, or today building a Facebook page, or putting together a video of oneself, or hiring a ghostwriter, are ways to create this sense of closure, of what Frank Kermode, the great literary critic, called, "The Sense of an Ending."
• For the self-seeking planner, who considers himself or herself a fiduciary of the client's self (defined by the planner as the economic self-seeking self) a plan can only be successful if it has benefits for the client that outweigh the costs. That is what the planner would want for himself. And the planner has no intution that anything lies beyond self-seeking in his or her own development. That recognition will come later, in its own crisis of identify. So philanthropy, at this stage, when the planner is still building his or her own success, is seen as an indirect and generally unsuccessful attempt to come out ahead. The planner is stuck and bewildered because he cannot figure out a) how he comes out ahead and b) how the client does. Beyond that he sees only confusion and sentiment. Giving will result in less!
• For the older and more spiritually mature client or donor who is seeking an Hegelian synthesis of Despair and Integrity, who wants his or her life to turn out whole, to have a happy ending, to have been lived as if on purpose, who wants to return to the world of love and spirit what was drawn from love and spirit, as the flesh must return to dust, drawn from the dust; for such a client self seeking outcomes proposed by the planner cause only Despair. These false solutions, no matter how technically brilliant, retard the growth of the client and pull (dare I say this?) the client or donor down to the planner's own level, an earlier - one might say more rudimentary - age and stage of the life cycle. Less is more, but the planner does not see it.
• Philanthropy in the final phase is service: letting go the isolate ego, welcoming the loss of control, as control passes to those the giver has mentored, to whom he or she she has passed on the virtues of wealth, as genes are passed on, as literary and spiritual traditions are passed on, as communities live in us and through us. Identify like lanaguage is social. Identity is negotiated and must pass current or it is counterfeit. We live on by dying to our isolate selves. Unless we die to ourselves during our lives our ultimate death is final and is rightly approached in fear, despair, and denial. The fruit falls and rots. The seeds may live on. Though they too can shrivel, dying long before the fruit falls. He who would find himself must lose himself.

So there is the soul. So where is the sale? I can tell you - actually in great detail. But until you find the soul of it, the sale of it will never follow. The first sale is always to yourself. You cannot sell what you have not bought, and if your soul has not been formed, you can't make the soul/soul, the ultimate gift or sale, to another. In giving, it is always, "You go first." And, "Physician heal thyself," or "Salesman sell thyself." Erikson calls this integrity or congruence, or one might call it authenticity or alignment.

On another note, I am impressed that Erikson quotes George Bernard Shaw to the effect that "the clown is often the best part of the circus." Laughter, Fred, is the best medicine, which is why a good Christian always laughs uncontrollably in church. I am serious. I do it all the time. Or did until they barred the door.

 

How to Think about Income Inequality without Getting Upset or Upsetting your Superiors

Good article from a conservative viewpoint in National Affairs. The tone can be conveyed by this, Clearly, then, America is neither an oligarch's paradise nor a seething cauldron of class resentment. It is just better for oligarchs than it was and getting better all the time; and the cauldron of resentment between the 99% and the 1% is at least simmering hot enough to draw conservative reframings and rebuttals. Looking at the authors' graph of income inequality over time,you have to ask if the Great Society programs did work after all and whether the rise in income inequality thereafter is a result of the Reagan/Thatcher viewpoint so prevalent even now. The cause of income inequality is unregulated global capitalism?

Foundation Philanthropists as the New Colonialists

Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story. If anyone reading this works for Gates Foundation, Ford, or Rockefeller, or is in the Council on Foundations Working Group for Social Justice and World Peace, it would be good to know how you would answer Roy's chilling charges of witting or unwitting complicity with an increasingly oppressive social structure.

Neo-Plutocracy

Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post. How has the top 1 percent been able to decouple itself from the nation beneath it?

God Revealed to the Man a Dark Suit

Reflections on God Revealed, Fred Sievert's site (by one who once reported to someone who reported to someone who reported to someone who reported to someone who reported to Fred, before Fred was promoted).

Dr. Paul Shervish from Boston College is a former Jesuit, whose first book was entitled, Gospels of Wealth: How the Rich Portray their Lives. He suggests that we all need to connect "moral compass" and "financial capacity" in how we portray our lives. As we tell our life story, he says, we are seeking to make sense of what we have lived, to see how it orients to a value, a moral quest, a "due north." It is not just that we were successful, the wealthy say, we deserved to be so, it was God's will, God's grace, his guiding hand.

I was raised Catholic. In a child's reading of the Gospels Jesus was not a success. He was born poor and went down from there, to the most abject and shameful death. He said if we wanted to find him we would find him among the poor. If faith does not shake us awake and make us ashamed of what we have been, at how we lived our lives, then how can we repent, reform, and be forgiven? That, I am told by my Protestant theologian friends, is so Catholic as to pitiful. I should be reading Bunyon's Pilgrims Progress, not the Purgatorio.

But I am wondering, if God Revealed is a Gospel of Wealth, and if all good stories have a moral, and some even have a turning point, and a moment of recognition, what is the moral? What is the central recognition? And what was the turning point?

Fred Sievert at New York Life had gravitas. A tall deep voiced man, "good with numbers," and a head as bald a Kojack, he could strike fear into a room full of executives with one word, "results?" As in where are they? Yet while he took the role and his responsibilities seriously, he did not take himself seriously. When it comes to faith, I wonder, if God Revealed will be funny at all? (Serio ludere, serious play?) If Fred could chop carrots in a chef's toque at New York Life, and run along the beach at a life insurance convention in a black suit, in what get up could be proclaim his next revelation? OK, a black suit, but with what kind of hat?

Voluntary Association as Seedbed of Self-Governance

The increasingly dominant, or domineering, school of philanthropy says that it is all about getting results, or outcomes, with the most efficient application of resources. Essentially, this is this the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, as interpreted through business and governmental logic. Charities must compete in a social capital market as vendors might in delivering a measurable service. Whether the money comes through government grants and contracts, or through vouchers, or through gifts (social investments), it is all about measurable results. That view leads to the professionalisation of nonprofits, as they attempt to "grow to scale" and be high performing and high impact in a world of paperwork, business plans, metrics.

Another view, though, is that voluntary association is how, beyond family, we learn to manage ourselves, to care about others, and do our bit for something larger. That we are often confused, ineffectual and fumbling is not suprising - we are learning the arts of citizenship, as we take on new roles, whether volunteer, treasurer, vice president, or president of some small organization driven by an ideal. Do such orgs get results? They make us better people, does that count?

In the most sophisticated philosophies descending from Bentham, the results are measured within "states of affairs." The state of affairs consists of agent, action, and result.  All of that is encompassed and measured. What kind of person? What kind of process? What result? If the goal is a better world, and if we dehumanize ourselves in the process, have we succeeded? (See Amartya Sen.) John Stuart Mill, whose father drove him in the Benthamite way to get results, results, results,  eventually had a nervous breakdown. He credits reading Wordsworth with his personal resurrection. 

It is difficult, and insulting, to say to these MBAs so driven to get results that they drive their fellow citizens into hierarchies of cubicles, into the Weberian "iron cages" of bureaucracy, that they are in themselves, in their own persons, in their ethos and language, in their utilitarian view of humankind, the proof case for how wrong, how life denying, their practical philosophy is. What matter "results" if we become so stunted?

MBA s are the new colonialists. They would reduce the organic life world to an enterprise that they must manage. On the poetry of the native peoples, and their freely formed association, the MBA would impose the antiseptic language of the empire. We are supposed not to notice who prospers in this extractive regime bent on results. Who lives highest on which hog? Who does the work? Who bosses whom? Who makes the money? The result that MBAs crave is preferment, power, and wealth. The rest is the means of obtaining it. When they say, "We want results," you can be sure that what they will next expect is control. Whether that leads to results for society in the end is secondary, for the real result sought is power. Democracy? It has become a market to be gamed and managed.

Anyway, Bill Schambra is sayiing similar things, only (can you believe it?) with greater moderation. Great piece here.