Getting a little pushback from social entrepreneurs, impact investors, trusted intermediaries, their foundation funders, the Wall Street packagers looking for the next new bubble, and the business school professors who set an example for the young, on my, admittedly foolish, remarks about "growing good to scale." They point out that by growing to scale they can and will achieve many measurable benefits:
- access public capital markets and get lower cost of capital than can nonprofits
- create exit opportunity for self
- get very rich like Omidyar and Zuckerberg
- attract top talent like themselves
- grow the good they do exponentially, like Wal-Mart, a green company
- put less competitive organizations that do less good out of business
- get tighter metrics
- improve job descriptions, delegated authority, and human resource supervisory systems
- promote human flourishing through due subordination of less accomplished persons
- reduce the need for critical thinking
- improve morale
- shorten time to market
- optimize innovative disruption of established ways of life at home and abroad
- bring creative destruction to all aspects of human life otherwise protect by love and care
- monetize the social
- drive value upward
- control value-creation systems from above
- do the most good(tm)
That gives me a lot to think about. Thank you to all who have sent me urgent messages. I appreciate being included in the conversation about the Future of Good and Evil. I understand you are good people. Your taglines say it and your innocent faces confirm it. You are the handsomest group of friends I have, if only because you all still have your natural teeth. Your clothes are also much finer than my other friends, if only because you have clothes. You eat better too, if only because you have food. We at the bottom of the pyramid that you take for granted and perpetuate, salute you! We are here to serve, to buy (had we any money), to invest (had we any money), and, in the absence of any other resources for the good, to raise our feeble cheer!
