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Best Books for Emerging Philanthropists?

Let's say that you were designing the best possible curriculum for a billionare industrialist, now emerging as a politcal funder, to help him go on to achieve great things in philanthropy for the good of humankind? What would be the three most important books or articles you would want him to read as he contemplates a journey from Success to Significance? I assume, given how busy successful people are these days, that short books are best. So I am not including Tristram Shandy in my ideal curriculum, but maybe the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius? Maybe a musical like The Beggars Opera? Or something inspiring like Tom Swift and the Race to the Moon? I would ideally include utopias and dystopias and some kind of true/false test on which is which. But then again, getting the super wealthy as clients has proven a significant challenge. I should probably have gone into private school teaching, where the scions of wealth are more readily shaped. Aristocracy is formed one young mind at a time. Without that all we have is rich people. Not that it is a bad thing, mind you, as long as they are job creators. I could certainly use a steady job myself.  Given the austerity to which our society is subject, the lunatic asylum in which I reside at state expense may well be defunded. Back on the streets, aged and toothless, my market value is much diminished. But my attitude is certainly more positive than it was before my recent lobotomy. There is now very little I won't do for money. The doctors say I am almost normal. I will soon be able to restrain myself, rather than relying on the nurse. I wish I were rich, though. I could make the whole world my asylum. And no one would call me crazy or I would scoop their brains out like they now do mine. Then we would all be normal, just like now, only better, from my perspective.

How Many Heads has Jeremy Bentham? On Improving our Metrics

Citizen or consumer? Hildy Gottleib asks. Is the purpose of the nonprofit sector, indeed of our shared life in community with others, to get results, or is it to be full developed human beings? Do we serve the economic engine, as investors, investees, consumers, producers, managers, social venturers, and metrics driven consultants - those roles and those alone, or do we come to civic participation also as human beings, parents, children, and as citizens half formed, needing experience in leadership and in compassionate service, if we and our communities are to thrive?

Jeremy Bentham invented the felicific calculus, the relentless emphasis on results and metrics. He also envisioned the famous panopticon, a prison in which all are held in eye of Facebook and the NSA, I mean the guards, I mean managers and investors set above us to good purpose to whom we are rightly accountable.  Bentham trained J.S. Mill's father, who raised John to be a superstar in the administration of English empire which brought enligthenment to the dark continent and to Inida, much as MBAs bring light now to the primitive nonprofit sector in our own times. John was on track until he broke down and fell into an endless depression, cured, as it happens by reading Wordsworth. The heart and soul reawakened within the thinker deadened by metrics, and more metrics, without meter, rhyme or rhythm.

What I think about most often, though, is Bentham's other legacy. He has himself stuffed and placed on display in a wooden cabinet at University College London. There to this day, on special occasions, you can see him in his 18the century costume. (He even attends board meetings sometimes as "present but nonvoting.")  Yet in the display case the head is not there. The original mummification was botched, making the head seem macabre. So a wax head was created, and both were displayed in the case. But the real head was so often stolen and used over the years in pranks by the undergraduates, that only the wax head is now on view, and the real head is maintained under lock and key. So, in this fable, this parable, we have the invention of metrics by which we are now dominated, and a missing real head, quite grotesque, and an artful duplicate. Here we have masquerade and carnival, don't we? We have the duplication, mummification, and inversion of the established order, and the reassertion of laughter, unseriousness, and of what it means to be human, in the face of the inhuman system. Where Jeremy who famously said, "Quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good a poetry," meant to leave his own real no nonsense head as an auto-icon, identical with itself, sign and signified at one, what we now have is art, verging on, well, inadvertent self satire - much as we see today in the writing of experts about social venture philanthropy.

As for myself, as my lasting legacy, I will leave my head, shucked of brains, even more so than now, with the flesh and hide well-tanned, as a soceer ball to be used, gratis, at a first rate private school, preferably a feeder school for the Ivy League. These future, high performing, leaders of America will enjoy kicking my head, as their parents did before them.  My pain will be zero; and so the greatest benefit of the greatest number will be rescued from the sorry mess I have made of my life. A duplicate head can be made, once mine gets ratty, if funding can be found.

Foundations of Freedom at Home and Abroad

New book suggests, in effect, that Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie have historically spread Weath Bondage worldwide, under the doctrine of Freedom, and economic development, in such places as Chile, in cahoots with the Chicago School and Pinochet. Why Bill Schambra at Hudson finds this problematic, beats me. Freedom at home, Freedom abroad. I am in favor it, aren't you? The long arc of history may not, as MLK hoped, tend towards justice, but he should be pleased it has tended more and more to economic Freedom, dungeons, and dread. A good business here at WB, one to which I myself have lent my best efforts, though I am less powerful than some in the hierarchy here. I do try, though, to keep Jose happy, by wearing my big boy pants when I torture those he has said might be bad people. For me to do otherwise would be crazy. I want a chance to rise in the organization like anyone else. Plus, to be denounced means I could be tortured myself. A Constitution has to be more or less suspended in Emergencies like these, to protect our precious Freedom for which Terrorists hate us. I love Freedom, that is why I have devoted my life to Wealth Bondage and the Philanthropy that will save it.

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.