5 Key Business Stakeholders Driving Change

Posted on by Dan Neale

Five years ago last month, the Rana Plaza tragedy in Bangladesh was a stark reminder of the need to improve corporate management of human rights. Half a decade on, we can reflect on some positive signs of progress on human rights from the corporate world and its wider stakeholders.

1. The corporate world is getting out of first gear

In 2017 the first ever Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB) assessed 100 leading food, apparel and extractive companies and found disappointing levels of human rights management and disclosure – with the average performer being a poor performer. However, this week a Progress Report from CHRB found encouraging signs that more companies are committing to investors to improve their absolute human rights performance and are implementing improvement plans. For example, it reported that law firms, specialist consultancies and advisors such as Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and ERM are witnessing increased demand for human rights support from major corporates, partly in response to the 2017 results.

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Non-profit organisation Shift has also recorded a four-fold increase from 2015 to 2017 in the number of corporations submitting human rights reports and over 5,000 companies have now reported on their public commitments to avoid modern slavery in their supply chain. This all suggests that although progress is slow, the corporate world is headed in the right direction.

2. Investors pushing progress

Investors are playing an increasingly important role in this progress. Part of this has been using benchmarking to foster competition on human rights and create a ‘race to the top’. That is why CHRB is backed by Aviva Investors, APG Asset Management and Nordea and has been endorsed by the $5 trillion UNGP Reporting investor coalition.

Simply put, it is becoming a major investment risk to invest in companies that don’t respect human rights as they could face reduced share prices, restricted access to capital due to reputational damage and regulatory backlash. Issues such as modern slavery, worker safety and freedom of association can be material to the financial performance of these companies. Investors outside of the CHRB are already using the CHRB results to guide engagements, put expectations on companies and in some (confidential) cases, move to divest based on rankings.

3. The UN is providing a framework

Progress can only be made if everyone is pulling in the same direction, and that is why the establishment of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) seven years ago was a watershed moment for human rights.

Although the UNGPs are not without their shortcomings, the existence of an authoritative global standard for preventing and addressing the risk of adverse human rights impacts linked to business activity has been vital. It creates a framework that all companies have to measure themselves against and the CHRB Methodology is firmly grounded in the UNGPs.

4. Governments stepping up to the plate

National governments are also beginning to provide leadership. In 2015, the British government brought the issue to the fore with the introduction of its Modern Slavery Act, which required all major UK companies to report on the steps they are taking to eliminate slavery and human trafficking from their operations and supply chains.

Other governments are also taking action. The Australian government has indicated that it plans to release draft legislation for a Modern Slavery Act this year, while the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act has put increased attention on accountability and disclosure for retailers and manufacturers.

The issue of binding legislation for human rights due diligence is an increasingly hot topic, following the French Vigilance law and the ongoing efforts of the German government to assess the level of due diligence implementation (to inform the need for further legislation).

5. Civil society’s role is growing

There is always an important role for civil society to play in tackling human rights abuses. Now, more than ever before, social media platforms are being harnessed by NGOs to both aid victims and mobilise groups to take action. For instance, a video from a witness can both protect a victim from future exploitation and trigger a huge social media campaign in an instant. With civil society groups now having more tools at their disposal, they possess the ability to direct assistance, collect accurate information, campaign and lobby, raising their ability to bring about positive change in human rights issues.

While CHRB provides publicly available data and ranks companies on their disclosed performance, it relies on civil society to follow up and hold those companies to account where they fail to meet their own standards.

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Elevating Humanity Through Business Just Got Real

Posted on by Real Leaders

Conscious Capitalism cofounder and chairman emeritus Raj Sisodia, had just given a presentation at the Lead with Love Leadership Summit in Aspen, Colorado, when a woman approached him.

“You and Larry Fink need to meet,” she said before setting the meeting in motion.

Just days before the meeting, Fink, cofounder and CEO of the BlackRock investment firm (pictured above), had sent a letter to the chief executives of the largest public companies, telling them they should focus on value creation for all stakeholders –that they needed to have a larger purpose than making profits – and that they must engage with communities and make a positive contribution to society.

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He included a warning: if a business doesn’t act in a way that promotes societal good, “it will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders.”

“As you read his letter, you saw he was using our language,” said Sisodia, the FW Olin Distinguished Professor of Global Business and Whole Foods Market Research Scholar in Conscious Capitalism at Babson College. He said he couldn’t help but be impressed by Fink and by the BlackRock firm.

First, despite Fink’s clout, Sisodia said that during the course of his 35-minute meeting, it was clear that Fink is a grounded, conscious leader, and “just a regular guy.” Second, Fink has been living Conscious Capitalism principles within his firm.

“He’s creating a different kind of financial firm,” Sisodia said. “It has a culture that is people-centered, and he speaks of emotional connection. People stay there instead of moving on to other jobs, which is the norm in this kind of high-pressure environment.”

Sisodia said he was able to talk to Fink about the Conscious Capitalism movement and even invited him to the upcoming Conscious Capitalism Annual Conference (April 30 – May 2, 2018 in Dallas). While Fink said he was already committed at that time, he wanted to send other top executives.

BlackRock’s influence in the financial community is hard to overstate.

The firm manages more than $6 trillion in investments, making it the single largest investor in the world. Although about $4 trillion of that is invested in index funds, that still leaves $2 trillion in directed investments that could be up for grabs following Fink’s letter.

“They have a lower profile than their reputation warrants,” Sisodia said. “They have the power to influence and inspire, and they want to uplift the whole game.”

As a case in point, Sisodia said that immediately after Fink met with him, he was scheduled to meet with the ExxonMobil board of directors.

Sisodia said Fink’s bombshell letter does not mark an entirely new direction for BlackRock. Rather, the firm has been articulating a similar message for several years. “This year’s letter is the most direct,” he said.

Fink’s letter drew predictable backlash. Fink told Sisodia that at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, many CEOs pushed back, saying Fink’s job is not to lecture them but to maximize returns.

But Fink, like those in the Conscious Capitalism realm, told Sisodia that he understands that the best way to maximize returns is to take a long-term view.

And BlackRock, Sisodia said, doesn’t just lecture companies to do better but has a growing stewardship team that helps companies make sure they are focused on long-term value creation for all stakeholders. Currently staffed with about 30 employees, the stewardship team is projected to grow to 70 under the leadership of BlackRock cofounder Barbara Novick. “In spite of the costs of this effort and building a larger team, BlackRock doesn’t charge any extra fees,” Sisodia said.

Sisodia said that stewardship team both helped ExxonMobil Corp. move toward acknowledging climate change and then remain focused on ways to mitigate the issue. After meeting with Fink, Sisodia said he spent another couple of hours with top executives to do a deeper dive into the firm’s culture.

“When people criticize Larry, he can point to his own firm as an example,” Sisodia said. Among other things, BlackRock never trades on its own account, instead focusing on the long-term best interest of clients. That approach has not hurt profitability in the slightest.

BlackRock went public in 1999 valued at about $1 billion. Now it’s worth $90 billion.

“That’s a 28% compounded return to shareholders,” Sisodia said. “That will get your attention.”

BlackRock’s sudden higher profile casts a fresh light on the issue of investor activism. The traditional view, especially among Conscious Capitalists who have gone public, is that activist investors can be a bad thing—especially if the activists are focused on quarterly returns instead of on long-term value creation.

But Fink’s brand of activism, which tracks the Conscious Capitalism model, is noticeably different in both focus and intensity. For one thing, BlackRock doesn’t just meet with boards of directors during proxy season. Instead, it meets regularly throughout the year, Sisodia learned.

Although BlackRock votes with management between 80 and 90% of the time, it’s not merely rubber-stamping decisions. It has already been engaged with management and helped shape the policies and decisions that form the proxies, Sisodia said.

“BlackRock is trying to elevate the whole game, not by intimidation, but by inspiration,” Sisodia said.

Sisodia noted that, although the BlackRock letter is a major development, it will have no direct impact on private companies.

“But there’s comfort in validation like this because for the most part, the money guys aren’t here in the Conscious Capitalism movement,” he said. He added that the prevailing attitude in the investment community is that Conscious Capitalists are a “bunch of do-gooders who don’t know how the world works.”

That attitude is slowly changing. In addition to the rise of purpose-based financial firms like Satori Capital and Gratitude Railroad, mainstream investment banks are seeing the light. Sisodia noted that Morgan Stanley created a fund based on Conscious Capitalism principles. Trading as KRMA (pronounced karma), the Global X Conscious Companies exchange-traded fund invests in conscious, sustainable, responsibly-managed companies. Providing private businesses with a practical framework to implement these principles is the focus of Sisodia’s latest book, Conscious Capitalism Field Guide: Tools for Transforming Your Organization, which was just published by Harvard Business Review Press earlier this month.

Given Fink’s willingness to further engage with the Conscious Capitalism movement and his brash call for greater consciousness in public companies, it feels as though the investment community may be on the cusp of larger change.

But the $6 trillion question is whether the BlackRock letter will accelerate the spread of Conscious Capitalism. Sisodia thinks it may represent a watershed moment.

As he tweeted when Fink’s letter became public:

“This is fabulous—Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, THE largest investor in the world ($6 trillion under management), essentially endorses Conscious Capitalism! #tippingpoint”

Geoff Campbell and Aleksandra Corwin are editorial writers with Round Table Companies (RTC), a storytelling company, event production company, and creative agency that takes a unique approach to supporting purpose driven businesses in amplifying their authenticity.

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How to Build a Business and Still Have a Life

Posted on by YPO

In the 17 years it took me to build Pacific Direct into a multimillion dollar business, I drove myself very hard. From the day I started, at 23, a second sense told me I had to keep myself in peak fitness to succeed. My trainers and my swimming costume were always packed and ready to go. I still run up escalators and if there are stairs, I take them.

In my last year of owning the company, I traveled 221 nights, sleeping upright on planes to save money on hotel rooms and and rarely staying in lodgings ranked higher than three stars. My body twitched with exhaustion, sending me messages to slow down and breathe. I was more stressed than I suspect I admitted.

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My determination to succeed separated me from my family but, taking on board good advice from my elders, I made sure I never missed what I perceived to be a landmark childhood event. Sports days, nativity plays, and, of course, speech days.

Over this journey, not only did I learn many important business lessons along the way, but also valuable life and leadership skills too.

Build a positive culture

An open culture at work adds real value to the company. I believe all players work hard for each other and I’ve learned the team only works if no one is an island. Respect each individual as an individual. Every person adds value to the team effort; make sure they know this. Mistakes will always happen and that’s OK.

Ensure there are no witch hunts after by embedding a continual improvement process and mindset. It’s so much more valuable that everyone learns from any mistakes and everyone moves on without disrupting the momentum of the team.

Employ ‘smart and fast’

If you do make a miss-hire and your gut tells you so, act fast, release and always reach out to the next person you keep on file, just in case.

Recruit well — employ the best hires you can so that you can go further faster and expect greater returns. I’m a great believer that you save an awful lot of pain if you hire an expert. I do take great leaps of faith when I employ people and if I do make a mistake and take on someone who turns out not to be a team player, I know I must likewise make a swift decision to remove them.  

Go with your gut, but have a business plan

Pair your instinct with a way to review your business plan to remind you of your venture’s core business.

Second time round, I’m building a brand around my lifeline at Pacific Direct —  an aromatherapy brand to breathe renewed positivity into our busy lives. However, I honestly never saw the whole trend of mindfulness coming. My feeling was that someone needed to modernize aromatherapy and I knew first hand from dark times at Pacific Direct that therapy-grade essential oils do work. The Scentered mantra and ritual — Stop. Inhale. Reset — gives the customer a moment of time, which is just the best commodity anyone could possibly sell. At Scentered we sell well-being. I continue to make mistakes, but these teach me which paths not to progress and highlights which strategies are unaffordable. I follow my gut, and it serves me well. If you don’t, you are likely to live to regret it and who has time for regrets? Learn from a review but move on fast and recover quickly from mistakes so you can learn from yet another error.

Take one (fast) step at a time

Business is a race, so you need a relentless desire to continuously improve. Focus on one thing at a time, irrespective of all the other demands that come your way. It is better to do one thing well rather than a leave a couple of tasks half-baked. I read, “The Power of Focus” and realized what a huge amount of energy I wasted trying to juggle too many options. Learn to say no; it is the most important skill. It also enables me to be brutally direct in my desire to milk every moment out of every opportunity.

Find reasons to celebrate, innovate

Celebrate even when times are tough. Look for incremental innovations that keep you one step ahead of the rest. I believe that you are what you choose to be in life and you can choose to surround yourself with people, lessons, tactics and methods for coping with tough-life challenges. Reward yourself especially in the tough times as small rewards go a long way. There is always something happening, somewhere, to celebrate. Find it and build on a new potential.

Keep fit, healthy and rested 

Your body tells you when you need sleep. Listen to it! Money does not buy you health and well-being; you must work at these things. Make choices to eat healthily and exercise daily. I often walk (very fast) between meetings. I get calls done and I stretch my legs at the same time. Learn to get more value out of everything you do and remember there is no such thing as perfect; just be grateful for every healthy day. Get up early so you’re then ahead in this race, this game called business. If it is not fun, make it so.

Have humility but don’t lack confidence

Read everything about your industry and strive to be an expert. Be engaged, be aware and notice the small things. I truly believe that you can build and drive confidence through well-being. When you’re fit and healthy — and you know you’re looking good and you feel good about your inner and outer self — you’ll be more able to take chances, put yourself into challenging places and expose yourself to seemingly uncomfortable environments, to achieve significantly positive outcomes, especially in the tougher times. I find this enormously energizing and empowering. A positive mindset is pivotal to leading a life full of exciting experiences and meeting interesting people.

By Lara Morgan – a motivational speaker, entrepreneur, Co-Founder and CEO of British-based portable aromatherapy brand Scentered.me.

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Leadership is Like Climbing a Mountain

Posted on by Maya Brahmam

When I was invited to speak at the Real Leaders magazine launch last September, I was asked to share my thoughts on leadership. I wondered what I could say about real leaders that was fresh, inspirational and personal.

I hiked up Hawksbill Mountain in the Blue Ridge the day before the launch so I could clear my head and think about these questions.

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The connection I made at the launch was that leadership is like climbing a mountain. You don’t climb alone and must depend on your partner or team to get to the summit. You understand their struggle and they yours. Their success is your success. Leadership is not easy, and the hardest piece of it is compassion. If a member of your team slips and falls on the way, you have to stop, and you may not reach the summit as quickly as you’d like. Compassion builds trust and a strong team.

Manley Hopkinson, the author of Compassionate Leadership, said that leadership is less about telling people what to do and more about forming a relationship with them, so they motivate themselves to do what is required. The heart of the approach is “understanding yourself.” Once you have a true understanding of yourself, you understand others better and can create more effective businesses and relationships.

Leaders exist everywhere – each of us has something we’re passionate about and can act on. And we must act now to create the change in the world we wish to see. The costs of inaction are too high.

Real Leaders magazine hit the newsstands recently and has a list of the “Top 100 Visionary Leaders for 2018” who are changing the world. I’m honored to be included there.

 

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10 Things I Learned From Sheryl Sandberg’s New Class About Resiliency

Posted on by Samantha Samel Fairygodboss

Sheryl Sandberg’s life changed forever the moment she found her husband, successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur and SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg, dead in a hotel gym during their 2015 family vacation in Punta Mita, Mexico. Goldberg, 43 at the time of his death, had suffered heart complications and is survived by Sandberg and their two children.

Coping with Goldberg’s death was, and still isn’t, an easy feat for the Facebook COO — and she’s written about her grieving experiences in her New York Times best-selling book Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, which she co-wrote with Wharton psychologist Adam Grant. She wrote about how to make the most of Option B when Option A is no longer in the cards in the face of adversity. 

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Recently, Sandberg shared a course that highlights some of the most powerful topics in their book on LinkedIn— it includes how to talk to friends and colleagues who are hurting when you’re not sure what to say, how to fight the idea that the hurt you’re feeling is permanent and how to give yourself permission to experience happiness again. The book is a resource for those trying to resume normalcy in their lives, possibly get back to work and carry on, but are struggling.

“Dodging adversity is often not a choice,” reads the description of the course, “The Importance of Resilience.” “Encountering a devastating event — the gut-wrenching kind that zaps away joy — is an inevitability of life.”

In the course, resilience is described as the strength and speed of our response to adversity. It’s “when something bad happens, big or small, how much are we able to overcome it — or how well do we persevere in the face of it,” Grant explains.

I’ve experienced adversity in my own life, when I suddenly lost my dad also from heart complications in 2015. So I took Sandberg’s course on resilience, and here are 10 lessons I learned about overcoming any kind of traumatic experience (and helping friends and colleagues to do the same) — albeit loss or something else entirely.

1. Trauma can have a cascade effect.

We need to understand that trauma isn’t always just one big fiasco. Trauma like loss can affect someone’s confidence in other domains of their life — many people will experience survivor’s guilt or feel like their depression is a nuisance to those around them. It could really put a damper in their confidence. So a primary loss can lead to a cascade effect of secondary losses, Grant explains, which have a negative impact on different parts of our lives.

After losing my dad, for example, I gained 40 pounds, lost fistfuls of hair, had very little faith, and became increasingly irritable and alarmingly apathetic. Work felt like a dreaded chore, when it used to feel like something I loved. So that primary loss led me to a myriad of secondary losses that ultimately turned me into someone I no longer recognized. For a while, “resilience” felt like a foreign concept — I thought I had none of it.

2. Resilience is not something we have; it’s something we build.

When Sandberg lost her husband, she began asking Grant how much resilience she had, she says. But he told her that she was asking the wrong question; what she should have been asking was how she could build resilience. And, according to Grant, it’s something we can build long before we face any tragedy or difficulty. 

I’d also realized that I’ve been building resilience my entire life — we’ve all had to face adversity to some capacity throughout our lives, and we can take those lessons we’ve learned from doing so to help ourselves and others overcome extreme trauma, too. Over time, resilience builds. We just need to recognize that.

3. Resilience can be strengthened by expressing gratitude.

Grant says that we can build resilience by changing how we process negative events. When we recognize and appreciate the good we do still have in our lives, and realize that our lives could theoretically be worse, we can find the strength to carry on.

Sandberg says that she’s grateful for her own health, her children’s health, every birthday, every dinner, every minute. She also feels fortunate that she at least still has her children in her life. I’m, too, grateful for my health, my family, my work and the many priviledges in life.

4. Adversity isn’t permanent, but unhappiness can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“I learned that one of the best ways to build resilience is to fight permanence; you have to believe that it won’t be this bad forever,” Sandberg says.

Grant says that, while many people think that their feelings of overbearing depression and anxiety will last forever — as I did the day I learned the news of my father’s death, and even in the months thereafter — evidence suggests that it probably won’t. Affective forecasting, he explains, is a prediction of how we will feel in the future, and most of us overestimate just the intensity and duration of our misery. He remembers when Sandberg told him that she’d never feel joy again, but he advised her that, if she genuinely believes that, she’ll never do anything that brings her joy again — and then it’ll become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

5. We all deserve to feel joy, and we can again.

Sandberg tells a story of finding just a moment of happiness while dancing with her friends, but she explains how she immediately felt guilty for feeling happy without her husband. 

Grant explains that we have to take back and reclaim our joy, and we can do so by starting up the things we love again. “Happiness is really the frequency of positive experiences,” he explains. “Not the intensity.” 

Dance more. For me, that meant realizing that life is too short so I started a new job doing what I love: writing. I revamped my blog. I took up kickboxing again, promising myself at least two days a week. I kept myself busy with the things I knew would make me feel even an inkling of happiness or, at the very least, not depression.

6. We can grow from trauma.

A lot of people who experience trauma expend their energy trying to bounce back, but psychologists have discovered that it’s possible for people to actually bounce forward, too. We can find meaning in the loss or traumatic event that’s happened to us, and grow from it. 

For Sandberg, this means helping other women in the same way that her husband helped so many people — all of whom raised their hands at his wake to admit that he’d helped them each in some way.

Many of us choose to volunteer or to try to help others overcome the same suffering that we’ve been through; doing so gives our life and our suffering meaning.

7. We should treat others as they would want to be treated.

How we cope may not necessarily be how other people cope, so how we want to be treated might not necessarily be how someone else wants to be treated.

That said, asking someone what you could do to help them places the burden on them — and asking for help isn’t always easy for someone, especially if they may already be feeling survivor’s guilt or like their depression is encumbering those around them. Sandberg says that doing anything at all to be there for someone is better than asking what you could do — maybe they don’t know what they need, but if they know that someone is there for them regardless, it helps them to not feel so isolated.

8. Sometimes, people just don’t know what to say.

I know this firsthand, because no one knew what to say to me, and I still don’t know what to say to people when they go through the same thing — I don’t actually think that there is any “right” thing to say. The Mum Effect is when people avoid talking about upsetting topics, Grant explains, sometimes because they don’t want to be that person and other times because they don’t want to remind someone of a bad experience. 

But we need to talk about these things so we don’t bottle them up. And, for me, it wasn’t always easy to bring up first. So we can all be more sensitive in how we ask people about how they’re facing adversity.

Sandberg explains that she felt very alone after losing her husband and when people would ask her how she is doing, even though it was always asked with the best intentions, it felt insensitive. She just lost her husband — how did anyone think she was doing? But when someone would ask her, “How are you today?” she felt like they’d acknowledged that she was suffering while asking how she was handling it that day. And that made all the difference. Plus, it’s a lot easier for the mind to explain what you did that day than to attempt to articulate the total roller coaster of emotions one’s had since their trauma.

9. Mattering matters.

Mattering is “knowing that others notice you, care about you and rely on you,” according to the course. Sandberg explains that, despite how hard it is for a young boy, her son was able to ask friends to step out of school with him to be with him while he had cry breaks. As she told her children, sadness will come overcome them when they don’t want it to. Her son realized that his friends did care about him and actually wanted to be there for him during those cry breaks, and that helped him cope with his father’s loss. 

I remember approaching the first anniversary of my dad’s death. My biggest fear was that my sulking time was over — I could no longer burden my friends and family with sob stories because it’s been a whole year, right? The first few days after a tragedy like mine, everyone is there for you — people fly in from all over to console you (and mostly feed you). But then it’s over; everyone goes home and carries on with their lives, and you’re still stuck living a nightmare, seemingly alone. After a few months, I felt like crying about it was still warranted, but I thought I had to give myself a cut-off time so I was neither walking around like “woe is me” nor being “weak” by my own unfounded definition of the word.

On the anniversary of my dad’s death, knowing about my fear, my best friends threw me a legitimate “pity party.” They went so far as to hang streamers in my apartment, put out my favorite foods and wrote me the most beautiful card to let me know that I can always cry to them — for eternity. Friends called me up or showed up at my apartment periodically, and still do, to share memories with me or check in. My coworkers mailed me flowers and took care of my workload as best they could. I’ll never forget those gestures that made me feel like I matter. We can all make others feel like they matter just by being there or lending an ear, too.

10. Being open helps the community.

When we’re all open about the hardships we each face, at least with one other person, we help each other to open up. Everybody is going through something, but it’s not always easy to talk about unless we feel safe, cared about and not alone. Community is key.

By AnnaMarie Houlis – a multimedia journalist and an adventure aficionado with a keen cultural curiosity and an affinity for solo travel. She’s an editor by day and a travel blogger at HerReport.org by night.

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Every Investment Has Impact. What’s Yours?

Posted on by Real Leaders

For Liesel Pritzker Simmons, there’s no shortcut to raising the bar on impact investment performance. 

As Principal of Blue Haven Initiative, a family office she co-founded in 2012 with her husband Ian Simmons, this millennial is showing how investors of all ages can maximize the positive social and environmental impact of their investments while generating financial returns.

But it isn’t easy.

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Whether it is analyzing a portfolio company prospectus or visiting entrepreneurs in sub-Saharan Africa, Pritzker Simmons applies a rigorous portfolio-management lens to every investment—whether for-profit or philanthropic capital—with the goal of aligning financial performance and public benefit. There’s no magic bullet or “Top 10” list for impact investing, says Pritzker Simmons. “It’s a highly personal endeavor, requiring people to think deeply about how portfolios should reflect their values and concerns.”   

As one of the first family offices created with impact investing as its mission and focus, Pritzker Simmons and the Blue Haven team are careful to ensure that philanthropic efforts and investment efforts are coordinated and complementary.  And they are playing the long game. Whether investing in a social enterprise, supporting research and education, or regularly reviewing its public equity portfolio, Pritzker Simmons, her husband and their advisors believe the future of investing will be reshaped by more informed investors.

We recently caught up with Pritzker Simmons. An excerpt of our interview follows:

Amy Bennett: Liesel, thanks again for your time. Let’s jump right in. How do you define impact investing? 

At Blue Haven Initiative, we start from the premise that every investment has an impact—good, bad, social, environmental and financial. From there, we do extensive research and seek to maximize the positive social and environmental impact of our investments while earning a market return. As a result, impact investing requires us to ask a lot more questions and do more rigorous due diligence in assessing the long-term risks and returns of our investments.

We’re a family office and we take this approach because we’re long-term investors. If we don’t consider environmental and social risk and returns, we’re not only putting our financial investments at greater risk, we’re not being good stewards of wealth for future generations. We don’t want to make a mess our kids will eventually have to clean up.

How does your philanthropic giving fit into your impact investment strategy?   

Blue Haven takes a Total Portfolio Management approach to impact investing. That means looking across asset classes and capital types. Our philanthropic capital is an important resource that we use as effectively as possible. We look for opportunities that markets really cannot address—civic engagement in voting, disaster relief, research and education—things that traditional investing typically doesn’t value as much as we think it should.  We prioritize our philanthropic spending for those kinds of opportunities. 

Philanthropy is one tool in the tool belt for impact and we use it for grants as well as concessionary investments where the impact equates to a non-risk-adjusted return. And it is part of a holistic process. We want to make sure that our investment portfolio is not working against our philanthropic goals. There is absolutely no point in funding climate change initiatives with your philanthropic dollars if you’re not trying to reduce your carbon footprint in your investment portfolio.  It doesn’t make any sense. 

We hear a lot about how donor advised funds are growing in popularity and democratizing philanthropy. And we know each other because you use ImpactAssets’ offering, the Giving Fund. How has it played a role in your impact investing?

The Giving Fund is the vehicle through which we do our philanthropic grant making and our concessionary investing. We want to spend time finding great organizations and companies to support without devoting a lot of time on the complexities of philanthropic administration. There’s really a great range of tools that impact investors use these days—from debt to equity, recoverable grants, C4 strategies—and ImpactAssets knows how to help us implement them.

In addition, the organization plays an important role in the impact investing ecosystem. Clients of ImpactAssets are among the most active impact investors in the world.  It’s an innovative and risk-taking community and you can see that in the number of deals that are done and the kinds of funds that are on the platform. It’s inspiring to be a part of it. 

Can you tell us about one of your favorite impact investments that you made through the Giving Fund? 

One example is our support of PRIME Coalition, an intermediary that facilitates very early-stage investments into game-changing climate-change companies. They find companies, vet them, and structure early-stage investments into them.  We’ve supported PRIME through an operating grant as well as providing funding that PRIME used to place equity into another venture. And we’ve also supported them by directly investing convertible debt into RedWave, a company that is developing technology to convert waste heat into renewable electricity. 

Millennials are enthusiastic but often inexperienced when it comes to impact investing. What’s the most important lesson you have learned as a pioneering impact investor that you can pass along to your fellow millennials?

I’ve learned that you can’t expect that impact investing is going to be faster, easier or cheaper than traditional investing.  It’s more complicated, idiosyncratic and rigorous. And that’s okay. If it were easy, everybody would have already done it.  You have to put time and energy and effort into impact investing, but it’s where the most exciting conversations are happening. And I think millennials know that.    

It’s also important for millennial investors to just get started with something and learn as they go. Don’t try to find perfection in one single investment or in one single fund. Don’t try to look for a website that rates every company perfectly and makes impact investing just a click away. Start small, piggyback off of investors that you think are smart, and learn that way. 

If you could deliver one message to investors of any age, what would that message be?

I would appeal to investors to take more responsibility for the total impact of their investments. If an investment has a negative impact socially or environmentally, somebody is going to have to clean up that mess. If not you today, then your grandchildren tomorrow. 

Get into the mindset of long-termism because a thoughtful and rigorous consideration of the environmental and social impact of your investments in the long run is just more informed investing. 

And if you believe that a better understanding of risk is smart in the long term, then you’re more than halfway to being an impact investor.

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5 Ways to Find Your Personal Leadership Brand

Posted on by Will Marre

What if your life had a purpose… a particular purpose? There are almost 7.5 billion individuals alive right now. As far as I know, there are no duplicates.

So, what if you were unique because you could make a difference that no one else can? What if you could make your difference every day, if you were simply aware of what your difference is and looked at life as one giant opportunity to matter?

We know from decades of social research that people who adopt the view that life has a personal purpose are happier, healthier, live longer, experience less stress and have better relationships than people who stumble through life believing that they will find joy and satisfaction by achieving a never-ending succession of goals. Of course, we have no absolute way of knowing that life is purposeful but we do know that this belief leads to greater happiness than choosing to believe life is meaningless.

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It’s true, we actually know the human mindset that produces self-respect and contentment. We also know what behaviors produce both inner joy and enjoyment of our outside world. But we have a major problem and it is this:

Our brain is in a constant wrestling match with primal urges and loud, insistent advice from people who claim to know what we should do.

Famed psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes a simple way to look at this inner battle for our identity. Imagine yourself holding the reins of a large carriage lead by two powerful horses. One horse is named Fears, the other horse is named Desires. These horses are very powerful and hate having bits in their mouths. They want to run wild but you know if they do your carriage is likely to end up tipped over in a ditch.

There is also a backseat in this carriage and it is filled with people you respect and love or have held authority in your life. Parents, teachers, coaches, friends, pastors and gurus are all yelling at you. They’re screaming at you, telling you both where to go and how to get there safely. There’s also one more distraction. You are guiding your carriage in a very modern world in which along roadsides, there are large video screens with very distracting messages. Most of them are telling you to turn at the next fork in the road to get to a new destination or buy something that the people on the video are sure you want.

The further you travel, the more you come to realize three things:

First, that the horses of Fear and Desire must be controlled or you will surely tip over. Second, the people yelling instructions may mean well, but they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

Third, the powerful messages broadcast from the roadside video boards are irrelevant, distracting and misleading. Following their directions will definitely take you in the wrong direction.

So, to find the self-respect we long for and fulfill the purpose we hope for, we must discover our deeper identity. We must become aware of who we are separate from our roles, our goals, our jobs, our achievements, our feelings, our current beliefs, our tribes. All these things are temporary. All these things can change. However, we have to find out if there is anything deeper? Do we have an “essential” self that wants to take the reins of our life?

That is the question that I try to help leaders answer. It is the most basic question of all:

Why do you want to lead?

What difference do you want to make? Are you a leader simply because you’re ambitious, want to make money, seek power, seek validation or is there something deeper?

I’ve become very aware of peoples’ inner voices as I have coached leaders to become more influential. It is terribly difficult to tear yourself away from the opinions of powerful others and our own inner goblins. But there is no other way to be the best version of you.

Here’s a process I take people through to find their inner voice and express their personal brand.

Learn To Engender Trust

Social research is clear that people who engender trust in others are the most personally fulfilled and most effective with others. Trust is primarily engendered by being authentic, pro-social and competent. Pro-social means that you are an advocate for the betterment of others. It is difficult for leaders of large organizations to be either authentic or pro-social today. That’s because Wall Street investors care nothing about either quality. In fact, they often admire leaders who are mercenary and willing to do whatever it takes to make money in the short term. I’ve been fortunate to work with many courageous leaders who figure out how to financially excel by being pro-social with their customers and employees. It’s possible to resist the corruption of your inner integrity, but I can attest it takes continuous clarity and strength. So I ask clients, “Are you ready to be authentic?” “Do you intrinsically care about maximizing the positive impact you have on the lives of others?” (And yes, some leaders have actually told me they don’t care about either.)

Discover Your Design
What are your motivated talents? I have observed that WHAT we are “designed” to succeed at, fulfills our higher self. By designed I simply mean that there are things you naturally do very well that you enjoy. When you find this intersection of talent and enjoyment, you have found a talent that is a gift to others as well as a personal success path. (It is important to understand that we all enjoy doing things that we’re not particularly talented at. Singing is a good example for me. We are also competent at many things that we don’t particularly enjoy doing.)

Find Work That You Intrinsically Value
What work do you intrinsically value?  If all jobs paid the same what job would you want? When you discover work that intrinsically engages you will much more easily pay the price to learn what you need to learn to do the job with excellence.

Discover Your Strengthens And Capitalize On Them
What are your character strengths (take this assessment to find out)? These are things like curiosity, attention to detail, empathy, practical thinking, and a host of habitual personal tools you use better than the average person to solve problems or seize opportunities. The most critical advice I give about personal strengths is that no one gets to live their life only doing things that capitalize on their strengths.

For instance, my daughter Natassia, had to overcome her weaknesses, math and science, to become a high-risk baby nurse (NICU). One of her greatest strengths is a combination of empathy and observing detail. This natural ability of focused attention makes her an extraordinary nurse. But she also had to address her weaknesses in academic science in order to get the chance to do what she does best. She used both her social intelligence and attention to detail to get through her dreaded but unavoidable science classes. That’s how it is for all of us. We have to figure out a way to use what we are good at to also do what we are not good at.

Express Your Leadership Brand
Express your purpose.  Some people call this your personal brand. I call it your leadership brand. This is a way of telling others the value you bring to any challenge or opportunity.  It is the difference you are designed to make. Normally your brand will seem a bit fuzzy but as you observe yourself doing what you do best, your gift will become clearer, and the way in which you express it will become more powerful.

Here are some real examples:

  • I create clarity in confusing situations
  • I challenge the status quo using humor to put people at ease
  • I forge new paths by finding new solutions
  • I inspire and lead teams to achieve extraordinary results
  • I continuously create valued innovations
  • I reframe challenges into opportunities
  • I make people feel included and special
  • I inspire extraordinary commitment and effort
  • I heal pain and dissolve fear

As you look over this list. I want you to imagine having your own expression for what you do consistently, that produces the impact that you most value. As you become conscious of the core of your personal brand you will become bolder in expressing it in a wide variety of work and life situations.  When you do, you will be completely in charge of the carriage you are driving through the rutted roads of life.

The bottom line.

We all need to be leaders.

If good people with high purpose and pro-social values don’t lead, only people who cannot control their primal fears and desires will.

Lead your own life first. 

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Four Investments You Can Make Today to Increase Your Love Life

Posted on by Will Marre

You can’t do a good job, if your job is all you do. The aspiration for work-life balance is dead. It was killed by technology. If you want to be happy in life and happy in your primary love relationship…

Over the past two years with almost every Executive I coach and every audience I speak to, I hear that the aspiration for work-life balance is dead. It was killed by technology. What’s weird is that this fact is often presented with some chest beating… as if to say… work-life balance was for wimps all along… people with a serious work ethic never worry about work life balance.

Really?

I guess so. Sheryl Sandberg the guru of Leaning In writes, “The days of unplugging for a weekend or vacation are long gone.” Way to go Sheryl… sounds awesome.

Yet, sadly I find she is not kidding. Ten years ago, even the CEOs I coached had most weekends and evenings free of direct work, such as conference calls and decision-making meetings. That’s certainly not true today.  Today leaders are lucky to get a half of a Saturday or a half of a Sunday free of stressful meetings or real-time e-mails where decisions are being made.

And free evenings… yeah that’s a relic from an earlier age. Today most people go home and spend at least two more hours on the computer working. This new work routine is not confined to leaders. The combination of technology and massive projects is increasingly engaging managers and individual contributors in a trail of work that slithers through our lives like a hungry python night and day.

Is this it? Is this the best we can do? Is this the crowning achievement of our economy… that we all live work-centered lives?

If so, what is the cost?

Well, according to marriage experts at the University of Washington and the University of Virginia what we are sacrificing is our love lives. The biggest toll a work-centered life is having on us is increased feelings of social isolation and a lack of intrinsic connection with our loved ones. When we get too busy, love devolves into a concept rather than a feeling.

In this state of mind, we recognize that we love our romantic partners and children but we just don’t feel that love. We could write down on a yellow pad all the reasons we love our loved ones but we just don’t feel it. All words but no music.

Having the emotions of love evaporate from our lives is a ridiculous price to pay for work. A recent survey of 1,500 people over the age of 78 asking them what their biggest life regret was overwhelmingly confirmed it was one thing… staying too long in a job that was unfulfilling.

We also know that the happiest and healthiest people on earth are actively in love. In the hundreds of studies done on the causes of human happiness we know there is no greater mood elevator than being “crazy in love.”

We all know how goony people get when people fall in love. The thrill of emotional intimacy with someone you find fascinating, attractive and admirable sets off a brain circus of dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin that gives you a feeling of optimism, well-being and invincible confidence that is simply the best brain buzz ever.

The problem is this love fog does not last without continuous investment in the relationship similar to the investment you were willing to make when you were falling in love

So, just what are the investments you can make to increase the love in your life?

First of all, you have to have an IPO! Stay with me.  A few days ago I was talking to one of my favorite clients, Brad and Sheryl, who own a very successful high-tech consultancy. I have known them for nearly two decades. They’re married with three daughters and have always been crazy in love.  What I mean by that is that they have an Irrational Positive Opinion (IPO) about each other. When I talk to them separately they’re constantly bombarding me with how great the other one is. They refer to each other as brilliant and amazing. They brag about each other’s accomplishments. Hell, it’s like being married to a cheerleader.

So, are they really that great? Well no. They’re like all the rest of us… full of good stuff and not such good stuff. But they’re living proof of the research by John Gottman at the University of Washington that confirms that the happiest couples are those who hold and an irrational positive opinion of each other.  It turns out that when it comes to personal self-worth and interpersonal trust we don’t much value realists who point out our flaws and want us to change. That’s something a coach can do. What we want from our romantic partner is for them to be “crazy” about us… literally irrational about our wonderfulness.

If you want to be happy in life and happy in your primary love relationship launch an IPO. And keep investing so the stock of your relationship continuously rises.

Here are four critical investments that research confirms will keep the flames and the feelings of love burning.

1. Celebrate each other’s successes. Research tells us that making a big deal of small successes creates more trust and intimacy than comforting people when they’re struggling. The reason we think this is true is that amplifying good feelings has a bigger positive payoff than trying to reduce bad feelings.Here is a silly but true example. I am an old dude surfer and like all surfers we want to be admired for our surfing. I am quite sure that I am average for my age and experience, yet sometimes I get a good ride and some other surfer will give a hoot or say “nice wave.” When I get home, I never fail to tell Debbie of my small success. She insists that I then tell her about the details of the wave, gives me a hug and a kiss and makes me feel like I’m the greatest surfer on earth. She clearly holds an irrational positive opinion about my surfing that jacks me up with enough dopamine and oxytocin that it makes me want to actually move the furniture around so she can see how the room would look with a new arrangement.The key to celebrating each other’s success is to ask for the details of what your partner actually did. That’s what creates positive intimacy.

2. Help when it’s inconvenient. Talk is cheap, even love talk. A willingness to drop whatever you’re doing to help your loved one communicates how important their agenda is to you. You don’t have to do this one hundred percent of the time because sometimes what you were doing may greatly suffer from an interruption. However, if you’re willing to instantly respond most of the time your love stock will certainly rise. (It’s also important to help with routine tasks to avoid causing simmering resentments.  Only 20% of men are willing to do laundry and vacuuming regularly. So, if you want to be in the top 20% of male partners you know what to do!)

3. Plan positive experiences. Dating is all about planning positive experiences. We make careful choices about where we eat or what movies we see to make sure that our dating partner will be happy. We take great care in what we wear, how we smell and what we say. However, when our relationship ripens we often approach going out together with a question… “So, what do you want to do?” This means you did very little thinking about your time together… not good.

Planned positive experiences are critical to fanning the flames of love. That’s because we associate the positive feelings we get from the experience, like going to a sensational concert, or visiting a breath-taking National Park or exotic tropical island with the person we are with. New experiences also make us more interesting to each other. These experiences also create shared memories, which are strong positive bonds that sustain loving feelings when things get a little stale, dull or frustrating.

4. Love with your full presence every day. We know that the happiest couples spend at least 30 to 60 minutes a day in focused conversation with each other. I know…. that may seem like an impossibly high bar. But consider its possibilities. The greatest longing of the human heart is to be fully accepted by another. The most powerful way that we communicate this is to listen to a loved one without an agenda for them. This is difficult. When I am talking to Debbie I often have to remind myself that I just want her to be happy in the way she experiences happiness. It’s unnatural to listen without judgment. We justify having agendas for the people we love because we think we know how to help them… and sometimes we do. But remember our loved ones long for someone more than a coach. We all want to feel loved intrinsically. We want others to see our good and positive motives not just our less-than-perfect behavior.

The only way we can access the feelings of unconditional positive regard is to drop our agenda and just be present. Just listen with loving intention. All of this will be impossible unless you’re willing to unplug from both your job and the torrent of mostly irrelevant media that bombards us daily. (New research validates that peoples’ optimism and happiness rise when they quit Facebook or other Social Media Apps.) The primary reason seems to be that Facebook incites envy and social comparison causing an epidemic of inner emotional drama among Facebook users. If you think this doesn’t apply to you try a week-long Facebook fast and ask yourself if you’re less stressed and a little more happy.)

The bottom line is that love and intimacy take a daily investment of personal time. I’m convinced the good life is a combination of meaningful work performed at a reasonable rhythm that makes plenty of room for love-drenched relationships. No work success can substitute for love.

 

Mindfulness as a Path Toward Achieving The Global Goals

Posted on by Martina Buchal

The world is a beautiful place, but somehow it seems that humankind’s presence here has done more harm than good.

As a species, we kill other species and our own; we destroy natural habitats of wildlife, while mindlessly depleting our food supplies. Poverty and inequality plague us and have done so for decades. We are shooting ourselves in our own metaphorical feet… and the way we are moving, eating, consuming, and behaving is simply not sustainable.

For most of us, this is common knowledge. Even the United Nations, one of the world’s largest international organizations, has noted that things must change, and soon. It’s done this through the creation and promotion of the Sustainable Development Goals (aka. The Global Goals). 17 goals ranging from zero hunger to protecting life in our oceans, are nicely branded and shared widely as an aspiration for the United Nations to reach towards.

But, these goals are not for the institution of the United Nations alone. While they originate from the UN, they stem from a global survey, and I doubt that anyone would look at this list and think “Nope, we don’t need to work on any/all of this as humanity.” I think most people would look at these goals with a quiet recognition sounding more like “Oh yeah..we messed up pretty bad, didn’t we?”

The goals are actually for all of us.

Now, before we start to feel too guilty and wallow in the feelings that may inevitably arise when we look at these 17 boxes and contemplate the state of the world today (including the truly unnecessary stuff that’s out there, like the complex wars, battles for oil, and let’s not forget the questionable political tactics and fear-mongering of certain politicians) – we need to make an acknowledgment. We need to make a few:

Firstly, we created these problems.

Secondly, we are responsible for solving them, and ideally, as Albert Einstein once famously said, to not “solve problems with the same way of thinking that created them.”

Lastly, we need to recognize that we can, if we choose to, make positive steps towards achieving these goals, on a personal level. We don’t have to don a superhero cape and save the world on our own, either.

I can hear the questions already arising, and the resistance. “But I wasn’t responsible for the wars in the Middle East, why and how can I possibly help?” “But, I’m a vegan! I’m already doing my part..it’s all the other people who need to get on board.”

Stop it right there. Ego aside for a second, please. We live here. We affect the world around us. I think we need to accept that too. We are all in some way responsible for every single one of the earth’s ailments in one way or another. If not directly, then indirectly.

I am no exception, and I’m certainly not a saint. I can’t say I started the war in the Middle East directly. But you know what I didn’t do to prevent it? I didn’t write a letter to my government when Canada decided to go to war. I didn’t protest more than once. I didn’t blog about it. I watched TV and just added negative energy to an already awful situation and felt powerless. And also, there was that one time someone was in a rage arguing that we NEED to be in the Middle East, and I just had too much of all of it that I didn’t bother to muster up the energy to inform him that many of his views were based on false knowledge. I didn’t tell him there was a better way. I get ZERO brownie points for that – especially for someone who calls herself a peace practitioner.

But that’s a pretty big example. Let’s try something smaller. I don’t think I’m particularly responsible for climate change..but I am. Every time I drove my rusted old minivan given to me by my grandparents when I was younger, even though that exhaust was spewing garbage into the air, I was helping contribute to the depletion of the ozone layer. Every flight I fly on (and I fly quite a bit), I am adding to the supply and demand of airlines and flights, and through the use of airplanes contributing to the same depletion of the ozone layer. Do you know how much gas it takes for an airplane to fly? How much of that has to be pumped out of the earth, polluting our oceans along the way, to be able to sustain this thing we often righteously call the necessities and privileges of human life?

And guess what? We all do this stuff without thinking about it. When one of us does it, it’s not such a big problem. When many of us do it, repeatedly, and unconsciously- well, then we need the Sustainable Development Goals, a large world session of singing kumbaya, and a huge ocean and land clean up… and maybe some praying. Praying would probably help.

BUT, here’s the good news. Even though these goals and problems are massive, we can make our lifestyle changes to move the sliding scale in another direction.

They say:

“The devil’s in the details.”

“It’s the little things.”

“One drop in the ocean can raise the tide.”

All these potentially cheesy quotes have some serious truth behind them. We can make a small, subtle difference, every day, which through the ripple effect, and amplified effort can drastically shift our world in the right direction… towards any one of these goals.

If tomorrow we all woke up, and mindfully ate our breakfasts, choosing which brand of cereal we eat – and don’t choose the one that uses slave labour; if we choose to recycle the cardboard box, and reuse the plastic bag within it; or better yet, if we get our cereal at a local organic, ethical, food store where the cereal comes directly from a dispenser, and we put it into a reusable container, we skip the whole “trash” part of it altogether. If we all did this, what would happen to the cereal industry? To farming standards? To our landfills? Heck, what would happen to your body without all the toxins from generic cereal and to the amount of trash you have to take out weekly?

And your morning cereal is just one of the thousands of things you can choose to think about on a daily basis consciously. Just one! We have thousands of decisions to make throughout the day. Imagine what might happen to your life and the world if we slowed down for a moment and were more mindful, and present to make those decisions.*

So, here’s my challenge to you, and to me, and anyone else either of us may talk to: take a moment to be mindful about your decisions today, even if just one. Contemplate your breakfast, and its impact; or your choice of running shoe brand; or how full your trash can is and where that trash is going. And then, mindfully make a change. It can be small. But make it.

If we all tune in, act as mindfully as we can, imagine what a difference that can make.

In the mean time, I’m going to try to fly less, plant some trees, live with an open heart and mind, try to keep it minimal… and keep talking about this stuff, because to me, this world matters, and if I can make my small difference. I most definitely will.

I hope you’ll join me.

Transforming The Way The World Views Failure

Posted on by Rey Castellanos

Fear of failure is an epidemic that stifles human potential and it’s time we rethink it.

Whether stemming from a lack of confidence or negative past experiences, the effect of fear of failure can be immobilizing, stopping most people before they even get started.

Over the years, I’ve coached hundreds of clients from all over the globe. My clients have been entrepreneurs, executives, artists and filmmakers. What I’ve learned is that almost everyone experiences fear of failure, regardless of how successful or accomplished they may be.

The truth is that we all fail far more often than we succeed, but because we are conditioned to constantly project success, our failures often go unseen, doing more damage than good.

I believe projecting success while never recognizing failure only perpetuates fear of failure. I believe that life’s biggest lessons can come from some of life’s biggest failures.

I believe failure allows us the opportunity to practice humility and compassion while building resilience and wisdom.

I believe fear of failure is an epidemic that stifles human potential and this is my attempt to inoculate it.

We Fail Forward: The Podcast On A Mission To Transform The Way The world Views Failure

On the show, we interview massively successful entrepreneurs, innovators and changemakers about their biggest failures. Our goal is to uncover how those failures have contributed to their success, shaped who they’ve become YOU the listener to play bigger and fail forward.

Each guest submits a “Resume of Failures” used as interview prep and then published on the website.

You can check them and more out at: wefailforward.org