Doing good, and the personal branding complex

Was talking to a good friend of mine who had recently returned to Stanford from a 1 year hiatus. One year ago, he had taken a leave of absence to travel and work in another part of the world, getting the opportunity to see life from the villages to the urban city. This time, when he talked, he had a certain worldly wisdom that was far beyond his years- he had witnessed the world, and seemed to understand himself more because of it.

One thing that we talked about was about a social enterprise in the Bay Area, which was doing work in the country he had visited. He had worked there for a short while, and I asked him what he thought of its work there. He raised an interesting point- he said that he wasn’t sure whether the founders were doing it for the cause, or for their own personal branding. I had heard about this from others as well- that the founders were more interested in building hype and letting the world know what they were doing, than doing actual work to help people.

Personal branding- an industry in itself

It was interesting, and it made me reflect back to the many times in the past I had had the chance to talk to founders of charities. Some struck me as intensely ideological, wanting to make a change in the world, while others struck me as more interested in enjoying the political/social capital they had accrued as “noble founders” of a charity. I could place most of them somewhere along this spectrum- some had started out in the former category before sliding to the latter.

I recall sitting in a swanky office of a local UN-linked nonprofit in Singapore, facing a founder who had his legs up on his table while telling me that his clout with the UN “made the government scared of [his] power”. Yet another time was hearing nurses in a church-linked community hospital complain about their church-appointed socialite overseer, who hardly spent any time in the hospital but yet was present for every charity gala dinner.

It was something interesting to think about: Mike Del Ponte, of Sparkseed once told me that the most powerful question to ask someone was “what do you want?”. Perhaps it is ever more important in the social enterprise/nonprofit world to ask oneself that question, to avoid one’s ego getting in the way of the larger social mission. I have been guilty of this more often than not- and often the blurry line between doing it for the ego and for the cause is difficult to define. But it something I have to be aware of and avoid, to prevent the I in me to blind me to inadequacy.