Roger Martin has come clean: Barack Obama made him cry. In his remarks during the plenary opening of the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University, the dean of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management confessed that he cried "several times" during Obama's inaugural address. One line in particular struck him: "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals."
What in the world does a comment about national security and civil liberties have to do with business or social enterprise? "In my study of highly successful leaders, I feel the most common theme, the most universal characteristic, is a form of thinking characterized by President Obama's sentence," Martin said. "Given a choice between two unsatisfactory outcomes," a stellar leader finds a third way. He doesn't choose. Instead, he "has the capacity to find a solution superior to either of the available options."
Martin contrasted Obama's line with a post-9/11 one from George W. Bush: "Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists." "On the one hand, choice is the only possibility," he said. "On the other, we reject the choice."
To hammer home his point, Martin offered an example that will be familiar to Fast Company readers: Victoria Hale and the Institute for OneWorld Health, which was honored as one of FC's 2009 Social Enterprises of the Year. OneWorld Health is America's only not-for-profit pharmaceutical company, a strange and wonderful hybrid bred by Hale that blends the research prowess of big pharma with the on-the-ground sensitivity of a public-health NGO. The world--as well as precedent and the establishment--told her she couldn't create both a world-class pharma-research company and an on-the-ground not-for-profit in one organization. Big pharma and public health "were the available models," Martin said. Logic said she should have picked one. "In the face of those two models, she said no, there's a better model." Turns out it just hadn't been created yet.
History is full of stories like these--of pioneers, trailblazers, and true believers. The search for the new can be a lonely pursuit, so it makes sense that Martin would kick off this gathering of social entrepreneurs with this time-honored message. It's a good reminder for anyone with the slightest interest in creativity, in making something new: "You must reject the notion that existing models equal reality." In other words, you must innovate.
"No! No! No!" Oxford business professor Linda Scott does not use Avon products. In fact, she says with a smile, "One of the worst things that ever happened to me is that a friend of mine started selling Avon." But she believes her research in South Africa could prove a fascinating hypothesis: that becoming an Avon lady could help poor women in developing nations knock on prosperity's door.
Scott is a cultural historian-turned-marketing professor who first got interested in studying Avon as she mused about the rise of the American beauty industry and how it affected feminism at the turn of the 20th century. Avon saleswomen "went into factories and rural environments, and they sold through social networks of mostly poor, mostly young women," she told me on the sidelines of the Skoll World Forum of Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford. "It worked very well for Avon--and very well for the women."
One hundred years on, "the infrastructure you have in the developing world as well as the position of women in society is not that different," Scott says. "So I wondered whether Avon would work for these women. Can women make money consistently, sustainably, and significantly? What if this were a legitimate avenue for poverty alleviation?"
In Scott's own telling, that was a big if. Two years ago, she contacted Avon CEO Andrea Jung with her query, and Jung gave the greenlight for Avon's Johannesburg-based staff to cooperate with Scott's research. (The company provides access to its sales force, and the U.K.'s Department for International Development and the European Social Research Centre provide funding.)
Her preliminary findings, gleaned from hundreds of hours of interviews, surveys, and focus groups, suggest that becoming an Avon lady might work. It could even be better than microfinance--"much more accessible," Scott says, in part because of Avon's venerable distribution model and how it suits the ways that members of a community interact in South Africa.
One thing that nagged me as we talked was that beauty products, in my mind, seem like luxury goods--in other words, not necessities. Scott thought about that, too, as she was constructing her studies. "Is the good off-balanced?" she asked. "Should the poor be spending money in different ways?" What she learned was that these products are meeting a pre-existing demand; many women, even among the poor, had already "budgeted" for the tiniest of luxuries such as body lotion, and their spending on these small items is not coming at the expense of, say, food or school fees.
Even if the research proves her hypothesis correct, Avon is obviously not going to be a panacea. There's a natural ceiling on how many Avon ladies one community can have; if everyone's selling it, then who's going to be buying it? Plus, "selling Avon is not for everyone," Scott says, and she doesn't just mean if you don't like the smell of Skin So Soft. It's definitely not for the poorest of the poor--those many millions in the developing world who earn less than $1 a day. "You need a minimal amount of upfront capital, and even though it is very minimal, they don't have it."
Scott, who expects to have firm data later this spring and full results toward the end of the year, says that positive findings might affect Avon's marketing: "Women helping women is a big deal!" But it probably won't change much about the company's self-perception. "This is what they think they do already." She recalls the words of one Avon manager in South Africa. "My business is not selling toiletries," he said. (Yes, he.) "It's about empowering women." If Scott can prove that to be true, that would be kind of beautiful.
One of my least favorite activities of all time is the icebreaker. You know how it goes: Throw together a bunch of people--six, eight, more than two is too many--and force them to tell each other something silly, secret, anything that will publicly humiliate in front of total strangers. Cue nervous laughter and clammy palms. But barely has the Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship begun and Ideo is already telling us: We have a better way. We're going to use design.
The Ideo icebreaker is a pilot project that it's testing at Skoll--a quick-fire exercise "to meet each other and design some new partnerships." First task: "Turn around and pick a partner you haven't met before." (I get Raymond from Hong Kong.) Next, we enter the "empathy stage." (How far before we get to denial?) "Do a miniature interview. Take five minutes to get to know your partner. Don't write at this point. Just listen. After two-and-a-half minutes, I'll give you a signal. AND NO WRITING YET."
I tell Raymond about Fast Company, and Raymond tells me about Baptist Oi Kwan Social Services, which runs, among other things, a vocational rehab program that helps the mentally ill find gainful employment, many of them in a restaurant that the organization operates in Hong Kong. (When I ask what kind of food, Raymond looks at me--an obviously Chinese person--as if I am crazy. "Chinese!" he says. "It's good!")
Next, it's time for the "distill stage." We have two minutes to write down each other's names, organizations, and three defining features of our organizations.
Finally, we're given four minutes for the "prototyping stage." That means coming up with a project that the two organizations can do together in a week, and then another that we can do in a year. At the rate we're talking, it will take a week just to come up with a project that we can do in a week, but we gamely devise a plan to help Raymond's organization improve its publicity and outreach while giving Fast Company access to an interesting case study of a social enterprise. When it's time to come up with a project for a year, well, we just extend the weekly project because they need the staff and I'd rather have a more in-depth story.
In the end, it was a little like speed dating. There was the rare winner: One person effusively announced that she had forged a partnership that might actually work outside the walls of this bland conference room. But more of what I heard was this: "That was odd." "For God's sake, I can't hear a thing." "Why can't you just let us talk?" "That was awkward."
A few days after Barack Obama's inauguration, I called a Rwandan diplomat who had helped me with my story on that country’s remarkable economic-development strategy. "Did you go to the balls?" I asked. The response was tepid. "I stayed home," the diplomat said with a sigh. "I watched it on TV."
What I found, in talking to this diplomat and other officials, was broad ambivalence, not about President Obama himself, who is widely adored in Africa, but about his team. It goes back to 1994 and the Clinton Administration's inaction during the genocide. "We are seeing a lot of old faces coming back in the Obama Administration. These are the same people who shied away from the opportunity to stop it," the diplomat told me on condition of anonymity, because of the sensitivity of the issue. "I am thinking about [U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.] Susan Rice. She says she has learned from her experience. But we’ve learned too."
Rice is singled out because she's the most prominent Clinton-era returnee who was involved with Africa policy in the 1990s, when, according to one ex-State Department hand, "it was the humanitarian approach to Africa--disaster, disease, and destruction--which often leads to paternalistic policy." Back then, Rice was relatively junior in the policymaking hierarchy (she directed the National Security Council's work on peacekeeping), and it was her boss, Richard Clarke, who was the fiercest proponent of doing nothing in Rwanda. "If you're a person working at the NSC and your boss is the one leading the effort to disengage and feeling quite righteous about it, what are you going to do?" says another ex-diplomat. "National interest trumped moral imperative."
Rice is especially remembered for one startling comment (reported by Samantha Power--now a fellow Obama adviser--in her seminal 2001 account in the Atlantic of the U.S. failure to act): "If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?" Rice has said she doesn't remember making the comment, but that it was inappropriate. Through a spokesman, she declined comment for this story and referred me to various statements she has made expressing contrition. (She told Power: "I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required.")
"I do not think that anybody who was close to Rwanda in 1994 got out of the experience without having been seared. It was a soul-searing experience," says Prudence Bushnell, then the deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs. "As fellow travelers, as human beings, we know we did not do the right thing. The question now is, What lessons do you bring?"
Here's one possible lesson, from the Rwandan perspective: in attitude as well as policy, it may be smarter for the Obama Administration to emulate George W. Bush's presidency than Bill Clinton's. Because of Bush's initiatives on trade and on AIDS, Africa policy was one of the few relatively bright spots on his report card. One Kigali-based Rwandan official cites a bilateral relationship that--perhaps surprisingly for an administration not seen as fond of dialogue--involved lots of listening. "The Bush administration treated us like partners, more than any other in the past," she says. "They tended to listen more. It was refreshing."
With Obama's plate overloaded, he hasn't spent much time on Africa-related issues. He has only just named an assistant secretary of state for African affairs. (His choice is retired foreign-service officer Johnnie Carson, who has vast experience in Africa) and a special envoy for Sudan. One Clinton-era official says the slow start and lack of definition on Africa policy has fed fears that the continent will, ironically, be a lower priority for a Kenyan's son than for a white guy from Texas: "They're skeptical, and I certainly don't blame them. I would be too."
The official Rwandan line: "We had good relations with previous administrations and have no reason to believe this will change--we in fact look forward to consolidating ties," says Yolande Makolo, press secretary for President Paul Kagame. "We greatly appreciate U.S. support in our development especially in the areas health and rural development."
But privately, officials feel less confident: “Nervous would not be the term, but cautious," says one. "We are cautious." And as is too usual with Africa, they've reverted to "wait and see."
Last fall, I called Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch--who died Thursday night in the crash of a Continental Airlines plane near Buffalo--to ask for her help with my forthcoming story on Rwanda. She didn't respond as most potential sources do. She didn't say, “Sure!” She didn't say, "How can I help?" She didn't pencil me in. She gave me a reading list, and she said, "Then we would have something to really talk about."
In subsequent weeks, we traded emails, a correspondence that revealed to me a woman with passion--for human rights, for doing what she saw as good wherever she could, for her family. She felt all this deeply. Her ardent belief that civil rights are not being respected in today's Rwanda made her a pest to that country's government. Her commitment to not waste any time meant that I'd get emails telling me that she might be able to squeeze in a brief chat in between research for a UN Security Council briefing, a meeting with ex-Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, and the Security Council briefing itself. Her commitment to her grandchildren meant that I couldn't interview her the week I wanted to--all those days, she told me, would be totally blocked off for her family.
Five years after the genocide, Des Forges published an 800-page, painstakingly researched account of the tragedy called Leave None to Tell the Story. Some have said her recounting was "authoritative;" it certainly was exhaustive and in many ways exhausting. Many people dispute some of her interpretations of events, past and current—I certainly didn’t agree with everything she told me. But those who know Rwanda would acknowledge that her contributions were enormous. Another friend and source who's as passionate about Rwanda as she was—but also passionate in his disagreement with much of what she has said in recent years in very strong criticism of Paul Kagame's government—told me: "She did more to document and teach the true nature of that genocide than anyone else."
Certainly she helped me to ask good questions. In our brief interactions, she acted less like a source than a professor: She questioned my questions and forced me to consider underlying assumptions and conclusions that I hadn't even realized I'd made. She, of course, had made a lot of assumptions and conclusions, too--and she defended them fiercely.
Des Forges was forthright about her opinions, never hesitated to share them, and felt free to take on those who differed with her. But I can't--nobody can--question that she sought justice and the truth, which, in the murkiness of geopolitics and the tragedy of events like 1994's genocide, are often awfully hard to find. I think the title of her book is especially telling. Why did Alison Des Forges do what she did with her days? So many people don’t have the freedom to watch and to record, to speak out and to call out. But she did—and she used it. She told that story, as honestly and powerfully as she knew how.
When D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee got a shout-out from Barack Obama in the third presidential debate on Wednesday night, she was asleep. "I was trying to watch it," she tells Fast Company. "But it was so boring. Then, all of a sudden, my phone and BlackBerry start blowing up. Someone sent me a link to the transcript, and I saw what they said, and I was like, 'Oh, good Lord!'"
It wasn't a surprise that both candidates, who have used the words "reform" and "change" about a million times in an effort to be seen as forces of reform and change, tried to align themselves with the only woman in Washington who can unmistakably be called a maverick and a reformer. Obama praised her as a "wonderful new superintendent"; McCain tried to pull Rhee over to his side, citing her as a supporter of vouchers. Obama shot back that she was a supporter of charters, implying that she was against vouchers.
Who was right? The National Review and the Washington Post’s Marc Fisher came down on McCain’s side, claiming that Rhee supports vouchers. Mike DeBonis of the Washington CityPaper reminded readers that Rhee told the Wall Street Journal she “would never, as long as I am in this role, do anything to limit another parent’s ability to make a choice for their child. Ever.”
But as far as I can tell, it was the blog Sassafras Mama that got it closest in its liveblog, saying “Michelle Rhee, the Superintendent of D.C schools supports charters, but as I understand it, she doesn't support a widespread system of vouchers.” Rhee’s office quickly issued a statement that said she “disagrees with the notion that vouchers are the remedy for repairing the city’s school system.“ But she reiterated to Fast Company that she has “not taken a formal position on vouchers,” and she said she won’t—because she’s more concerned about fixing the schools where nearly 50,000 kids are still being educated.
The back-and-forth was enough to get some post-election buzz going about Rhee. Matthew Bishop of the American Spectator instantly touted her for Secretary of Education, in either administration.
Rhee hasn’t shown much enthusiasm for either candidate, but told me earlier this year that McCain has the much stronger education policy from her point of view. "He isn’t great, but he hasn’t said he’s going to throw NCLB out—and now everyone who says I’m a right-wing wingnut is going to be like, 'I knew it!'" she said.
As for Obama, she told me in May that what he might do on education policy "terrifies me," even though she’s a staunch Democrat. She criticized his stance on No Child Left Behind, which she portrayed as “an ‘NCLB is evil, sucking the life out of teachers’ angle. It’s a total victim mentality.” (Obama did voice support for charters, which won’t be good news for his hard-core union supporters.)
That might take care of her Sec of Ed prospects in a Democratic administration, but let’s say the White House did call her in January and offer her that job. How would she feel? “People say that I’m not even qualified for this job,” she says with a laugh. “I think that would be ridiculous.”
Photo by Ali Goldstein / NBC Newswire/ Alessandra Petlin / Mountaineer / Flickr creative commons
A few days after Barack Obama's inauguration, I called a Rwandan diplomat who had helped me with 
