On May 15, I spoke to the 2018 graduating class of New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Below is an abbreviated version of my speech, an effort to illustrate the need for moral leadership in our ever-evolving, interdependent world.
Seeing all of you on this day reminds me of my own journey as a young woman. I started my career on Wall Street in the early 1980s, working mostly in Latin America. Though I loved the tools of finance, it made no sense to me that low-income people were excluded from banking. I hailed from an immigrant family with a strong work ethic and had already concluded that poverty tells you nothing about people’s character, just their income levels.
I knew I had to do something about this. After doing some research on banking for the poor but without a proper plan fully in place, I left my job and headed to West Africa. A course of missteps landed me in Rwanda, a country I knew little about. There, I met a small group of women interested in women’s economic development. Together, we co-founded the country’s first microfinance bank.
The work was difficult; at times it felt like a series of taking two steps forward, one step back. This is a common theme in a life committed to creating change. You shouldn’t sign up if you are looking for easy. But I also saw how a small group of people bound by a common idea could change at least a corner of history.
That experience gave me a new level of courage. When I first decided to move to Africa, friends and family called me crazy. When we started building the bank in Kigali, the community called me crazy again. I’ve since learned that being “crazy” is usually a good sign you’re onto something.
So, get in the habit of doing something you fear. Remember that each time you practice courage, you gain courage. Think of it is as a muscle you build for when you most need it.
In time, I learned that my successes and failures usually had less to do with ideas or structures, and more with character, my own and that of those around me. It was only when I learned to listen not with the intent to convince others of my solutions but with the intent to change myself that I succeeded. It was only when I found the courage to fail and try again that I built the resilience needed to walk the long road to change.
After I left Rwanda, I spent the next decade continuing my apprenticeship, if you will, picking up tools for my toolbox in business school and starting other endeavors. I followed leaders whose actions showed me the kind of person I wanted to become. I continued to be obsessed with both markets and philanthropy and thought I wanted to revolutionize the latter. But in time, I came to understand that my real goal was to create the conditions that would make philanthropy unnecessary. This I’m still learning.
We started Acumen in 2001 to invest patient capital in entrepreneurs defined by their character, men and women willing to go where both markets and aid had failed the poor to solve our toughest problems of poverty: health care and education, agriculture and education. We’ve invested in more than 100 companies and supported nearly 450 young leaders around the world. I can’t imagine a better education. I’ve learned how markets and government work — and where they fail. I’ve learned about sectors I didn’t even know I wanted to understand: artificial insemination in the dairy industry, chickens in Ethiopia, rice gasification processes, solar mini-grids. But those are lessons for another time.
Because what separates the solutions that work from those that fail has less to do with the idea or the context in which we invest, be it a stable country or one in post-conflict. It has everything to do with character. Conversely, our failures are too often correlated with betting on entrepreneurs who choose to do what is easy, not right; or they lack moral imagination and curiosity about others; or they lose their resilience and don’t stay the course.
The kind of character that leads to success can be summed up in two words: moral leadership. Moral because we need leaders who care about the world, and not just themselves. Leadership to navigate our complex times. We can no longer depend only on profit as a motive without considering other stakeholders, nor can we sit with easy ideology or the arrogance of certainty.
Our problems demand more than that.
Because there is no roadmap, developing moral leadership requires a compass, one whose north star points to the flourishing of all humans and a sustainable earth. And we shouldn’t settle for anything less.
There are many points to this compass, but let me share just a few today.
First, moral leaders redefine success. The zero-sum model of “I win, you lose” cannot sustain in an interdependent world in which we rise and fall together. Instead, we need brave individuals driven by a metric based not on how the rich fare but how the poor and vulnerable are treated.
One of Acumen’s entrepreneurs, Sam Goldman was working as Peace Corps volunteer in Benin when his neighbor’s kerosene lantern tipped over and burned down his house, nearly killing the eldest child. Sam woke up to the insanity of a world in which 1.5 billion of us still live in darkness, and decided to do something.
Though he lacked an engineering degree, he found a partner in Ned Tozun at business school. Together, they ventured out with a $30 solar light they’d designed and a mission to eradicate kerosene. Acumen invested in their company, d.light, though neither they nor we fully understood that we were creating a new market altogether.
It took more than a decade of experiments and failures, countless hours spent listening to customers, and changing products to meet their needs. Sam and Ned spent many years earning little money, struggling to raising investment capital and grants, experimenting with financing solutions.
There were years when they thought they’d fail. But they never gave up.
To be honest, I also sometimes wondered whether they would succeed. But we were on board because we had bet on these guys to take on the difficult. We bet on the guys’ character, on their resilience.
Change takes time. When people ask me how patient Acumen’s own investment capital is, I sometimes show them a picture of Sam and Ned when they started d.light in 2007—young and eager with full heads of hair. And then I show them a picture of them today — smiling, strong, still youthful but with a lot less hair. It’s been more than 10 years, and Sam and Ned have brought affordable, clean light and electricity to more than 82 million low-income people around the world.
This is success: It doesn’t matter how much money they have earned. Through d.light, Sam and Ned are lighting the world.
Second, moral leadership requires building muscles of moral imagination — or having the audacity to imagine the world that can be, and the humility to see the world that is. Emily Stone was working with an environmental firm when she learned that 5 million farmers, most of who make less than $2 a day, produce 90 percent of the world’s cacao for the $100 billion-dollar chocolate industry.
That made no sense to Emily. She’s an amazing woman who likes chocolate. But she loves justice. She wondered why global commodities pricing was the only guide to pay smallholder farmers, and made a conscious decision to ignore it. After all, retailers ignore how much the farmers earn when they charge $10 for a premium chocolate bar, right?
So she used her moral imagination, understanding the realities of farmers, and dreaming of what could be in a flawed but important industry.
Her company, Uncommon Cacao, works to understand farmers’ production costs and then adds an ample margin, sometimes paying two to three times the global price. The business model is based on trust and transparency for all stakeholders. Farmers can see how much their coffee is selling at every level of the supply chain. It isn’t always comfortable but it works.
Emily now sells to more than 100 chocolate companies. The farmers with whom she partners are moving out of poverty. With agency. In a world where there is so little trust, building such networks is more valuable than gold.
Third, moral leadership requires the skills of building partnerships. Manik Bhat is a young entrepreneur working to solve some of America’s toughest issues. On his way to becoming a doctor, he dropped out of medical school and founded Healthify, a company to help healthcare providers and government organizations coordinate with social services workers to keep low-income people healthy. Manik’s work starts with seeing every patient as a whole person who requires social support. To make his company work, Manik must understand and use the language of medicine, of markets and of policy. Yet he’s driven by supporting the underserved.
We need more models in this country that get the best of business and government, the right and the left. It requires rallying different stakeholders around a common end, holding the values of including the poor, learning to partner sometimes across uncomfortable lines. This requires holding out for a hard-edged hope.
Finally, moral leadership requires learning to hold two contradictory ideas and reject neither. This is a massive challenge of our generation, especially in this age of rapid-fire response on social media where nuance is rarely rewarded. We move too quickly to outrage and blame. It is as if I cannot be right unless I prove you wrong. Or at least say you are wrong.
But a winner-takes-all society strips us of our individual humanity. It diminishes us, enabling a vulgar laziness with language that divides and shames and too often humiliates. The real winners are cynicism and fear, and there are no greater allies of the status quo than those two.
At Acumen, in addition to investing in companies, we support young leaders through a fellowship focused on leading in uncertain times. Last year, a group of Indian and Pakistani Acumen Fellows decided they’d had enough talking with just their fellow countrymen and women about Kashmir, a topic that provokes heated conversation in each country. They courageously organized a series of discussions across national lines via video-conference. Though most were nervous and the conversations uncomfortable, the fellows were rightly proud for creating a platform for discussion.
One of the Indians posted a screenshot of the conversation on Facebook. For this, he was immediately barraged with hateful comments.
Even his parents shared their disapproval. “It is bad enough that you decided to be a social entrepreneur,” they said. “But now you are consorting with the enemy. You have to decide if you are a patriot, if you are with this family or with the enemy.”
Later, he asked: Can I be a patriot and a global citizen?
Of course, you can. In fact, you must. We can love our countries and, at the same time, be curious about other people and other nations. Most important, we can learn from them. We can hold onto a strong sense of identity without presuming that the wounds of our own past are more legitimate than another person’s or group’s.
Being a patriot and a global citizen should be mutually reinforcing.But don’t be tricked by language. The Indian fellows’ parents weren’t speaking about patriotism. They were speaking about nationalism. That is an entirely different kettle of fish.
Nationalism is an arrogant love of country based on notions of us vs. them, blaming others to justify one’s own superiority. Patriots love their country with a sense of duty to seek the nation’s betterment, to renew its values and confront the difficult because it will lead to a better place. Patriots see themselves as part of a greater whole.
An either-or world limits our chances for shared humanity. In our interdependent world, we all must reject false polarities. There is a space that connects love of country and love for the world, that bridges left and right, that goes beyond shallow judgments of right and wrong. The opportunity, indeed, imperative of moral leadership is to create a set of values and possibilities in which we can all see ourselves. So, learn to navigate the contradictions.
Your generation also has the chance to drop the excess baggage carried by mine. But don’t jettison everything, for there is wisdom in history. Seek it out. It is up to you to learn to hold those values from the past, whose beauty must be carried forward, while having the courage to let go of what no longer serves.
The work of change is not easy. But you know that already. If you are here, you didn’t sign up for easy.
I promise you, if you focus on developing your character and not only your career, if you practice the principles of a leadership focused on the world and not simply yourselves, you will find richness and joy in the privilege of being a part of the great questions of our times.
Thirty years after starting this work, I have discovered in myself a soulful connection to my own and others’ humanity. It has opened me to the deepest love. It has taught me to see beauty in, well, everything.
If there is one thing to leave with today it is this: the world needs you to be the leaders and foot soldiers of a moral revolution. Leave graduation today with a sense of confidence in what you have learned and what you know. And with responsibility, too.
If we dare to act with moral leadership, this can be the most hopeful time in history. You are the first generation with the ability to imagine and build new frameworks and institutions for a world that is more inclusive, less wasteful and more sustainable. Our promise is nothing less than the flourishing of every human being on the planet, of human dignity.
