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I just got back from the first national summit of the Initiative for Global Development, which was formed after 9/11 “to make the elimination of global poverty a [US] national priority.” The initiative showed truly phenomenal convening power (in order of appearance: Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, John Shalikashvili, George W. Bush, Jim Lehrer, Jim Wolfensohn, Mary Robinson, Ted Turner, Carly Fiorina and Jeffrey Sachs to name only a few) and while I came wondering whether the very high powered business and government people who were convened there would be aware of or would recognize the value of the social entrepreneurial and investing innovation going on out there in the xigi community, given its inherent unconventionality and their inherent conventionality, I left feeling tentatively optimistic. While many there probably do not see this as an emerging capital market yet, many of them definitely have their sleeves rolled up in pieces of it, and through IGD there is an opportunity for the larger group to begin to see the more systemic picture and the roles they can play in relation to it and each other. But, I also left still feeling concerned that there’s a lot of room for unintended negative consequences, since this group has a lot of horsepower, but the execution still lacks any systemic way of either assessing what good and bad is actually getting accomplished, or systematically incorporating the voices of the people the whole initiative intends to help.
What was affirmed from every speaker, not least of whom was Bush himself (at some length no less, and with evident passion), was the notion that it is both a business imperative, a national security priority and a moral necessity to “get on with it.”I thought Wolfensohn and Turner said it best. Wolfensohn painted the situation in big, eloquent brushstrokes which I won’t do justice to now but which went something like: in the next 40 years we’re moving from a world of 6 billion to 9 billion people, and one where Brazil, China and India replace the European countries among the G8, and the growth in the middle class is going to be in the 100s of millions if not billions but almost all of that will be in non-western regions. There’s both an opportunity for continued business growth of our economy here if these peoples’ wealth increases, and an opportunity to avoid the backlash now that they can see on the internet and cable what they have and don’t have relative to us. Not only this, but America has lost moral standing in the world– people don’t dislike us, but they think Americans are selfish. There is an opportunity, Wolfensohn said, to redefine what this country stands for– to restore the nation’s soul. We can think about what is good for business, and what’s good for our kids… and if we do nothing, our kids will have to deal with the consequences of that.
Or, as Turner put it: “let’s stop doing dumb things, and start doing smart things.”
Like I learned a long time ago from Shorebank’s founders (who weren’t at this meeting but who should be next time), the old-fashioned way of doing business used to be that you couldn’t do business in a place where people couldn’t afford to buy your products, or where your products harmed them, so you had to invest in creating the conditions for people that enabled them to do business with you. That kind of business seemed to get lost when the market grew to be international, but now that the world is shrinking again– fast– this gathering tried to remind us that the old-fashioned ethic is true once again.