Making A Living Or Making A Difference. Is It A Choice
i remember being a little girl playing
with my friends in the streets of manila
the capital city of the philippines
we would make up rules to an imaginary
game we would play and laugh a lot
the streets were loud and messy flanked
with half-finished flats
back then i had no idea that people on
the outside
looking in would label my family poor
all i knew was that when i didn’t walk i
wanted to change
the world i was three years old
fast forward three years later and i was
playing in a beautiful house overlooking
the indian ocean in western australia
by then my mum had met my aussie dad who
married her and took us there
and it looked very different to the
poverty in which i was born
and as i’d be quietly playing she would
often come up to me and ask what do you
want to be when you grow up
even at six years old i could tell that
it was a bit of a test
the nudges were subtle but i could feel
a choice was being created for me
between making a living and making a
difference
and so instead of saying what i really
thought i took a look around
and i said i want to make enough money
to live like this
so when i grow up i want to be a lawyer
and so when i grew up i went to law
school but the dream wasn’t dead though
because i wanted to be a human rights
lawyer so that i could help
people in poverty who didn’t have the
same opportunities that i had
i studied a law and arts degree majoring
in politics and philosophy
and i loved it
but something happened i started
noticing that my peers
ambitions weren’t around changing the
world
but around making lots of money whenever
we would talk about
graduate clerkships we would rank the
firms based on their starting salaries
the most prestigious ones were the ones
that paid the most
the least were the ones that didn’t and
careers that helped other people
paid even less and so they would dismiss
and again a choice has been created when
i graduated
would i become a greedy capitalist with
all of the money
or a starving humanitarian that saved
the world
because i couldn’t do both so i chose
money
and in my second year of law school
despite really loving it
i quit my politics and philosophy degree
and took up a degree
in commerce
and that decision marked a 10-year
career
punctuated with money status
prestige and intense feelings of
self-loathing
over six years i would work
in corporate and banking law after i
graduated and got top-tier clerkships
what that meant was my primary goal was
creating wealth for investors
my corporate career crescendo from the
bowels of the most capitalist
institution
invented by man the listed fund manager
over 18 months i would lead over 40
deals
with over 3 billion and at 32 years old
i would be the youngest senior executive
appointed
onto the leadership team now on the
outside looking in it looked like i had
won the professional lottery
but on the inside i felt like a fraud
yes i loved how business could work to
generate so much money
that had the power to transform people’s
lives but yet the way that i was saying
traditional business work was that it
was actually
causing social problems not fixing them
things like cutting costs and having
environmentally damaging practice
just so that we could save on costs by
making people redundant
which would make investors richer but at
the expense of other
people it was a mindset that
chased personal wins over community
balance
i wanted to grow up to have a career
that valued generosity
but then ended up in one that valued
greed
i wanted to grow up and help other
people but by winning the professional
lottery i ended up helping
only myself i was so conflicted that at
the height of my corporate career
i quit my job without another one to go
to
because i was done choosing profit over
purpose
and i didn’t do it any sooner because i
was afraid
i didn’t see anybody taking a different
career path
did that signal that my choice was wrong
and what if i never made that kind of
money ever again
or worse what if i failed
and they laughed at me but one year
after quitting my corporate job i was
approached by the board
of grameen australia and they asked me
if i would become
their ceo i was stunned
i didn’t know what to say instead of
failing
with that offer all of my professional
dreams
were coming true and to understand why
you need to understand the origins of
grameen
australia it’s an independent
not-for-profit
with charity status fashioned on the
ideas
of a man named professor mohamed eunice
in the social enterprise world professor
eunice is a rock star
he won the nobel peace prize for lifting
an entire starving nation
out of poverty many calling the
bangladeshi mother teresa
or nelson mandela and yet what he did
was really simple
and it started with just 27 dollars
where it started was in bangladesh
during the revolution
see despite teaching traditional
economics at university
when he went out into the real world
professor eunice would see people dying
of starvation
in the streets the job market was
decimated
and there was no money to go around
these people were so poor that they
didn’t
qualify bank loans and traditional
economics
wasn’t helping them and the people that
he saw were mostly women
they would have little businesses making
bamboo furniture
where they would sell it to the market
but in order to do this they needed to
have money
to buy the bamboo but they were so poor
that the banks wouldn’t give them a loan
and they had no choice but to go
to loan sharks who would charge them
crazy high interest rates
so it meant that once they sold their
furniture paid back their debt with
interest
they had no money left over to feed
their families
educate their kids and get ahead
so professor eunice decided to try an
experiment
see the banks thought that poor people
didn’t have the character to pay the
money back but he did
he believed that it wasn’t the character
of poor people that stopped them from
repaying but rather
the design of the system itself
and so his solution was to redesign the
system
he would lend them small amounts of
money from his own pocket
so they wouldn’t have to go to loan
sharks and so that meant
because he wasn’t trying to make a
profit from them his interest rates were
reasonable
and when they sold their furniture made
a profit paid the debt back with
interest
they had enough money left to get ahead
and
instead of losing all his money by
backing these women
they paid him back at a rate of 100
percent this
financial innovation is known now as
microfinance
and what started out as 27 between 42
women
has become 27 billion across 10 million
people
with worldwide repayment rates of 97
and this program has become known as
grameen bank
the bank for the poor and it’s the only
company in the world to have one
a nobel prize
when we think about changing the system
or advancing a social cause we often
think we’ll start a charity
and charities do amazing work but
without a pathway to sustainability
they all face a common problem where
does the money come from
if donations run out but professor
unison started charity
he started a viable business and future
funding came from the design of the
business itself
borrowers would repay their debt with
interest
which meant that that could be
reinvested into more loans
to help even more poor people get out of
poverty
at scale but unlike traditional business
this business when it made a profit it
wouldn’t go up to investors to make them
richer but rather be
injected back into the business to solve
the social problem
so what this tells us is that everything
we know about business
is wrong or at the very least incomplete
we think that business is just a tool to
make
money but it is so much more than that
at its core business is just an
organizing tool to achieve a concrete
goal
and yet we think the only goal worth
chasing is profit
expressing only the selfish side of
human nature
but what about the generous side the
caring side
the selfless side why don’t we design
businesses that express those higher
order qualities
well professor eunice did and this micro
finance program is an example
of a different business a social
business
now social business has seven principles
it has to solve a social problem
it has to make a profit and not a loss
and like traditional business all
profits
go back into solving a social problem
instead of making investors richer
and unlike traditional charity where
donors never get their money back
in a social business if you put money in
you can get up to a hundred percent of
your money back
but no more like english did it has to
have
the same as or better pay and working
conditions as
normal business it has to have gender
equality
and be environmentally friendly and
finally you’ve got to do it with joy i
was overjoyed when i was asked to lead
grameen australia and of course i said
yes
because finally i didn’t have to make a
choice between profit and purpose
i could do both social business offers
both and instead of being a starving
humanitarian
i was actually paid a market wage to
help other people
and instead of feeling like a fraud in
business i could deploy the power of
business
to change the world professor eunice
says that poverty isn’t created by the
poor but rather the systems we design
for ourselves i believe this to be true
yes profit-generating business
can create wealth and it can create jobs
and lift people out of
poverty but if taken to a
one-dimensional
extreme this relentless pursuit of
profits can become dangerous
it can become greed oxham released a
report in 2016.
saying that the top 62 wealthiest people
in the world had the same amount of
wealth as the bottom 50 percent
in 2017 just one year later that number
shrunk to the top
eight billionaires how is that possible
when business as usual is meant to be
the great equalizer
because that shows that the gap between
rich and poor is growing
not shrinking but if business causes a
problem
if humans cause this problem and surely
humans can fix this problem
the only thing stopping us from changing
the world is our imagination
the only difference between little kids
in the streets of manila playing
rules and making up rules to an
imaginary game and adults doing it
is that adults forget that we can change
the rules
so let’s change the rules by upgrading
our mindset
starting with how we think of business
charity
and our role in the world professor
eunice’s vision is a world of three
zeros
a world of zero poverty zero
unemployment
and zero net carbon emissions with
social business
to redesign a new form of capitalism
that values altruism and generosity just
as much as it does
financial gain and ingram in australia
we share that vision too
our goal is to embed social business as
a viable alternative to charity and
government
permanently solving social problems in
australia and we aim to do this by
developing social businesses
and causing established institutions
like corporates and governments
to do the same examples of social
businesses
on our platform are assisted outing
they’re an online platform
that connects people with disabilities
to local activity partners
so that they can go on private outings
anywhere in the world
or all the wild roses which is a fashion
label
that makes beautiful clothes with
vintage fabric
it reduces waste and unemployment by
letting unskilled people earn a living
and learn a craft and i’m wearing them
right now
at grameen australia we aim to cause a
systems change
and if we succeed it looks like this as
many if not more social businesses as
charities
corporates creating social business
divisions instead of foundation
governments at all levels funding social
businesses
universities having social business
units degrees and mbas
and moms and dads funding social
business just the way that they do
charity
and if we do this grameen australia will
dissolve because we would have left in
place a lasting model
for solving this nation’s greatest
challenges
now as young people deciding on how to
choose
between making a living or making a
difference know
this you don’t have to choose
you can have both social business offers
both
you don’t have to have the career paths
the traditional traditional ones that
your parents and grandparents had and
chose for you because the world that
you’re growing up in
is vastly different to the one that they
did the problems are different and if
oxfam’s right the problems are growing
the idea of social business is new but
there are many examples that show that
it works
and we need more examples so that
nations and corporates can take this
seriously as a viable model
for making social change
perhaps instead of asking yourself what
do i want to be when i grow up why can’t
we ask ourselves more higher order
questions
who do i want to be when i grow up how
can i play a role
in building the kind of world that i
want to live in rather than
surviving in the world that i inherited
the world doesn’t need any more
ambitious lawyers and fund managers
what it needs are ambitious leaders that
can deploy their considerable talents
and passions
towards solving the world’s greatest
problems poverty unemployment
climate change bold leaders that will
create their own
social businesses and dollar by social
dollar
create a system that advances all of
humanity
not just eight of us
and if you do this
if you choose this you
just might be the generation that ushers
in
a world of three zeroes thank you
[Music]
you