Pamela Hartigan is an unreasonable person

PATRICK PITTMAN: What does it mean to be “unreasonable”?

PAMELA HARTIGAN: We weren’t the people who coined this. George Bernard Shaw said that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world, whereas the unreasonable one refuses to do that and tries to adapt the world to the way he thinks it should be; any hope of progress depends on the unreasonable person. Being unreasonable means that you simply refuse to accept the status quo; you’re always trying to find a better way. If the way it’s done is good, that’s great, but if it’s not, you’re really trying to improve on or change that system.

Entrepreneurs, they’re probably the most unreasonable people in the world. I used to think it must be absolutely horrible to be married to an entrepreneur, but the more I’ve worked with them, the more I’ve found it a real privilege and a challenge. They’re always seeing opportunities that we’ve just completely missed because we don’t wear those lenses. They are incredibly stubborn and they have ideas every two minutes; some of them are really terrible, a few are really great and they pursue them.

One of the things that we forget is that many of them, before they became successful, were massive failures. So failure littered their career paths and it was almost serendipitous that they came up with a way of doing it, through tweaking and tweaking and tweaking their mistakes.

I guess that’s the thing when sometimes, when people think of an entrepreneur, they have possibly some Gatsby-esque image of some ridiculously successful person, everything they do turns to gold. I’ve never met an entrepreneur like that.

No, neither have I.

It’s very much a big part of entrepreneurship, the failures and that crazy willingness to take mad risks—for instance, the woman who founded our magazine, Kate Bezar, there would be no sane reason to start a magazine in this modern world but she did and she stuck with it—it’s that drive and persistence.

Yeah and they don’t see themselves as taking risks, that’s what’s the most interesting thing. They think Of course this is going to work, you know, and so they pursue that.

One of the things that I like to tell my MBA students—they don’t appreciate this at the time but I think they do later on—is that, there are very few entrepreneurs in the world. You have to be slightly crazy to be an entrepreneur, but entrepreneurs desperately need people like the MBAs because if you’re an entrepreneur you don’t go to business school—you drop out of school.

MBAs are very focussed on the kinds of things that entrepreneurs desperately need: how do you operationalise a vision? As I’ve often said, entrepreneurs have a very difficult time managing anything, because that’s not where their strengths lie.

They know a little bit about everything. They don’t do one thing really, really well—they have this kind of lateral vision.

Whereas as, he says, the McKinseys of the world, they’re the A students—they know how to focus on something and they can drill down. I think he sort of exaggerated there but, he says, what we need to do is bring the A students with the B minus students and then you have a real winning team.

The other thing I learned is that we’ve tended to fall into the trap of hero worship. None of these people would have done what they did if they didn’t have a massively important team or couple of people behind them to really help them get going. We’ve often overlooked—in our quest for finding a superhero—the perspective on what it really takes to get something like this going from point of view of really building a team and driving that vision.

Let’s talk about social enterprise and social entrepreneurship.

I’ve met a lot of young entrepreneurs, particularly, who believe there’s no problem in the world that can’t be solved by a good bit of entrepreneurship; it’s how you go about changing the world. Do you subscribe to that view? And what is it that differentiates the social entrepreneur from your standard business entrepreneur?

I guess I should frame my answer response to that by saying I absolutely despise the term social entrepreneur. What is an entrepreneur? It’s someone who sees an opportunity, seizes that opportunity, is highly resourceful, in terms of how he or she leverages the resources needed to get that going.

A commercial and a social entrepreneur, they’re two sides of the same coin—they’re basically cut from the same cloth. The difference is that the commercial entrepreneur usually gets investors on board that are looking for a return, whereas for the social entrepreneur, money is a means to actually drive social change. I dream of the world where every entrepreneur has to be a social entrepreneur, because we cannot continue the kind of path we’re on unless that actually happens.

I find it very confusing that social entrepreneurs are immediately classified, you know, everybody says, ‘Oh these are the do-gooders of society.’ and anybody who’s doing commercial entrepreneurship is actually greedy and horrible and that’s just not the way to create the kind of world we need.

We are heading for lean economic times—

We’re already there!

Okay, so let’s just say total economic collapse or something along those lines. What’s the opportunity and the possibility for social enterprise in that space where everything’s contracting?

I think we’re in a unique time. Society’s always been in periods of chaos or turmoil but what is quite different about right now is the accelerated uncertainty.

Uncertainty has dominated the world but this acceleration of uncertainty is really quite terrifying I think. I think there are waves of opportunities in those kinds of situations and certainly some of the greatest opportunities for complete social transformation, and transformation of how we do business, are right now.

and rescuing what used to be the role of business before even the 1940s or so, when all of a sudden we developed this idea of shareholder value and maximising profit and the business of business is business and these kind of dichotomous constructs which actually wasn’t the way business was started at all. We’re going to perhaps be rescuing some of those initial concepts of what business in society meant.

You grew up in Latin America, with an Ecuadorian mother and American father. What have you kept with you from that childhood that stays with you in the work you’re doing?

I think that there was one thing that was a mixed blessing. My parents were in the diplomatic service, very high up in the diplomatic service, and that made them very, very busy. And so I was basically left in the hands of, I’d say, the hired help. The people who worked in our household were people who came from, let’s say, the less privileged areas of society, and they became sort of like my family, and I always felt that their lives were so much fun.

I’d go over to their house and there was always so much affection, no matter how little they had there was always something to do. I never felt sorry for them, was the point. I never felt that I was lucky and they were unfortunate. I never had any of that paternalistic or maternalistic feeling; on the contrary, I was a little bit in awe.

When we lived in the Dominican Republic and I’d go visit a friend of mine who lived in a grass hut, I’d hop on my little pony and ride down into the bush, and you know, there was a family, eleven of them in a grass hut.

They never treated me as if I was somehow different. That struck me massively, because they were the first of the ‘frugal innovators’, making do with whatever they had and doing things that were really quite inventive and creative.

One is constrained when one has so many resources, in a funny way. I’m not romanticising the way they lived, but the whole cult of charity—the cult of my mother’s generation, of, ‘Oh, let’s give away clothes to the poor’—never, ever, ever hit me. I was never part of that conversation, which was so steeped in Catholicism and steeped in this idea that ‘the poor are poor and we’ll always have them with us.’

And how did that experience lead you to the World Health Organisation?

I didn’t follow it because of my passion for health, I followed it because of the fact that there were health problems. People were coming around to solving them in a very inventive way, and my work at the Pan-American Health Organisation started out because I was working in community-based grassroots organisations in the Latino community in Washington, who were doing very inventive things around adolescence, joblessness and migrant issues, and we had set up a program that was extremely successful.

That’s how the World Health Organisation came to find me and ask me to take this and replicate it in Latin America. It wasn’t because of health, it was because of the inventiveness of approaching health from a development perspective.

When you find yourself in that role, working with HIV/AIDS in those communities, you can’t in any way remain romantic about poverty.

The thing that struck me was how impotent doctors were to solve issues that were fundamentally behavioural. They were fine if they could find the smallpox vaccine, or the malaria vaccine, or some pill, but if had to do with anything around human behaviour—which was why smoking, obesity, diabetes, anything that’s behavioural, including HIV, completely stymied them—they just didn’t know how to approach that.

And yet they were steeped in this very curative model and trying to understand prevention models. What I saw was a real clash between a medical approach to a health problem, and a public-health approach to a health problem. Whereas public health was much more population-based and more preventative in nature, a medical approach was much more individualised and let’s just give ’em the drug or the vaccine, and there was this real tension between the two.

And what do you think you managed to achieve in that area?

A bridge. Like everything, my life has been one big bridge-builder, from one sector to another. I’ve always operated on the fringes of disciplines, and that’s always been my forte, to be the bridge-builder between public health and medical approaches, whether it’s corporate and grassroots-based approaches, and those kind of fringe people. I’ve always been a fringe person. Those kind of fringe people are more-and-more needed in society, where we’ve siloed off different disciplines and different approaches.

We’ve come to recognise that what we now call systems thinking or design thinking or any of that kind of jargony stuff is really about looking about the whole, not about compartmentalising, analysing and forming a deductive process of how an intervention should be done.

It’s a long way from there to Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum. A long way. Explain.

I remember getting a call from a headhunter who basically said the World Economic Forum is looking for a managing director. And for me, the World Economic Forum, working in public health, was the bastion of everything that was evil about the world. I thought of the World Economic Forum as holding this annual event in the Swiss Alps where all the white CEOs got together and decided what they were going to do with rest of the world.

We have a troubled history with it here in Melbourne…

Yes I can imagine. I said to the headhunter, “I don’t know who gave you my name but I would not work for this man if he were the last man on the face of the earth.” Famous last words.

So he said, “Oh you know, he’s not such a bad guy, he wants to start a different organisation, he wants to start this foundation” And I said, “Sure he does. He’s getting old and screwed the world and now he’s got to do something to make it up”. So I gave him a couple of names and that was the end of that.

And then I kept thinking about it and I kept thinking, You know, there is an opportunity if ever I saw one. I wonder what it really is that this guy’s thinking about doing. A couple of months went by and I called the headhunter back up and I said “remember me?” and he says, “Oh yeah” and I said, “I want to find out more about this organisation that Schwab wants to start.”

That’s how I met Klaus and his wife Hilde. And Klaus didn’t have horns and a tail. He was very charming in fact; so was she. I asked him, “So what is it that you’re thinking?” and he says, “Look, I don’t really know but I’m tired of the protests.” I thought, Yeah, I bet you are, and he said, “I agree that the model of capitalism is not working for everybody, but what is the alternative? Where are the solutions? I’m tired of people on the streets protesting when they don’t talk about solutions.”

I said, “But the solutions are everywhere” and I started to talk to him about the different entrepreneurial ventures that I’d come across during my career. His response was, “Those people really exist‽”. I said, “Look I’ll make you a deal. I will write the strategy paper for your new organisation. If you like it I’ll quit my stupid job at WHO and I’ll come and do this.”

Everybody was shocked when I eventually moved over because in organisations like the World Bank, like these UN institutions, when you get to be at the level where I was, people don’t leave except in a coffin. It’s a trap. You just have massive benefits but this was just too good to pass up. So we started this adventure of the Foundation. Things that look really bad can turn out to be really great, because Klaus and Hilde’s idea was, we want to give a million dollars to the leading social entrepreneur in the world because that will raise media attention. And I remember saying,

But they were determined that they wanted this million dollar prize and so I said, “ok, let’s do the following: let’s go out and do a year of due diligence and bring together the ones that we find that we really think qualify for this million dollar recognition.”

So with my colleagues we spent a year going all around the world to visit some of the most amazing entrepreneurs, whether it’s Fazle Abed of BRAC in Bangladesh or all those superstars of the social venture world out there now. They all knew they were in the running for this million dollars and I said to Klaus and Hilde, “We want to bring them to Geneva and have you and the Board sit down and listen to their stories. We’ll put all the due-diligence paperwork together and everything else but we want you to have a chance to really listen.”

We brought thirty-five or forty of them to Geneva and, for one solid day, they stood up, they talked about what they had done and the enormous challenges they were facing still, despite being recognised in some way or another. By the end of the day, there was this magical transformation in terms of community building—these people had all heard of one another but they had never met.

Some of them were doing water sanitation, others were doing microfinance—Mohammad Yunus was there, Paolo Coelho he was on our board—and they all were transfixed with one another’s stories.

It was funny, because the entrepreneurs came and said, ‘you know, what are we going to do? The Board is fixed on this million thing and we don’t want anyone of us to get the million because we’d feel really bad if we got that million. We need three things as successful entrepreneurs: we need legitimacy for the new models we’ve created; we need access to networks of people that we would never have access to; we need capital. The Foundation isn’t big enough for the kind of capital we need to be able to support each and every one of us. But because of the fact that you’re basically a sister organisation to the World Economic Forum, you have those two first things that nobody else does: we get invited to some of these World Economic Forum meetings and we will have legitimacy in the eyes of our country, and then access to those networks, not for capital as much as, again, that legitimacy and being able to leverage.’

When I took the job at Schwab Foundation, Klaus and Hilde had invested, they said, “We have millions…” it was like, great, and how did you invest that money? “Oh in technology companies,” and I thought, Hmmm. This was 1998, they had 220 million Swiss francs, and that’s why they were able to give away this million. What happened? Within six months, we went from 220 million to 20 million with the bubble bursting. That was the best thing that ever happened to us. It forced us to have to say we’re going to invest that money in building the world’s best community of high performing entrepreneurs and in infiltrating the World Economic Forum, like the Trojan Horse, to begin to showcase these examples and infect the entire forum with this kind of idea. By not having the capital, it forced us to be completely different. And the other thing it did was, because we didn’t have money to either invest or in any way financially support our entrepreneurs, because they had said, “Invest in building the community, not in us; invest in building the community, we’ll be able to do the rest because you’ve given us this platform,” it gave us a very different relationship with those guys. It was one of pure honesty. In other words, when you’re an investor, or you’re a donor in a grant-making institution, there’s a power thing there. By not having that, what are we going to say? You can’t be part of the community?

So, that’s how I got involved and it’s like, The Eagles do that thing in Hotel California: “You can check out any time you want but you can never leave.”

Last year was a year of profound economic and social disruption around the world, full of real protests and demands for change. There were a lot of unreasonable people out there demanding unreasonable things.

Reasonable people, I would say!

Yes! Demanding reasonable things. You can be boundlessly optimistic in the world of social enterprise but the credit crunch I would imagine brought, perhaps some realism in? Realism’s the wrong word, but…

Yeah, sobering. It was sobering. And also confusing, because many of them, they’ve grown up believing that business is a good thing—and it is a good thing—and the idea of having to completely rethink the way business has been done for the last twenty or twenty-five years, we’ve completely lost all perspective in terms of the role of business in society, I think was a very sobering realisation from them. You know, what can I say?

What’s on your horizon at the moment that’s exciting you?

I get very excited about the idea of, as I said, companies that are coming to us and increasingly wanting to understand how entrepreneurship, whether it’s institutional entrepreneurship, or social entrepreneurship, can foster different approaches within their own companies, whether it’s students getting massively excited about coming up with new approaches, or working for organisations that are innovating in the social and environmental space, there’s just so much going on. I feel like I’m drinking water through a firehose.

We’re on the cusp of building this massive ecosystem comprised of many different stakeholders around social change, and it involves all kinds of sectors, and bringing all those things together. I’m like a pig in mud. It’s too good to be true.

Is there anything that’s tempering that optimism? Anything that risks undoing that good work?

Oh, lots, yeah, every day. Look at the world, it’s a mess! The issue of climate change is something that’s very real, and I just can’t believe that our leaders are so absolutely impotent to get off their butts and do something about this. I feel a tragic loss of leadership on the part of the Obama administration, which came in with so much hope and has just so squandered so many opportunities to do the right thing. It makes me wish Michelle Obama had become the president instead of Barack. I just feel, every time I go to the States, that’s on my mind—what an incredible tragedy.

And just the increasing issue of youth hopelessness here in the UK. I don’t know what it’s like in Australia, but the unemployment rates of young people here in this country who aren’t very well educated and who are not in any kind of job training, what they call the not employed or in employment training, the NEETs, it’s growing, it’s despairing, it’s causing all kinds of social malfunction, and you can just see the gap widening and widening, at a time when budgets are being cut more and more. There’s tonnes of stuff to get really depressed about!

What would it take to break that malaise? In terms of the work you’re doing, what would it take to get us back on a path of hope?

To me, it all boils down to a loss of trust. One can say, Oh, it’s education, but it really is a massive loss of trust in the institutions that you thought were there to actually support, whether it’s education, or legal frameworks, or any kind social cohesion. It’s just a massive loss of trust between individuals, communities, governments and their citizens.

You know, it’s not easy to regain that trust, and I think the fact that, despite this complete financial debacle and the fact that it’s cost taxpayers millions of dollars, and we keep seeing the CEOs walk out with these big compensations, the whole thing is set up against doing the right thing. I did a speech the other day in Canada and referred to the Humpty Dumpty who fell off the wall and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put him together again.

I think we need to find completely different ways of operating. I think we’re looking at that, when we question capitalism, when we question what it’s done, when we talk about sustainable capitalism, when you see these movements around the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street or Los Indignados in Spain, you see a tremendous amount of frustration.

Those are young people, who are seeing that they have no future the way the world is set up against them. There’s a hell of a lot to do, but you have to remain, not stupidly optimistic, but realistically optimistic, if that is possible. You cannot give up, you have to continue, you have to really try to do the best, and have a sense of purpose to what you’re doing.

Are there any specific projects that you’ve seen springing from that rage that justify that optimism?

Not springing out of that, because frankly I find all of those sort of movements just that. It’s an expression of people’s outrage, but there hasn’t been any leadership that’s going to take this in an interesting way and actually come up with something that’s different. It’s just an expression of people’s frustration.

Out of those specific things? No. But I think that many different things, where technology blending with social innovation etcetera has been a way of really coming up with very concrete approaches to reaching those who are at the fringes of economy and of society. Whether you look at what’s happened with mobile banking or mobile anything in Africa, people are really coming up with solutions to using their assets in a different way, to doing more with less, so to speak.

One thing that interests me a lot, particularly when talking about social enterprise, is when we talk about charity, it’s almost in a past tense. Can social enterprise and charity co-exist? Is there space for both? Does one negate the other?

Yeah, I guess there are two aspects here: one is the legal structure. You can be legally structured as a charity and be highly entrepreneurial. It doesn’t have to do with the legal framework. It has to do with your approach.

So, some of the entrepreneurs form their ventures as not-for-profits and are highly leveraged, if I take the case of somebody like Wendy Kopp and Teach for America. Wendy Kopp was this student at Princeton University and, for her senior thesis, she wrote on, ‘How do I actually change conditions in this country so that where you are born or where you grow up doesn’t determine the rest of your life.’ So that if you’re born in a poor community in the United States you’re going to do this.

She set about basically constructing very much a model of the Peace Corps which was, how do I immediately get as many graduates from the best schools in this country to want to go and teach in the worst schools in America? She told me how her thesis faculty member had written on her paper: “You are totally deranged.” Talk about unreasonable.

And she started going, knocking on doors of people to get her started on this and she thought, I’m going to aim for 2500 recruits. She also tells this story of how she finally knocked on one door—the guy was a CEO of a major company and she got in because of her Princeton professor—and she sat down and told him the whole story and he said, “I’m going to write you a $30,000 cheque. But actually not because I really believe in what you’re doing, because I think you’re crazy, but because I feel so sorry for your parents.”

So there she was with a $30,000 cheque, and that’s how Teach for America started. Today there are about, I don’t know, between 20,000 applicants for 250 places at Teach for America; they’re all graduates from Harvard and Princeton and Yale and the leading schools in the US and they’re all competing for the privilege to work for two years in rural America.

Wendy is a non-profit, she does not earn an income, she doesn’t have a revenue stream that’s coming in because of X, she doesn’t do consulting on the side and put in Teach for America, she’s highly leveraged. She’s been able to get public companies, governments, local community groups; even the teachers’ union to actually all contribute.

Now how could you not say this woman is not an entrepreneur? She’s totally changed the system. So it’s not about the fact that she set it up as a for-profit or not-for-profit, forget all that stuff. It’s what you are doing to transform the system. That’s what entrepreneurs do. It’s not about, “Oh, we sell Christmas cards on the side but we’re really working over here with this other thing.”

It’s not about how you earn the money, and I think that’s a big mistake that Britain has done and I hope Australia doesn’t follow in its shoes, you know, in its path. It’s not about how you generate income. It’s what you do to change the system.

For people that are starting out in this space, from all of the incredible people you’ve spoken to for your book and through your work, what are some of the key lessons that you would have picked up?

One thing that I would say is that these folks have had many ideas before one idea really took hold and, as I said, the road to success is been paved with setbacks.

The greatest asset, and it’s sort of a contradiction in terms, on the one hand how do you know when an idea’s a good idea? How do you identify an opportunity? Who knows? I have known so many people that are like, this is the best idea! This is the greatest opportunity! And you’re like, maybe it is or maybe it isn’t. I can give you an example that I’ll always remember as long as I live.

Mel Young is an entrepreneur who started something called The Big Issue in Scotland. John Bird started it in England and Mel was a journalist who took this one step up and his life has been dedicated to solving the issue of homelessness, which is manifested in different ways in different societies. But then he created the international network of street papers, which brings together all of these different groups from all over the world and he was quite successful at that. And then he called me up one day, back in 2000, and he said,

Do you know, that idea took hold and is massively successful and is called the Homeless World Cup. When Mel told me about the Homeless World Cup I thought he was a complete idiot and he’d lost his mind.

So don’t take advice from me; who knows what germ is going to seed and grow and become what it’s become? The Homeless World Cup actually played in Melbourne, right? He said it was amazing, he said Australia was the best place to do this and for two reasons: because Aussies love the underdog and they love sports. And bringing these two things together was just absolutely magical.

So it’s been quite interesting, how such an idea, which I thought was half-assed, actually take off. So there’s no telling what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. They just try it and they keep at it and then after a while if it doesn’t get it right the first time or the second time they keep tweaking it and maybe they give it up but it’s hard to tell.

Did you find yourself a little less willing to call people’s ideas terrible after that?

No, still, I can’t help myself.

But I’d imagine you’re dealing with people who can’t help themselves and do it anyway.

But it’s okay. At least I’m open and humble about the idea that I’m totally wrong on so I think that’s okay.