Founder stories don’t really matter
Posted on April 20, 2012 at 6:25 am
As an entry for the Day Without Dignity 2012, I was sent a typical White in Shining Armor founder story. Someone that had left their good job to volunteer in Africa and ended up starting their own nonprofit at great expense to themselves. We’ve all heard stories similar to this before.
But here’s the thing, the personal journey of the founder doesn’t matter guarantee good aid.
A compelling founder story, such as Greg Mortenson’s, doesn’t mean that the nonprofit is successful or even moderately helpful. A boring founder story doesn’t mean that the nonprofit is floundering or failing. There is no correlation between the compellingness of a founder story and the competency of their nonprofit. And yet we keep focusing on them.
Katherine Lucey, founder of Solar Sister, wrote about the pressure for a good founder story during the “Three Cups of Tea” debate. I’ve asked permission to repost it below.
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Eureka and Other Myths
A Reflection on “Three Cups of Tea”
Inevitably I am asked, “When did you have the moment of inspiration for Solar Sister?” Every interview, every grant application, every conversation leads to the same breathless anticipation that I will reveal the secret moment of inspiration. There is such a palpable desire for an origination story, an epic tale of good versus evil, a lost soul finding redemption or a single moment of inspiration. The Eureka!
Sir Herald Evans wrote about “The Eureka Myth” for the Harvard Business Review back in 2005, “Innovation, cast as the triumph of human imagination, may be the most romantic discipline in business. And the eureka moment, that epiphany of total clarity in which a breakthrough invention or discovery occurs, is the most romantic aspect of innovation. In fact, the eureka moment still looms so large in the folklore of business that it overshadows the historically far more important matter of how an invention reaches the marketplace as a practical innovation. As companies turn their sights anew to top-line growth, it is time to see the eureka moment—indeed the whole gestalt of “breakthrough thinking”—for what it is: largely a myth.”
Real solutions to real problems don’t happen that way. They don’t just pop out like the Greek goddess Athena leaping from Zeus’s head, fully grown and armed. If there is a “Eureka!” moment, it is the result of long hours of deliberate consideration, of study and preparation and open-ended learning, of trying and failing and trying again. True innovation is more likely to result from Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 Hours” than from a single moment of inspiration.
I once told an interviewer that there was no ‘moment’. I told her that Solar Sister evolved over time in response to market conditions. I told her that my involvement in Africa is the result of a long and not very straight path. She said point blank, “Well, that’s no good. We’ll have to think of something else.” I fully appreciate a good tale, and believe that the best way to connect to people is through story. But I worry when the desire for story as entertainment, when the need for a ‘hook’ becomes so necessary in order to connect people to important issues facing humanity that we are willing to throw over the staid truth for a more interesting, sexier version.
I am thinking of this today as I read about 60 Minutes upcoming expose of Greg Mortenson’s “Three Cups of Tea”. According to 60 Minutes, Mortenson’s origination story is fabricated. In a brief rebuttal posted on the Central Asia Institute website, Mortenson defends himself, but his comments do not exactly inspire confidence. 60 Minutes goes on to talk about financial and program discrepancies which are damning if true. It will be a shame for all the work that Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute has accomplished and all it could accomplish if Mortenson is discredited.
Mortenson’s work to build schools is inspiration enough without the getting-lost-bonding-with-the-locals bit. But I can imagine that perhaps he submitted a first draft with a somewhat more mundane version of the origins of his work, and his editor said to him point blank, “Well, that’s no good. We’ll have to think of something else.”
According to Sir Harold, even Thomas Edison crafted a Eureka story, “Admittedly, the eureka myth is seductive. Thomas Edison, who usually stressed that invention was the easy bit, forgot his own 1%-inspiration-to-99%-perspiration rule in describing to a newspaper reporter how the incandescent light bulb came to him as a gift from the gods. The reporter wrote: ‘Sitting one night in his laboratory, Edison began abstractedly rolling between his fingers a piece of compressed lampblack mixed with tar for use in his telephone….His thoughts continued far away, his fingers meanwhile mechanically rolling over the little piece of tarred lampblack until it had become a slender filament.’ In fact, Edison’s laboratory notebooks suggest that he had considered carbon early on but discarded it in favor of platinum because carbon burned up too quickly. It was a new prospect—evacuating most of the air from the bulb—that induced Edison to return to carbon.” Despite Edison mythologizing the origin story, we benefit today from his invention.
I hope that the allegations about Greg Mortenson prove to be false, and that the work we have all been inspired by is not just a lie. I believe that Mortenson’s CAI has accomplished much in creating awareness about the need for education in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, especially for the girl-children of that region who have not had a place on the world’s agenda. Like Icarus, Mortenson may be punished for flying too high, but I hope that his work survives the fall.
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Guides by Good Intentions are Not Enough
Good Intentions’ Guide to Holiday Charitable Giving
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While I agree that a great founder story may not have made the cut for “Day Without Dignity,” I would argue that having an organization’s founder tell a compelling story at an event is a great tool for connecting a cause to donors. Why a cause matters to one person can give another a reason to buy in and support it as well.
I’m also curious if you take the same issue with sharing the story of why a country national decided to start a certain initiative or organization to support a project – be it a school or a microfinance initiative – in their home country. If Good Intents is starting to write off the intentions and locally-driven help-our-country-grow projects started by local staff, I think the aim of these conversations has moved in uncomfortable and borderline hypocritical territory – who are any of us (sitting in our US HQ offices) to say what locally-initiated projects are good? Isn’t that us trying to be “white knights in shining armor” in a different way?
Hello Amanda,
Even with local initiatives, I would argue that the founders story is not important. With all aid – be it local or from abroad – it’s the actual impact the organization is having that matters. Even locally, great founders stories do not guarantee good projects, nor do boring stories mean it’s a bad project. Nor does being a local organization guarantee that it’s doing a good job or being a international aid project mean it’s doing a bad job.
This year’s Day Without Dignity focused on local stories because with all the Whites in Shining Armor stories out there it creates a real impression that there are no local people starting their own initiatives, so we wanted to bring attention to the fact that there are many people working hard to improve their own communities.
I wrote about this particular founder story because it was recently sent to me and struck a chord.
I agree that founder stories are a great fundraising tool, but I am concerned that they take the focus off of critically looking at the organization’s work and instead focus on an emotional connection with the founder themselves. Just because you have an emotional reaction to the story of the founder doesn’t mean their work is worth funding.
Entirely agree that a story doesn’t make a project worth funding. But at the same time, a story (this hits a nerve with me, as our local Kenyan founder for OHMH comes to the states to tell his story of why he got out of journalism and into the work he does and what we’ve achieved to date) can be a meaningful tool for connecting to new supporters. At the end of the day, our local staff couldn’t do any of the work they do at OHMH (provide a loving home for the girls, send them to a private school, build a tilapia farm to raise fish & sell to local hotels as a revenue generating program, provide clean water taps for community members nearby…) without the funding support of our US and European donors. Who often connect to the organization and donate because they connect with Anthony’s story & personal willingness to do a career 180 because of a personal experience he had with street youth.
That said, I acknowledge that there are orgs with great stories but that don’t do great work. I just think that the lead paragraph & headline for the post dismiss founder stories entirely, in both the “is it smart aid” and communications realm.
Greg Mortenson grew up in Tanzania, where his parents were Lutheran missionaries where his father started a teaching hospital, called Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center. I served there briefly with a stint in orthopedics in 2003. Although there is little funding, the hospital has long been the primary care provider and teaching center for a huge area, and it is run by locals.
I’ve not met Greg, however after hearing and reading about him, and hearing Tanzanians talk about his father, it seems that they were both shy, reserved, and tenacious hard workers.
Like his father, I do not believe that Greg promoted himself as a ‘white saviour’, and he was constantly striving to put the locals in charge, so his work could go on longer after he was out of the picture. From all reports, it is obvious that both were uncomfortable in public and wanted to raise funds as fast as possible, get the job done and move on to life in obscurity.
I would suggest to anyone who wants to use Mortenson’s failures to elevate themselves, to actually review the Montana Attorney General’s investigation report, and to actually go and review the Central Asia Institute financials. They tell a completely different story than what the media and critics have portrayed.
His critics, who seem to operate mostly out of jealousy and envy, would be wise to also at least try and put themselves in Mortenson’s shoes and look at life through his lenses. And be married to a wife who calls him ‘ a product of the third world and an ‘African’ and not ‘American’.
They would not see the self righteous ‘knight in shining armour, or egotistical fame seeking power monger that they seek to destroy, but a bumbly, quiet soul who against every grain in his psyche forced himself to go into the public arena out of his passion to help educate girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Even his harshest critics do not deny the good works he has done.
My take from this, besides my disappointment that hundreds of thousands of girls will not be able to get an education, is to see how so many people use Mortenson’s flaws and mistakes to point out how good and uprighteous they are, or how good their nonprofit is. We all make mistakes, no one is perfect, and if someone bothers you so much, why not go out and do it right yourself, or write your own book, instead of making arm-chair analysis – to feel good?
How many Americans have actually had tea with the Taliban, or been near a suicide bomber when he exploded, or argued Islam with Muslim religious leaders, or seen hundreds of children dying in refugee camps, or spoken with most of the senior U.S. military commanders, or been to the most remote parts of Afghanistan, or spent half of the year away from home and family for two decades? That seems like a compelling story to me.
Thanks Kathryn for your insight and look into ‘founder’s stories’.
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very useful