This past weekend I was — like many others, I expect — badly jolted by the devastating news of Leila Janah’s untimely death at the age of 37.
I wasn’t a member of Leila’s inner circle, but I had the privilege of knowing her just a little, and had looked forward to getting to know her further. She had graciously shared her experience and insights with my Innovative Social Enterprises students at Tufts University last spring, enthusiastically and patiently answering their questions and encouraging them to look beyond small or cautious ideas. Visiting the class shortly after her diagnosis, she was characteristically bright, charismatic, and infectiously optimistic about both her own and others’ endeavors to use the tools of social enterprise and commerce to transform lives and economies.
Leila was extraordinary, and her demise is a huge loss not only to all who knew her, but to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people who will never meet her but nevertheless benefit from her legacy. Her sudden absence is jarring and painful.
But rather than focus on what we have all lost, her death has prompted me to consider how her endeavors illuminate what is possible when we adopt higher expectations.
Reversing poverty via three world-changing social enterprises and a best-selling book (among other things)
Let’s be clear: Leila was a titan, and most of us will never achieve on her level. As founder of Samasource, Samaschool, and LXMI, and also as author of Give Work, Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, and other achievements, Leila was a uniquely accomplished changemaker.
However, one of the reasons she was so extraordinarily effective in her many endeavors is that she consistently adhered to, communicated, and acted on her conviction that by fundamentally changing the expectations of market objectives that organizations could fulfill, and the methods they could employ to achieve them, both for-profit and non-profit enterprises could reshape the economic structures that perpetuate poverty, and break it instead.
That kind of impact doesn’t come from making donations, or from tinkering around the edges of existing models to make incremental improvements in hiring, labor management, supply chain, or other practices, although all of those curatives are of course urgently necessary.
Incremental changes produce immediate, linear, readily measurable outcomes. But that is only the very beginning of what is achievable. Transformative impact comes from designing enterprises with the express objective of creating the intended impact, and then structuring everything else around that objective. Leila demonstrated that realignment of assumptions and expectations can yield systemic shifts.
In the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and, ultimately, destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.
— Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
We shouldn’t need to be constantly reminded of this intuitively obvious fact.
But since we so readily and persistently revert to demonstrably false assumptions such as talent as a limited resource and value as something created only by people who are already privileged, we benefit from being regularly disabused of these and other deeply rooted misconceptions.
Leaders like Leila and Rev. Dr. King remind us that the seemingly intractable societal, environmental, or other ills we decry are not unavoidable horrors. They are not even “externalities.”
Reality is much more terrifying: extreme poverty and other calamities are created and propagated by the very “best practices” that treat them as inevitable and immutable. This is true in every aspect of human society, perhaps especially so in finance.
But that damning realization is also liberating and energizing: after all we can change our thinking, revise our practices. We can choose to abandon destructive practices that reliably produce destructive results. We can instead employ constructive means to achieve constructive ends.
We can rebuild it!
This is not a hypothetical proposition. Reinventure Capital is representative of a nascent community of fund managers employing constructive evidence-based means to achieve a broad array of higher-value ends, comprising both transformative shifts and financial returns.
For our part, Reinventure Capital is building a fund focused exclusively on US-based expansion stage (breakeven or so) companies, led and substantially controlled by people of color and women, poised to become the economic engines that will positively reshape sectors, societies, markets, and lives. And we know from observable evidence, including Ed’s track record, that disciplined adherence to this ends-driven practice generates both social impact and non-concessionary returns to investors.*
If you’re ready to commit capital to fulfill higher standards and more constructive ends, please contact us. We will be delighted to welcome you into the community. And if you are already actively investing in overlooked, undervalued managers or founders, or otherwise redesigning investment practices to achieve transformative outcomes, please share, so others can join you!
Even if you didn’t know Leila, now you know what is possible. As she wrote in Give Work, “We don’t need more people like me. We need more people like you.”
Image credit: Wikipedia / Christopher Prentiss Michel
*While there’s no such thing as a guarantee in investing and no one can reliably predict the future, Ed’s prior track record delivering 32%IRR to investors provides direct evidence that it is indeed possible to consistently invest for both financial returns and social value creation. If you are an accredited investor and would like to learn more about investments that can advance social, racial, and gender equity by supporting high-value companies led by women and/or people of color, please contact us to start that conversation.
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