Mission and Motivation

Katherine wakes up every morning with a fire in her belly. As she walks to her office in San Francisco, she gets tremendous satisfaction walking past the headquarters of corporations that have adopted her company’s product. For several of them, she’s actually calculated how many hours a year they save because they can now seamlessly share documents and other vital information, and that number is in the millions for enterprises in downtown San Francisco alone. She is a marketing manager at Dropbox.com and is passionate about the speed with which its product is transforming how people work.

Joe feels the same way about his work as a transportation official in New York City. He bikes to work these days along streets that used to be forbidding to bicycle riders. He is a fiend for measurement—his agency has taken to just painting new bike lanes in place and letting the data on ridership determine whether they stay or go within a few months. He is still amazed at the feeling he gets in his gut when he stops at key intersections and sees crowds of new bike commuters thronging the street.

Katherine and Joe are both in the business of making change. They are motivated by a vision and values about what it means to make a contribution. Their choices about how to roll out their respective innovations are largely guided by what can make the biggest difference to those they are serving—customers in Katherine’s case, and citizens in Joe’s.

The only real difference in mission and motivation between the private and social sectors is the degree to which they can easily be boiled down to money. In business startups, there is a presumption that the value you are adding can easily translate into dollars and cents and that, eventually, your startup can collect that value in monetary form. Core to Katherine’s marketing case is that those millions of hours of time saved by workers add up to tens of millions of dollars in savings and ultimately in value to shareholders. In most cases, her own motivation is measured in the amount of money she will personally gain from fulfilling her mission as well. In successful for-profit startups, alignment of motivations from top to bottom is a crucial ingredient to success.

Joe’s new bike lanes also save money, but in far more diverse ways (less traffic, reduced gasoline use, reduced commute times, increased commuter health, and better air quality, among others), and those benefits accrue to a far more diverse set of stakeholders than employees and shareholders. The financial benefit in the social sector is, often by design, quite diffuse, with large pools of beneficiaries. Funders rarely expect a direct payback, but they are looking for benefits that accrue as broadly as possible. And Joe may be personally motivated by just one or two of the benefits of his work, like reducing air pollution or increasing exercise.

Katherine and Joe are both about creating change. In the social sector, impact remains the primary metric of success, while in business that impact must almost immediately translate into financial gain. This difference has several general implications (as well as some specific implications that we’ll look at in the following chapters).