A new, world-changing idea can spring from something as simple as asking a person you don’t know out for coffee. That’s one of the messages Jean Case, chief executive of the Case Foundation seeks to drive home in her recently published book Be Fearless: 5 Principles for a Life of Breakthrough and Purpose.
Stretching out beyond one’s familiar network of contacts for an informal coffee meeting can stimulate the thought process and potentially lead to new ways to achieve success.
There isn’t a magic pill or a “secret sauce” to transform people into effective business leaders or social entrepreneurs, Case says. But she’s boiled down the essential ingredients to a set of prerequisites for people looking to make a difference in the world.
Lasting change, she writes, can be sparked at the individual level. In her book, she provides sketches of people who have achieved success and distills lessons from their experiences into a set of principles that emerging leaders can follow.
“People everywhere have ideas about how to build a better world,” says Case. “But often they’re stuck believing they don’t have what it takes, or maybe they don’t have a framework for getting started.”
Finding Success
As the title of the book suggests, people often succeed because they are undaunted by the challenges they face. But success is a result of more than intestinal fortitude or a firm resolve. Being fearless, in Case’s view, can be put into practice by following a set of five principles:
Make a big bet. Every history-making transformation, she writes, has occurred when people go for revolutionary change.
Be bold and take risks. For Case, taking risks doesn’t mean taking a blind leap off a cliff. In her view, risk means having the guts to do something novel and then using a long process of trial and error to improve on it.
Make failure matter. Risk-taking will naturally lead to failures. The key is to understand what went wrong and make adjustments. Or, as Case succinctly puts it: “Crash and learn.”
Reach beyond your bubble. Most change isn’t the result of a “lone genius,” Case writes. Meeting with people who have had diverse experiences — even a cup of coffee with someone outside of your normal group of contacts — can spur innovation.
Let urgency conquer fear. Instead of getting caught up in questions like “what if we’re wrong” that can paralyze one with fear, success comes when the compelling need outweighs doubts and setbacks.
Channeling Inspiration
Following the principles doesn’t guarantee success. But they were consistently present in each successful venture related by Case, whether in business, politics, or social change.
One of the stories that illustrates the risk-taking spirit Case embraces is about Jessica Jackley, who channeled her inspiration to help improve millions of lives.
After hearing Nobel Prize-winner Muhammad Yunus speak about the potential of microfinance, Jackley quit her job and moved to Africa with little more than a digital camera and a basic website. She took pictures of people seeking small loans and posted them on the site. The first year, Kiva processed $500,000 in small loans. Since then, borrowers in 83 countries have received $1 billion in financing through the service.
Like other successful social entrepreneurs profiled by Case, Jackley didn’t have a major institution behind her. She was guided by her own grit and sense of urgency.
“We tried to debunk the myth that it takes special genius, the right connections, or the right school” to make a difference, Case says. “Ordinary people from all over the world have done extraordinary things.”
Megaphone Philanthropy
The role of philanthropy in Case’s “fearless” model varies depending on the risk tolerance of the donor, she says. An important thing donors can do regardless of how much risk they want to take with their grant-making budget is to “put a megaphone” behind new ideas that are having an impact so stories of success can be shared.
When Case and her husband, Steve, the founder of America Online, started the foundation at a relatively young age, she says they knew it would not be a “coda” to long careers in business. Instead, with potentially decades of giving ahead of them, they sought to actively work on their giving so they could maximize the benefits of their grants.
It made the most sense for the couple to incorporate into their foundation the model they used as entrepreneurs. In part, their business background and their faith in using market power to spur social change led them to focus on impact investing. It also meant they would take the process of trial and error they incorporated into building an internet pioneer and put it to use as they deployed their wealth philanthropically.
PlayPumps Fall Flat
Failure still hurts, says Case. But when her philanthropic efforts result in a tailspin, Case says that owning up to a misstep rather than trying to sweep it under the rug helps the foundation make progress.
Case was first forced to make such a decision following the foundation’s attempt to provide clean water in sub-Saharan Africa through the use of PlayPumps. The premise seemed simple: Children would play on merry-go-rounds connected to wells to pump clean water to remote villages in 10 countries.
After a few years, it became apparent that the program was not living up to its own quality standards and the concept was unlikely to spread to new locations. Case could have continued to funnel money into the project. Or she could have quietly cut funding without the glare of public scrutiny. Instead, she decided to publicize the failure in an essay called “The Painful Acknowledgment of Coming up Short.”
Following the water-pump failure, Case writes, the foundation began to formally incorporate failure into its operations. It set up “safe tables” where project partners could talk about where they came up short without fear of reprisal. And the grant maker hosted “fail fests” that gathered social entrepreneurs who shared what didn’t work with their peers.
The ability — even the requirement — that organizations admit failure has worked itself into the way Case assesses its grantees. The foundation uses the colors of a traffic light to grade projects. Green means smooth sailing. Yellow means some adjustments are necessary. And red means a project is in danger of failing.
Too few red projects means the foundation isn’t being bold enough, she says. Getting a red flag doesn’t spell doom for a grantee. In its grant agreements, Case says the foundation makes it very clear that grantees have the flexibility to change course as needed and that Case and her team will be at the table helping design new approaches.
It can be tough for nonprofits to get used to the idea, Case says. But younger big donors with an entrepreneurial mindset may help shift attitudes.
“One of the things that has made nonprofits a little more risk-averse is this idea that if they are honest with donors about the failures they are seeing, their donors will walk away,” she says. “But I think there is a class of donors out there, particularly living donors, who understand how great things get built and will be there with the nonprofit during the highs and the lows.”
