S1, E4: Beyond Impact Jobs: How to Create Change in Any Role

[00:00:00] Never settle for less than you need to live. You can’t build an economy on the basis of asking people for stuff for free all the time. And you can’t be impactful if you can’t eat. You can’t be impactful if you can’t pay rent. There’s a reason it’s called work. Did you know the average person will work 90, 000 hours in their lifetime?

What if you could use those hours to find fulfillment and become a disruptor for good? Welcome to the work that’s worth it podcast. I’m Georgi Enthoven And I’m here to demonstrate that an ambitious meaningful and rewarding career is not just a dream It’s achievable each episode. We’ll dive into conversations with global change makers who’ve cracked the code on computing Finding income and impact.

If you’ve ever felt like you were torn between a paycheck and your purpose, or maybe you simply yearn for more purpose, you’re going to be exposed to the ambitious humans who have done it themselves ready to make your work worth it. Let’s get started.[00:01:00]

I am thrilled to introduce you to a new contact of mine, a legend in the impact space, Mark Newberg. Mark has been working in the heart of the impact economy for nearly 15 years. In simple terms, through Mark’s work, he is committed to solving problems worth solving and making complex challenges simple to understand.

That is one of his true gifts. Today, he is the founder and president of Stockbridge Advisors. which is an impact management consulting firm. Stockbridge guides institutions, corporations, and organizations across sectors on the integration of impact into the core of their enterprises to improve performance and achieve real world outcomes.

But there’s a treasure trove of experience under his belt. He has led the Impact Policy Initiative at a federal level, served [00:02:00] as a post Katrina policy advisor to the New Orleans City Council, developed income strategies for major philanthropies and multinational organizations, created quality jobs frameworks for corporations, and advised numerous high growth impact startups on initial business organization and growth strategies.

In fact, at one point in his career, he claims to have had one of the longest titles in Washington, which was Senior Disaster Analyst in the Executive Office of Disaster Strategic Planning and Operations of the United States Small Business Administration. And yes, he says all of that fit on one business card, which is something we all used way back when.

Mark is also an innovator in residence at the Center of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Tulane, a mentor for MassChallenge and the Harvard iLabs, a judge for the Louisiana Startup Prize, and an advisor to the Christensen [00:03:00] Institute, and so much more. Let’s welcome Mark. Hi, Mark. I’m so happy to have you here today on the Work That’s Worth It podcast.

Thank you for being here. Well, thanks for asking. I’m happy to be here. As I hear it, it’s a cold day in Boston. The things that we know we have to put up with in order to choose to live near home. Well, I want to just jump right in for my listeners, and I wanted to ask you, what makes your work worth it?

It’s a great question, and it’s not a question that was really asked when I was growing up, but the short answer is, I get to solve problems worth solving. My whole career has ended up one way or another being shaped by Impact and the Impact Economy, and I didn’t know that was an option when I went to college, partly because it wasn’t an option, but as I’ve gotten ever Older or more experienced choose whichever one you want.

Like [00:04:00] it’s become clearer and clearer to me that the, the set of skills I’ve developed that focus on enjoying problem solving turned into this thing that was both useful and helpful and enjoyable. And I was able to build a career around it. Wow, that’s amazing. What is it that you are doing these days for your career?

So I ended up launching my own impact management consulting firm about six years ago. And the reality of how that works is we’re kind of like senior advisors to the heads of things. So people who have the authority to say yes to doing things, whether it’s companies or investment institutions, foundations, nonprofits, whatever.

for impact and impact value creation and integrating it into the core of what they do in order to create better outcomes and especially for the for profits more value. That’s amazing. I don’t know if [00:05:00] it’s possible, but are you able to walk us through an example of something? Like, I don’t know if you can mention a client or sure, or just in theory, I will do this without mentioning specific names.

Okay. Right. So say you’re a manufacturing company. And you make something that in and of itself isn’t impact. You’re not making a solar panel. You’re not making a medical device that improves patient outcomes. You’re just making an everyday product. But you make it well and you sell it. But the real, the real impact in your company comes from where you make it.

In call it a city in the Midwest that has experienced manufacturing decline and who you make it with, meaning employees who you want to build good career pathways for, and that that’s part of your [00:06:00] brand. What’s the framework that you use? How do you integrate that into your management so that you can take advantage of some things that, you know, have research in the Harvard Business Review that say, The longer the tenure of the average employee at a company, the more profitable that average company becomes.

But we don’t, we don’t talk about that all that often when we argue about Milton Friedman, but it’s fundamentally good sound management driven by impact. Building things like that is fascinating to me. Oh, that’s amazing. I love that you use the word fascinating. When we had talked previously, you had mentioned that it doesn’t have to be, in quotes, an impact company.

And I love that you brought up this example, because really people can have impact wherever they work. I was talking to somebody earlier today, and there’s sort of a screen that I use for when I decide if I’m going to work with [00:07:00] somebody. Or that somebody who represents an entity. And it’s a, it’s a two part screen.

Maybe a three part screen. One, are you a jerk? As I’ve often said, authenticity never goes out of style. Unless you’re authentically a jerk. In which case the advice is different and I’m usually not the one giving it. Two, is your business at worst net neutral? You can’t be actively doing things intentionally that would be screened out in an impact investing process.

Those are legitimate businesses. They can make a ton of money. I’m not interested in working with them. And the third is I have to see something where My approach to impact and impact value creation and integration can help improve outcomes. Make the company better, make the foundation more effective, achieve something that’s defined [00:08:00] as what we want to achieve, that’s beneficial to communities or society in general.

And then if I can get those three to line up, then I get excited. No one can tell because I don’t have vocal inflection or facial expressions. But you’re excited and you enjoy what you do, but it sounds like you’re living your values. Your, your values are tied closely to how you conduct your work. One of the things that I wish I had been told in law school, and I don’t practice, I never wanted to practice, and in fact, never took the bar so that no one could ever make me practice.

I wish that we had been told that it was possible. To find the alignment so that you don’t have to think about your values in the work. It just is what you do and who you are. So you get in the right pond and then you’re not having to manage your boundaries all the time. We’ve seen the cartoon where someone [00:09:00] outside asks a fish how the water is and the fish asks another fish what’s water.

Yeah. I mean, am I in the impact economy? Yes, I am. Do I think about it every day in terms of, am I in the impact economy? No, it’s just, it’s the economy. It’s a part of the economy. That’s where I get to spend my time. That’s amazing. You have so many interesting stories. And one of the ones that you had highlighted top level for me before we talked on the podcast is that you wrote the initial draft of the impact investing policy for the white house.

And I don’t know if you can just share a little bit of insight of when that was and sort of help us all get up to speed with what was that early draft like, and, um, how did that happen? Sure. So co wrote, I’m not going to do the DC thing and claim credit. But so here, here’s what happened. I grew up in Boston or outside Boston, [00:10:00] went to Tulane undergrad, Tulane law school, Hurricane Katrina evacuation, went back, was an advisor of the New Orleans city council for a year and a half or so post Katrina, then burned out on disaster all day, every day and went back to Boston to.

What I called D Katrina and it took a while, but then right around the 2008 election, I started thinking I might be ready to do government again. And I ultimately got brought to the small business administration as a nonpolitical appointee. It’s called the schedule a to do disaster recovery policy. And a group of us all roughly the same age came into government at roughly the same time in different departments with different titles, different career pathways.

But we all found each other around something at that point that was called social enterprise and social entrepreneurship. And we sort of realized that it was going to be a thing. And there was going to be a federal role, but [00:11:00] nobody knew what it was. And since nobody knew what it was, nobody was really in charge of it.

So in our infinite stupidity, we decided we should be in charge of it. This is where the story. This is like the choose your own adventure stories where you hope you get it right. This is where it worked out for me. And. All of us. One of the group of us worked for Sonal Shah, who was the head of the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, and set up a meeting, and in that meeting, I started explaining why we needed a policy, why I thought we needed a policy process, what it would mean, what government could do, what it would mean for government to acknowledge that this sector existed, and that in order to to have a policy process.

We needed a white paper to even explain what it was we thought we were talking about and what we could do and what we should be looking at and how there were examples hiding in plain sight of government already having done things that were impactful. And Sonal looked at [00:12:00] me and pointed at me and said, yeah, you know what?

You’re right. You write it. And I went, Oh God. But instead of getting fired, that’s how I ended up co authoring the initial impact investing policy framework for the White House. And I had the benefit of working for a retired admiral at SBA. His name was Steve Smith. And when I told him that I had been tasked to do this and by whom, he looked at me and instead of firing me, he said, I get how this impact stuff connects to disaster recovery.

Do as much of it as you want. Get your other stuff done. Just don’t embarrass me. And I realized later that I had actually been given air cover by an admiral. And so one of the lessons here is to the extent that you can be, be intentional about who you work for. Good bosses who are not threatened by the success of the [00:13:00] people who work for them are what we also call mentors.

Love that. You have an interesting theory on networks as well. Would you like to share that? So people have said to me many, many times, you’re such a great networker. And I laugh because I’m not. I mean, in the Malcolm Gladwell theory of the universe, I know what I am. I’m a connector, which is ironic because people generally annoy me.

Like I am a textbook. INTJ. I don’t like going out. I don’t like part. That’s Myers-Briggs, right? Yeah, yeah, you can look it up. There are plenty of psychological deep dives on INTJ and the other archetypes. I’m an INTJ, but what I do like is putting good people together to do good things. And that’s not monetizing your network.

It’s not making your network transactional. [00:14:00] Understanding what drives the people in your network and what they will value. Yeah. When somebody reaches out to you on LinkedIn, what is your worst case? I can tell you exactly what the worst case is. There are several worst cases. It will be One, it’s clear that they didn’t read anything at all.

I’m very impressed by your expertise in your industry. I believe by connecting, we can collaborate and help leverage my work to expand my network. Why would I say yes to that? Or, there are so many adjectives in the first sentence that I have no idea what they do, and I just assume they have no idea what they do.

Okay, a better version? If you’re reaching, if you’re reaching out to someone cold, or you’ve been told you should reach out to someone cold, explain why, and why it matters. Not because of [00:15:00] money, not because you want to grow your network. What’s, what’s the purpose? What’s the outcome? What are you working on?

What are you trying to achieve? I don’t know that this works for everybody. I don’t know that this is everybody’s response, but you know, when I get something like I am a disruptor who catalyzes and transforms industries to such and such, I’m like, I mean, you might be disruptive, but not the way you mean it.

Please just leave me alone. Okay. So we know not, yeah, not to bother Mark unless you’ve got a well thought out ask. And so that makes a lot of sense. I have a question for you thinking about how you’ve been rewarded for your work along the way and how you think about income and the tug between income and impact and what advice you have for younger people navigating.

Those sometimes competing values. Never [00:16:00] settle for less than you need to live. You can’t build an economy on the basis of asking people for stuff for free all the time. And you can’t be impactful if you can’t eat. You can’t be impactful if you can’t pay rent. There’s a reason it’s called work.

Volunteering is different. And understand what your market value is. And be realistic about what your skills are, and then figure out how they align with the impact you want to have. Hmm. What do you find, like, of the people who do need to be rewarded better for their work, what’s in the way? Is it external or internal hurdles?

I realize people can’t see the face I’m making as I consider this question. I wish there were, I wish there were one answer to it. So, a long time ago I wrote an article. I don’t remember where the article was. I don’t remember what the title of the article was, [00:17:00] but it had something to do with if you want an impact job, don’t look for the word impact in the job description or title.

And this is back when the Really, the only impact jobs board that existed was the Global Impact Investing Networks job board. And I had probably just finished talking to a net impact cohort or something like that and got the question about building a career in the impact. And I went on to the GIN jobs board and looked and there were like seven impact jobs posted in the United States.

And the membership of Net Impact at that point was in the tens of thousands, I think. And it was like, well, if you want to have a job that has impact, find a job in a sector related to the [00:18:00] kind of impact you want, that you can see is adjacent to the impact you want to have. Get that job, learn the skills of it, and pull principles of impact into the performance of it.

It doesn’t have to say, impact for you to be impactful. And one of the biggest barriers is thinking you have to have the word in order to get the outcome. Yeah. Mark, how do you find your direction? Like for somebody young, how, I think you had talked to me before about your North Star framework. I don’t know if that is how you would do it or.

So yes, I have a thing called the North Star. If I had thought it was going to be a thing, I would have named it something I could trademark, but oh well. I’m a judge and advisor for the Louisiana Startup Prize, and I was down there, and I was on a panel, and They asked, what advice would you give to a group of entrepreneurs just getting ready to set sail on a boat?[00:19:00]

You can shout one piece of advice, what is it? And I looked up at the ceiling and there was a recessed light, and it was on, and I said, you see that? That’s your North Star. Figure out how to find it, define it, and refine it, and locate it, so you can always come back to it whenever you have to make a decision.

And what that turned into was this framework that is now written down, and I’m pretty sure it’s on our website. If not, I will put it on our website. But, one of my entrepreneurs, Leah Winter, who’s the CEO of Winter Innovations, disclosure, I have invested in them. I’m a board observer for them. But, Leah is a biomedical engineer, and she said to me, Have you written out your North Star?

And I said, well, I have it in my head. And she said, well, I’m an engineer. I work better with written examples. I went, damn it. And so I had to do my own exercise, and even though I had it in my head, it took far longer than I [00:20:00] thought it would. And this is the exercise. Three questions that you can answer in one sentence each.

And no more than one sentence each. If it’s about what, if it’s about your current state, you answer it in the present. If it’s about your future. You answer it in terms of what you want. So, for someone thinking about their career, it’s what do you want to do? How do you want to do it? And why do you want to do it?

Where why is the problem or problems you exist to solve? Put that all together. That’s your North Star. Print it out, hang it above your desk, and make sure that the decisions you’re trying to make are aligned with that North Star. Yeah. When in a career would you think is the best time to start thinking about that?

It can always evolve, but the sooner you do it, the better you’ll be in terms of understanding the [00:21:00] direction you want to head. You can also use it for yourself, but there will be a point where you’re in charge of things. You might be the CEO of the company and you have to set strategic direction. You can do it for the company too.

And there are very few engagements or initiatives or projects or anything I’ve been involved in since I created it where we haven’t done some version of it. Okay. And that is basically also what you’ve built into your current business and consulting. I mean, we have our Northstar and. You see it show up in the framework that we talked about earlier for how I decide whether it’s a yes or a no with a potential client.

And I don’t like going in to anything with a absolute rigid framework. Like I like to say, I’m not, if you’re looking for a report with proprietary shapes, I’m not your guy. If you want the outcome [00:22:00] of something to be a 40 page report, that’s not me. I want to solve problems worth solving, and there are a few tools that I’ve found that can help solve problems.

But they at least work for how we work. Doesn’t mean they work for everybody. Yeah. Yeah. I wondered your thoughts on how do you create a pathway for yourself that is something that doesn’t exist? It sounds like you have done that like throughout your career. Unintentionally. That’s how you do it. It’s really hard to set out and say, I’m going to create a career doing this thing that doesn’t exist yet, unless you’re actually doing the work in building it.

And other people are involved in building it too. My father was a tax lawyer for 40 something years at giant Boston law firms. And I could not have explained this to him. When it started, I still sometimes have trouble explaining it to him now that [00:23:00] it’s going, but if you know what it is you’re trying to get to, and you’re not so rigid that you’re stuck on the way in which you have to get there, you will find your way.

Okay, so the why is really important, and that’s like your North Star, so you have the direction you’re going, but how you’re doing it. It needs to be flexible. How many of us, eight years ago, would have included ChatGPT in our how? You know, sometimes it’s the best way to find a bunch of answers in the shortest amount of time, not always, but sometimes it’s a tool.

How many of us would have said that we were going to be using Zoom for the majority of our meetings before the pandemic? The how changes. It has [00:24:00] to change, otherwise time will leave you behind. Yeah. You’ve been an entrepreneur and you’ve worked in government and it sounds like everything in between.

What thoughts do you have for people thinking of sort of a large enterprise structures or government versus entrepreneurship when it comes to impact and how people can, or maybe some things to think about of sort of where they fit in that scope of small, tangible or large organization? Yeah. So it’s funny because I have never thought of myself as an entrepreneur.

I think by nature, I’m an intrapreneur. Like I understand big systems and institutions and where the gears and levers are and what. what they can do and what they can’t do. And then I’m pretty good at figuring out how to use the internal workings and what they can do to move them in a way to achieve [00:25:00] something that is both impactful.

And economically viable, I sort of think about it as integrating impact into the PNL, the profit and loss statement. How do you convince people to go along with your ideas? Like what is, do you have a special sauce for that? No, I mean, it’s like pretend like I took classes from Milton Friedman. What makes economic sense?

I can’t like, if it’s a for profit business, it’s really hard to convince. Senior leaders to do things that they don’t think are going to make money. But there are two different ways to improve the profit and loss statement. You can either make the P bigger or the L smaller. And if you look at where things traditionally are in a P and L, you start looking, well, if, if you’re more efficient in manufacturing, the materials costs and the energy costs usually go on the L.

Subaru of America was the first. zero waste [00:26:00] automotive plant in the United States. And it got to the point where they were saving so much money on that, that they started reporting it on an, if not an annual basis, on a somewhat frequent basis. And you can Google it and see how much money they saved. But it also taught them things about material usage and re usage that turned into other products they could use in Their vehicles or license to others that flips from the L to the P as soon as you can find a way to speak the language of business and the language of economics in the for profit world, you don’t have to spend time trying to convince people that impact is the language Air quotes, right thing to do because it’s good.

The good is directly tied to the business. Yeah. Where did you get your economic [00:27:00] background? Because you’d mentioned law degree, but is this formal training or reading, jumping into balance sheets? Like, uh, aside from having taken micro and macro economics in college, no, this is. observational. Some of it’s running my own business.

Some of it is working with a number of startups over the years and a number of accelerators over the years and knowing the questions that were asked in various different types of organizations and going. Okay, we can keep having this argument about what Milton Friedman would have said or wouldn’t have said or if we believe that impact can improve business through the rigorous application of management, then there’s got to be a way to explain it.

And there’s got to be a way to do it. And if there’s not, then the theory is wrong. Okay. [00:28:00] I’m thinking about people who have gone on a pathway that has not involved impact and are starting to feel compromised in values of, you know, where they’re working and what they’re working on and the impact it has in the world and wanting to switch to something with more impact.

I know we had talked about focus on where you are and the impact you can have, but What else, like, on sort of a human level do you think needs to get reconciled to make that switch? So, stasis is a tough thing. And the older you get, the more obligations you have. And It’s really hard to get away from the need for financial stability.

So I tell a lot of my entrepreneurs that stability is dramatically underrated. If you can be realistic about what you [00:29:00] need to earn, to pay your bills, to, I think we talked about having the enough number. The enough number is when you get to the point where You’ve got everything you need and everyone’s taken care of.

This is not the enough number. This is the, what do I need monthly, or on an annual basis, for us to be comfortable. Because I said before it’s very hard to have impact if you can’t pay your bills. So first thing Understand what you actually need to make Second thing your why that it’s like the thing that drives you the the type of impact that drives you you could be Intensely interested in environmental and energy related causes, or you could be intensely interested in health outcomes.

They’re not the same thing. They’re not the same industry. They’re not the [00:30:00] same jobs. You could be absolutely interested in community development in traditionally under invested communities. That’s not the same as either of the other ones. You have to not narrow it, but focus on the particular why that drives you to identify the type of impact you’re looking to have.

And then you can start looking for where you’ll go to do it. Yeah. So it’s, it’s, it’s not going to be a quick fix. You’re going to have to spend some time and invest in this process. I mean, yes, it’s possible that you know it already, you just haven’t asked yourself the questions that get you to write it down.

I mean, short of Short of somebody coming to you, a recruiter coming to you and saying such and such company wants to hire you. What job search is short? Yeah. What job search? No. Unless something lands in your lap and you’ve [00:31:00] recruited. Yeah. Somebody says you’re going to be perfect for this role. And yeah.

Oh, Oh, it’s going to take so much time for me to figure this out. Every job search takes time. This isn’t different. This is like when we were talking about. The impact economy and the economy there. It’s the same like the same amount of time whether you’re changing jobs and not doing impact or changing jobs and trying to incorporate impact into it.

It’s putting time aside to invest in something that’s important to you and making it happen. Yeah. Um, you have shared so many amazing tidbits and resources or frameworks for how you think about things. And I was wondering if you have like one to three resources that you believe are really important for this life in impact or a life with impact, I should say.[00:32:00]

Maybe it’s a book or a podcast or something that you think is, is worth the time of the listeners. So, the first is Impact Alpha, impactalpha. com. It is essentially the Wall Street Journal of the impact economy. It was founded by a former Wall Street Journal reporter. It is The best collection of what’s happening in impact every day.

That is the first thing you should read every day if you want to get into impact. The second thing is if impact is really. What you’re looking to understand and define and all of those things, it’s worth looking at this is going to get really technical really fast. So I’ll try and keep it short. The global impact investing networks.

website and the [00:33:00] stuff about Iris Plus. Iris Plus is the generally agreed upon way that you measure impact in the world. There are a bunch of, there are a bunch of different systems and frameworks. You might have heard about the UN Sustainable Development Goals and others. But just read some of the, the how to’s and the case studies on Iris Plus.

It will help you frame the sectors of impact and help you understand which one you’re really trying to get into. And the third is a book that I usually keep in my bookcase. behind me except I’ve used it so many times in the last few days that it hasn’t made it off my desk. I’m holding it up again. It’s called Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David Duncan.

I got really lucky growing up. It’s one of those born on at least second [00:34:00] base situations, where the town I grew up in, in the Boston suburbs, was where many successful professional families lived. And I grew up with Clay Christensen’s kids. And Clay is someone people know for disruptive innovation theory, the innovator’s dilemma, the innovator’s solution, et cetera.

But the book of his that I use most is, is Competing Against Luck, where he wrote about jobs to be done theory. And the reason I like it so much is it’s so broadly applicable. And if you use it for your customers, it helps you figure out what they’re trying to hire to solve. And if you use it for yourself, you sort of figure out what it is you want to be hired to solve.

And it’s fun to read. Well, [00:35:00] those are three really great resources that I have not had anybody mentioned before. So that would be a great list for the listeners. And I just want to thank you so much for being here and sharing all your insights. It will be a great episode. So thank you so much. I hope that.

Somewhere in there, I accidentally had vocal inflection. You definitely did. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, we’ll be in touch. This interview is jam packed with so many nuggets, and I want to emphasize a few things. First off, as soon as we hit stop on the record button after this episode, Mark asked me who he could introduce me to.

Although we were new friends, he was already genuinely excited to help me get some other great guests and individuals on the podcast. One of the aspects that I enjoy most about working in the impact space is just how generous the community is. I experienced this immediately with Mark. It’s not just that he is a good networker.

He’s thoughtful and generous networker. And [00:36:00] that left an impact on me. Mark can clearly see how to add financial value and impact to the companies he helps. As I’ve heard from many people in the industry, it’s too difficult to just sell impact. He leads with the income piece and intelligently makes the solutions a no-brainer for his clients by focusing on how it affects the p and l, rather than just moral arguments.

If you are wondering how you can add impact into your work, perhaps Mark’s advice on finding adjacent roles and building an impact principles into your strategy or day-to-day work is the best place to start. And that’s a wrap for today’s episode of work That’s Worth It. Remember. Every conversation we share is designed to empower you to build a career that’s truly worth your time and energy.

There are future disruptors out there just like you who would appreciate the conversations in this podcast. Please support me by spreading the word and sharing this episode with a friend or two, or visit my website at [00:37:00] georgienthoven.com. That’s spelled G E O R G I E N T H O V E N dot com. Until next time, ask yourself, what problems am I solving and are they worth my valuable time?

Your intentional choices today can lead to exponential impact tomorrow. Thanks for listening!