Krista Tippett: Jacqueline, I think you use the language of “moral imagination.” You’re the only person I know who uses [laughs] those words as much as I do. And really, moral imagination, moral revolution, moral courage — that’s what we’re going to talk about. And so I’m just curious, to start, about where you would go with your earliest memory of what the word “moral” meant when you were growing up in the 1960s, in your big, Catholic, Austrian immigrant, military family.

Novogratz: I think the word “moral,” for me, conjures up first-grade classroom of Sister Mary Theophane, in West Point, Highland Falls, New York, looking at a poster of a rice bowl with two hands holding it and being told by the nun that we had an obligation always to think about people who were less fortunate than we were. And then her mantra was that to whom much is given, much is expected. And I think that instilled in me, in a deep and crystallized way, that we’re here for each other.

Tippett: That’s so consonant, really, with what you’ve walked into. You know, you and I are roughly the same age, and I’m so aware right now, at this point in the young 21st century, of all these echoes from the 1960s — how things have come full circle or turned out so differently than we expected they would, starting out when we did.

Novogratz: Oh, my goodness.

Tippett: So you’ve written this book, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution: And you talk about — you left Rwanda in 1989, for Palo Alto, to go to Stanford Business School. The Berlin Wall falls that year. The Soviet Union disintegrates. It’s the end of history. You are a banker, and you’re remaking banking, and capitalism has won. And you made a statement, in a speech — I believe it was at a forum for business leaders. And you said Steve Jobs spoke to your business class. And you said, we thought we needed a technological revolution, but we needed a moral revolution. And that’s what you’re really writing about now and steeping in. And so just how would you start to talk about what that realization, what that phrase holds for you?

Novogratz: When I think back to that time — and it was really within the course of a month that the Berlin Wall fell, and then Jobs got on the stage and said technology will reshape the world. And both forces did: capitalism and technology did reshape the world and did lift a billion people out of extreme poverty. And at the same time, it has left us — both forces have left us more unequal, more divided, more divisive, and facing long-term — not long-term, short-term climate catastrophe. And so when I say we need a moral revolution, it’s really one that is not dictated from above, but it’s a reframe of the system, because we have had a system that has put profit at the center. And what we need to do is shift that to put humanity and the Earth at the center.

And that is not going to come from above. That is going to come from each of us changing our ways. I think, Krista, that we’re in this moment where we know our old and current institutions have run their course, but we have not reimagined what they need to become. And so because there is no roadmap, we can only hold onto a moral compass. And that, for me, is the beginning of the moral revolution.

Tippett: But we’re in this — we’re this in-between generation that can see what’s broken but has to make up the new forms. And when you say — when you point to the need for a shared moral compass, that is also the work, how in this world of proximity to difference, in this globalized world that, as you’ve pointed out, even though we were talking about it in the 1980s, in the 1990s, we could not envision what it has become and what it’s meant and what it’s given us to reckon with. So I think that’s really what I want to talk to you about — how do we start to develop a shared moral compass? And I think that’s what you’re working on in the spheres where you’re engaged.

Novogratz: When you and I were growing up, the world operated in separate spheres. There were rich countries, poor countries, capitalism, communism — and now there’s elements of the rich and the poor, of the developed and the developing, in every country, and we’re starting to understand — well, we need to understand — that we can’t just go to the polarities. We’re having this broken debate — if it’s not capitalism, then it’s socialism — rather than one that says, how do we take the best of each, move beyond ideology, focus on the problem that we want to solve, and then bring the best of us to bear on solving that problem, because that will bring out the best in who we are, as well? And so the skills — which I also think are not the soft skills.

When I was growing up, we relegated skills like the moral imagination, like listening, like understanding identity as a tool rather than as a bludgeon, holding opposites without rejecting either side — those are the hard skills. And those are the skills we need to impart in our children, in our universities, in our workplaces, if we want to do the weaving and the integration that I do believe, as you said, is the work. And 20 years of investing, trying to reimagine capitalism, and using those tools to invest in entrepreneurs that are first and foremost trying to solve tough problems of poverty, has taught me that the greatest predictor is not even the business idea of real success. The greatest predictor is the kind of character that holds some of those skills that I was just talking about.

Tippett: So Acumen, which you began as the Acumen Fund, works with the poorest people in the world. I think it’s important to articulate that what you are working on, and the people all around the world who you see and engage, makes this assumption or this insistence that the market and the way we live economically, using capitalism’s power and its tools, can be part of lasting and generative social change. And it’s that kind of entrepreneurship that needs character to succeed. But you’re also redefining what we generally mean when we say “succeed,” especially in terms of entrepreneurship.

Novogratz: That’s right. In brief, it’s moving away from money, power, fame, which is the shorthand for what we’re seeing around us too much, today, to celebrating those people who release the most human energy into the world. And so one of the great joys of my life, particularly now because I’m seeing it more than ever, is to work with entrepreneurs who aren’t cowed by this idea that if they’re not making a lot of money, they are not as successful as other entrepreneurs or they are not as real, in part because some of them are making enormous change.

I think of Ned Tozun and Sam Goldman, who had the audacity in 2007 to say, “We want to eradicate kerosene from the Earth. It’s been 130 years since Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb — 1.5 billion people have no access to electricity. No one else is solving it. We certainly aren’t solving it in the same old, same old ways of separation, either charity on one hand or traditional investment on the other, so let’s go after solving this problem. Let’s look at the poor as our customers. Let’s try to understand from their perspective — the moral imagination. Let’s build something that’s affordable, that’s beautiful, that’s useful, that lasts. Let’s figure out how to finance it.”

A traditional capitalist would say: “Too hard.” And for five, six, seven years, we weren’t sure whether this company was going to make it. But a couple of weeks ago we were able to announce that they’ve just brought light and, increasingly, electricity to 100 million of the world’s poor.

That’s a big number. That’s moving the needle. But when I think about what has driven Sam and Ned, it hasn’t been getting rich. It’s been lighting the world. And they’ve done it. And we need to celebrate them as role models. We don’t only need new business models, but we need to celebrate new role models.

Tippett: There’s a place where you say, “What if the golden rule were not ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,’ but also ‘Give more to the world than you take from it’?”

Novogratz: It’s such a simple rule. And again, right now when I see all this anger at “You’re a bad person because you’re wealthy,” “You’re a fuzzy-headed nonprofit entrepreneur because you clearly don’t know how to manage,” we’re just screaming at each other. If we moved from a metric that — or an ethos that recognized we’re all part of this together, that we actually do face enormous changes that are going to impact all of us, and we just use that simple moral idea of giving more than we take, the whole world would change. We’d literally go from thinking of ourselves just as consumers, to citizens, and focus on sustainability rather than celebrating selfishness. And those are the mantras I’d like to see, which I think this next generation wants to embrace.

[music: “Falaal” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being, today with Jacqueline Novogratz of Acumen, an incubator of human-centered capitalism.

I want to talk about language before we go much further. Moral imagination has so much to do with what we see and the words we use. You have chosen to continue to use the word “poor,” but you don’t speak in terms of “disadvantaged.” Would you talk to me a little bit about what you’re describing here and the words that actually capture what you see and what this moral revolution would take in differently?

Novogratz: I do think we need a different language, a language that gets comfortable — again, with what we too often look at as “soft.” And I would include love in there because I think real love is a hard skill. And at the same time, I get exhausted when we jump on words and, again, ascribe an evil characteristic to someone using that word, before we even interrogate it. And so when we were writing our manifesto, the phrase “It starts by standing with the poor” was incredibly important to us.

And there were people on our team who were really offended by that. Why can’t we say, “It starts by standing with low-income people?”

Tippett: Right, it sounds demeaning.

Novogratz: It sounds demeaning, and also, as I have come to understand poverty, I reject the notion that poverty is just about income. We’ve got to think about the opposite of poverty being dignity or having opportunity and choice. And so we couldn’t come up with a better word than “poor.”

The other piece of it was that, as investors, this pushed us toward our own bottom line, if you will — that when we look at making an investment, we have to ask ourselves — as enticing as it is, in a world that still looks at you in terms of your financial returns, to say, “Well, these people are vulnerable,” even though they’re middle-class, we wanted to be the organization that pushed ourself, took on something more difficult by investing on behalf and with the truly disadvantaged — the poor.

And increasingly, and I think this is something that’s deepened in my own learning and our own learning, we’ve integrated this idea that if you care about the poor, you have no choice but to care about the climate because, in the context of climate change, there is no doubt about who gets hurt most.

Tippett: I think that’s such an important statement, that the opposite of poverty is not wealth but dignity. And you’ve also really in very granular ways gotten into the fact that dependence can also be an enemy of dignity and that the language of “helping” people is problematic. And I think also, counterintuitively in this, as you say, this very stark, polarized debate about capitalism being good or evil, you’ve learned that the market can be a powerful listening device to poor people — in fact, that capitalism can be a humanizing way to accompany the poor.

Novogratz: What I think a lot of people don’t understand, and I didn’t understand, is that in a way, we make a mistake by looking at poor economies. When you’re looking at a community of low-income people, you’re looking not at a market economy, you’re looking at a political economy. And so where there is no real market, everyone has their hand in the lives of the poor: the government officials that usually, often — not usually, but often make low-income people pay for whatever grant or income support they’re getting; the religious leaders, who make a lot of decisions on their behalf; the family structures, mothers-in-law — all of these, certainly — aid organizations, charities; there’s mafias who control the markets in very extortive ways. And so the power of a fair marketplace, where people actually can have choice and dignity over their own lives — that is revolutionary. And if you’ve not spent time in slums or in rural areas controlled by bureaucracies and the politics of poverty, that can be hard to understand.

Tippett: I feel like there’s a sentence in your book that, to me, feels like an operating question for moral imagination. You said, “The question is not merely how to make people better off, but what does it mean to be a whole human being?”

Novogratz: And also, Krista, I’m so delighted that you said “operational,” the operating model. When I think of moral imagination, we always say “the humility to see the world as it is and the audacity to imagine what it could be.” But I break it down into four steps, almost, that are truly operational. One, it starts with empathy, but it can’t end with empathy and putting yourself in another person’s shoes, because that too often leads to distancing and the reinforcement of the status quo — “Oh, those poor people, their life must be terrible.” The second step is immersion — Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights advocate, would call it proximity, but you have to get close to the people that you want to serve. You have to understand their problem. And the third piece is analysis. Then you have to understand the system in which they’re operating. And then you have to act.

And my team will say, “Well, Jacqueline, moral imagination isn’t a verb.” I’m like, well, sometimes we just have to propel ourselves into action from that sense of knowing, because in the knowing, we have a responsibility to do. And so I like to think of it both as a beautiful phrase, but also one that demands that we extend that beauty to actually make a difference, rather than just imagine.

Tippett: So it’s aspirational, but it’s also fiercely pragmatic.

Novogratz: It is fiercely pragmatic. And it’s funny, because people often — in fact, when we talk about polarities and holding opposites in tensions and — I’ve had more than a couple of investors say, “You know, Jacqueline, you talk about love all the time. But then it comes, we’re sitting at the negotiating table, and you’re hardcore.” And it’s like, look, we’re patient capital, we’re not stupid capital, [laughs] and that love actually is about caring so much that you want other people to succeed.

That is hard to do.

Tippett: And that requires expectations and helping them develop capacities and growing, stretching.

Novogratz: That requires expectations, because if we think they’re gonna be — that’s right. And we have to set standards high so that people live up to it, because if we put low expectations on people, we all know very well that people — that all of us will stoop down to them. And so that’s what love is.

Tippett: I also feel like what’s so odd to me, when the word “love” gets used in public spaces — and you’re doing that, and I’m doing that, and I feel I hear that rising up. And one reaction people have, like you’re talking about these investors, is that it’s soft. But we know, each and every one of us in our actual lives, that it is the hardest thing and is not laissez-faire. [laughs] The people we love the most — there’s a lot of engagement.

Novogratz: It is the hardest thing, and inside of it is another secret we don’t talk about enough, which is, for anyone who is caretaking someone who’s been sick or who has lost someone, for anyone who’s accompanying someone — in a real way, there are times when that love takes every ounce of courage and perseverance that you have in your body, and those are also the times when you like yourself the best.

I think that is the opportunity we have right now in the world — that we feel like there’s such darkness around us, but we all know that it’s in those times that we can elevate ourselves if we get outside of the small parts of ourselves, which right now are being sparked too often by, frankly, the easy stuff.

Tippett: You know, this is pulling back a little bit from this conversation we’re having about this realm of entrepreneurship and leadership and economic life, which is just another way to talk about human life, but it’s very resonant with how you’ve also looked at what’s been happening in our country and in the world in these last few years. You wrote after the 2016 election — and this is really echoing with what you said a minute ago about “the opposite of poverty is dignity” — you said this was an election “about dignity, about being seen, about feeling counted. It was about people who wanted their voices heard so powerfully that they were willing to overlook language and actions they would never accept in themselves or their children.” And I really appreciated the place you went later in the piece, where you said, “And whether Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton won the election, the U.S. would be staggering, wounded and bleeding, left to wonder how we got to a place where we feel we hardly know each other.”

Novogratz: This is why I think we have an opportunity to build the skills of identity. What worries me is, I see identity too often used as a bludgeon, rather than a tool and a mechanism to enhance our understanding of each other. And in that same vein, we are so focused on our own identity that we’re missing the opportunity of recognizing that, yes, we need to learn about our identity and the many different component parts of our identity so that we can connect with those similar identities that exist in other people who, on the surface, may seem completely different than ourselves. And that’s also a skill, and it’s one that takes a lifetime to master, but we can all start on the path.

I had a great experience with the — I think you may have interviewed Jonathan Haidt, actually. So I had the great privilege of taking Jon to India. And Jonathan has studied shame and marginalized peoples and, of course, how we use language.

Tippett: What’s his book?

Novogratz: The Righteous Mind, which is so spectacular. And so we do something that we took from the oral history project StoryCorps. But instead of putting people face-to-face, we do something that we call “story walks,” because we found that when you let the air blow around people, magic can sometimes happen. And the idea is that you go walking with each other, 20 minutes. One person talks, tells their story, and the other person — then the other person asks questions for ten minutes, and then you repeat, on the way back. And it’s good to do it in a group.

We brought the group back, and I had paired Jonathan with a guy named Vimal Kumar, who is from the scavenger caste, which is the lowest caste in India. These are people consigned to essentially picking up human waste, usually with some cardboard or plastic. And so then, when you get back, you’re supposed to introduce each other, and some do it in the first person.

So Jon started and said, “I’m introducing Vimal, so I’m going to speak as Vimal.” And he said, “I’m Vimal Kumar, and I was born in the scavenger caste. We are the people consigned to picking up waste, and no one ever touches us.” And he said, “My mother, however, got a job at a private school, and they allowed me to go to school as a result of it. But we couldn’t afford a uniform. I had to go to school in rags, and I sat in the back of the class, and I never spoke. But my mother was so proud that when I was eight years old, she invited the whole school over to have a birthday party, and she spent two days cleaning the house, preparing for it. And then, on the day of the party, no one showed up.” And Jon started crying. And he said, “So I’m sorry, but I have an eight-year-old son. And the truth is, Vimal and I don’t have anything in common.” He said, “I am from a privileged background. I went to the best schools. I live in New York City. I’m a professor. My children have no want. And I can’t even believe that Vimal has been able to survive in the way that he’s so extraordinary.”

And then Vimal took a deep breath, and he said, “No, Jon. You’re wrong.” He said, “You love India, I love India. We both have two children. We’ve both studied shame.” He said, “And besides, Jon, you’re a Jew. You understand what it feels like to have people think about you in a certain way for no reason other than what you were born. And finally, Jon, we both have PhDs.”

Tippett: [laughs] That’s good.

Novogratz: [laughs] And you look at that — if these two could bridge that gap, we in the United States, who have so much in common, can find our ways to heal ourselves and to see ourselves in each other again: that we have a common endeavor in this country, to build a country where we can make good on the promise that all men were — and women — were created equal. And then we can help extend it to everyone on the planet, because we represent the planet now, in ways that have so much to teach if we would just take that privilege seriously.

[music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions]