#winnerstakeall

If I had to select a scene from a movie to summarize this book, it would be the moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and her friends discover what’s behind the curtain.

There’s no magic. There’s no wizard. It’s all an illusion.

Ditto, ‘conscious capitalism’ and ‘social impact investing’: as the subtitle of the book tells us, it’s an elite charade.

Which is not to say we, as a culture, elite and non-elites, don’t believe it. We do. 

I do/did -- this has been my work as a feminist marketing consultant!!! 

Even as I’m nodding and agreeing with the pages in this book, it’s clear to me that I’ve now got to have some serious conversations with the woman in my mirror.

But that’s not my point, as I muse on this book. He’s right and he’s convinced and converted me. (I’ll probably do a proper, idea-by-idea book review of his book sometime soon.)

Instead, here’s what I noticed, as I read: that as Giridharadas chronicles the sincere ‘world-changing’ intent and language of founders and corporate leaders who are developing unmistakably commercial and profit-driven start-ups and businesses, he’s overlooking an important driver of entrepreneurship.

As a feminist marketing consultant, I work with the people who traditionally DON’T get their start-ups funding and even struggle to access bank loans or credit. Women and people of colour and gender nonconforming folks and people striving to emerge from intergenerational poverty (and, and, and). 

They are starting businesses not because they have lofty ideals and want to create a business engine to deliver on those intents (though that might be part of if) but because they have to in order to survive.

Entrepreneurship has been the lifeblood of marginalized communities otherwise excluded from the corporate careers and access to governmental positions.

This is not a critique of Giridharadas’ book, at all. It’s a noticing. 

As a culture, we most often explain entrepreneurship as something chosen  to have “more freedom over our time” or to “change the world” or to “make more money”. We don’t often talk about the systemic realities FORCING many of us to start businesses just so that we’re in charge of our livelihoods rather than being inputs in a system that’s otherwise hostile to our existence.

I chose entrepreneurship, for example, because it was the only way to escape the impoverishment that comes with single motherhood. It was the only way I could manage mothering AND working. 

At the time I became an entrepreneur, I talked about it with all the freedom/time language but the truth motivating my ‘choice’ was starker: there was no way, in the corporate culture I was in, for me to advance and grow my salary to one that was sustainable (I wasn’t even making enough to make ends meet) and also leave at 5pm on the dot to make sure I didn’t get fined by the daycare for being late. I was stuck and I was going to continue to be stuck. 

Starting a business was a risk but it was the only one that potentially ended with me having a thriving livelihood. 

The gender wage gap, the gender wealth gap, the sexism that made my ex refuse to pay child support for a decade, my absolute lack of resources (everything I had went to daycare and rent) plus a corporate culture that assumes careerists are men with partners at home to do the caregiving and builds expectations and hours around that sexist assumption...well, all of them intertwined to foreclose the possibility of a brilliant career and a paycheque that was sufficient. (not even huge; sufficient)

So I HAD to start a business. Or stay frantically treading water until I got too tired to stay afloat. 

A decade later I am able to provide, handily, for my family and extended family. That would NEVER have been possible had I stayed in my corporate role.

Trans entrepreneurs often have to start businesses because no one will hire them. Disabled folks or people living chronic pain regularly find that their choices are fixed incomes or entrepreneurship, because bosses and teams won’t accommodate their physical realities. 

Anand Giridharadas is rightfully, thankfully pointing out that founders of start-ups that go on to become institutions and and the 1% and the ‘winners’ of our current system have to invent a cover (often from their own consciences) for their business-building in order to give their work and their lives meaning. They have to cloak it in a world-changing rhetoric. 

What I want to point out is this:  entrepreneurs with marginalized identities ARE doing life-altering, community-changing work simply by refusing to be double-billed for their own oppression and creating the thriving livelihoods -- for themselves and their community members -- they’d otherwise be denied.

In a way, it seems that the more removed an entrepreneur or organization is from personal survival and on-the-ground community impact, the more elaborately inspirational and communal the mission statement, language and branding has to be...which, given the fact that I’m a feminist marketing consultant, again prompts me to have a serious sit-down in front of a mirror.

It’s easy to see the flaws in ‘their’ logic and ‘their’ business activities; but it’s important to attend to my own impact, too. 

And there are definitely points of logic and conclusions in this book that uncomfortably highlight the fact that I’m doing some of the things he’s pointing out, even as I thought I wasn’t. 

And of course I am. Our culture is thoroughly neoliberal and infected with the logic of capitalism, and I’ve been marinating in that for more than four decades. 

As I tell my clients all the time: we are all in the water so we are all wet.

But if the water’s poisoned, we get out. We stop drinking it. We find out where the toxins are coming and we fix it, at the source. We don’t throw some cherry Kool-Aid in it and call it Revolution Juice.