Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - The Man Obama Called When a Million Lives Were on the Line | Dr. Rajiv Shah - Rockefeller Foundation President & Fmr USAID Administrator

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Lessons - The Man Obama Called When a Million Lives Were on the Line | Dr. Rajiv Shah - Rockefeller Foundation President & Fmr USAID Administrator · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, explore how to turn big ambitions into practical action without falling
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  into the aspiration trap. Discover why balancing long-term vision with day-to-day execution drives
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  meaningful progress, understand how trust and personal relationships enable large-scale collaboration,
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  and uncover why simplifying complex problems inspires more people to take action.
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  You mentioned this aspiration trap and I think that this is a, let's start there because this is
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  sort of where this whole problem stems from. When you are, say an entrepreneur, a lot of entrepreneurs
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  listen to this show and they're looking to build the next big thing and they want to do good in the
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  world but they're worrying about finding product market fit and making rent next month and
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  they're going to listen to this and they go, I'm sure Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation
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  are able to change the world and they're able to make these big bets. Billions are at play here.
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  It's not my reality. I'm aspirational. I want to make the world a better place. I'm an entrepreneur.
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  What are the lessons you're going to teach me? How do I avoid this aspiration trap?
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  I think it starts by being able to zoom in and zoom out. Great entrepreneurs can zoom out,
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  see the forest for the trees, understand how their vision is going to affect change at massive
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  scale, whether that's transforming an industry or building a new one or innovating technology that
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  changes the way people live. But then to make it practical, real and to build the flywheel of progress,
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  you have to zoom in tremendously and be super detail oriented about as you point out, making payroll
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  delivering product, generating the next bit of revenue. It's shocking. The same skill set is
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  required in taking on big public sector or social sector efforts. You have to be able to, I had
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  teams at USAID that were leading and I was helping to lead the effort to overcome the earthquake
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  crisis in Haiti right when it happened in 2010. It was a massive tragedy. 250,000 people died
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  very little visibility on the ground. You had to be able to kind of go all the way down to the
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  ground and understand, okay, are women, is there enough lighting in a community to keep girls safe
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  at night? Is there enough film micro? But then you had to zoom all the way out and say, okay,
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  we've got 56 countries seeking to be part of this response. The whole thing might cost 4 billion
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  dollars. How are we going to allocate resources? How are we going to move fast? How are we going to
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  set a results framework that allows us to measure and respond to that whole cohort of actors that
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  are going to be part of what was the largest civil military cooperative humanitarian response
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  in history? You just have to be able to do both. I think that's a skill set for entrepreneurs.
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  I think it's a skill set for people in charge of projects in government. I think it's a skill set
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  for people in the social sector that really want to make change happen at scale.
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  When you were thinking of compiling all your learnings and your knowledge into big bets,
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  do you feel like it was knowledge that was based on retroactive responses or were you hoping to put
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  this book out into the world in hopes of saying, this is more of a proactive framework that I want
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  you to take on? Well, I think a little bit of both. I did the book in part because when honestly,
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  when I was a young kid starting out in my career, I kind of knew I didn't want to be a practicing
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  doctor. We had lost a presidential election. I found myself unemployed and I just had no idea
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  what to do with myself. I didn't believe in a million years you could have a career where you
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  help Bill Gates deploy billions of dollars and save tens of millions of lives and then have a
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  career where you work with President Obama on large global humanitarian and development priorities
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  and then you run a kind of really historically unique foundation that kind of created the movement
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  of philanthropy before any of it existed. So I wanted readers to have confidence that in fact,
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  there's a path here if you want to take it and there are set of tools and skills you can hone
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  to be someone who has a successful career making change happen at scale if you kind of learn and
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  apply these lessons and I wrote it largely because I didn't have that when I was starting out and I
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  thought it would be helpful to others. I also want to ask a tough question that's going to set the
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  framework for how we can be effective as people that want to give back that want to take big bets
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  for people to take big bets or to even bet in institutions that can take on these challenges.
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  There's a very important thing that I'd like you to speak on because I think I was looking back
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  like three years ago you made a very good point how people don't trust institutions as much as
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  they should. They don't trust governments and trust is a big thing because a lot of the issues
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  that are big bets that are taken on by the Rockefeller Foundation, world governments, the Gates
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  Foundation, these are things that should be nonpartisan. They are humanity improving initiatives.
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  But for some reason there's a trust factor. There's discord there. So I don't think trust in
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  institutions has gotten better since COVID. I'm pretty sure it's just gotten way worse. So
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  how do we solve for this? Because right now I think trust is at an all-time low across the
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  aisle with any group that you speak to. Yeah, trust is at an all-time low in almost any kind of
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  institution. And so what I was hoping is that this big bet mindset gives people the capacity
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  to trust others and to build trust and to be an optimist when it would be very, very easy to
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  be cynical. It's very easy to say, well, government shuts down. It's not effective. It's not
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  going to work. It takes more effort and you got to have a different kind of mindset to be able
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  to say, hey, if we really want to tackle hunger at scale globally, we need food companies
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  working together with humanitarian partners working together with governments at scale.
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  And here's a playbook for how to bring that partnership together. One of the elements of
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  building trust is reaching across the aisle and making your relationships really personal.
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  And I write in the book about efforts we pursued after 2008 when there was a horrific food crisis
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  around the world related to the financial collapse and the financial crisis.
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  100 million people had pushed back into deep, deep hunger, kids eating mud cakes
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  in very poor communities just to feel satiety. And we built a bipartisan coalition in the United
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  States to pass something called the Global Food Security Act and move 100 million people out of
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  hunger and poverty. And that happened because I had the good fortune of getting to know some really
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  conservative Republican senators who on television didn't quite seem like they were going to be our
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  partners and friends. But in private, when you got to know their families and you got to know their
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  values and you got to know their faith and you got to know what they really cared about,
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  they became real champions for fighting hunger, whether it was in Ethiopia or India or Indiana.
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  And they held hands with progressive partners and made it happen at scale during a really
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  tough political environment. And so I really think it's about building those personal
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  relationships. And you can only have trust if you know people and you know their values. And
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  to know their values, you have to talk about your own, you have to share what your vulnerabilities
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  are and you have to be very real with people that sometimes you just met.
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  I love that though. I think that's so important because I think that everyone being locked away
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  and assuming that somebody's entire personality is their Twitter feed is it's a very dangerous
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  game to play, right? And I think that I mean some of these, some of these ideas should not be
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  partisan, should not be polarizing. And I think this is actually, you know, there's a few points.
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  I think that trust is is monumental. I think the way you build trust across styles is very important.
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  Another point, it was literally your first point in in this book, the ask a simple question,
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  but there's a, there's a, there's a quote, a Bill Gates quote, and the barrier to change is
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  to little caring. It's too much complexity. I think complexity causes confusion and confusion
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  creates distrust. So talk to me about simplicity, simplifying these issues, educating on these
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  issues that we can actually move the needle and stop worrying about the banter back and forth.
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  Yeah, that's a great point. I think it's very easy for people to be put off by complexity.
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  And it's super, how many times have you asked a question, well, why are so many people homeless?
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  The answer is, well, it's very complex. Why do we allow 40% of American kids to grow up in
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  child poverty? Well, that's, that's super complex. You know, why, why are there still droughts and
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  famines that are actually killing people in large numbers when food is relatively abundant and
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  pretty cheap? It's very complex. Complexity is a way to kind of keep people out and Bill actually
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  told this great story once he was like, you know, Davos is something, the world economic forum,
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  all these leaders, private sector, public sector, go to the Swiss Alps and have this big conference.
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  And, and he said, you know, you can go to Davos and sit and listen to a meeting about saving
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  tens of millions of children's lives. And it can feel a little dry like everyone's using big
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  words. And it's all very technical and complex and very low energy. And then, then you can go across
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  the street where a software company is like launching a new game or a new piece of software.
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  And there are lights and cameras and smoke and dancing and music. And it's very lively. And you're
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  just like, why, why do we try to tackle the toughest problems in the world with the language and
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  work style that is off putting to so many people like we have to make this simple to bring people in.
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  And I saw that over and over and we did the Haiti earthquake, you know, more than more American
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  families contributed in some form to relief around the Haiti earthquake than watch the Super Bowl
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  that year, which shows you how good American families are, how, how much they want to be on the
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  side of right morally. And they did it because we created a text thread and you could text a small
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  contribution very quickly. They did it because lots of our partners had other ways to be a part of
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  the solution. Instead of saying, well, it's very complex. Just, just sit this one out. You got to
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  reach out and give people and trust that people want to be on the side of right. If you make it
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  possible and you make it easy for them to do so. And I think the, the last question about trust
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  and the more keep going. But I think this is also a very important question to address. When people
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  think about big bets, it's just sentiment I've heard echoed repeatedly. It's like, well, we,
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  especially in the US, and I'm not even American, but let's pretend that I am for a second.
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  So say I'm an American and I'm always being told we have to help outside the country, outside the
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  country. But to your point, there's homelessness, there's, there's crime rates in certain cities
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  that aren't great. I don't feel like the US is properly getting the TLC that it deserves. So for
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  that individual that feels that way, how do you convince me to support big bets outside my
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  country when at home I feel like government isn't even taking care of me? Yeah. So both are quite
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  necessary. But, but what we do in the context of global humanitarian and development efforts
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  really amount to less than 1% of the federal budget. It's, it's not a huge cost item. But it is
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  often some of the most cost effective spending we've had. And on a bipartisan basis, we have,
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  when I write in the book about the effort to fight Ebola in 2014, the CDC was estimating in 2014
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  that there could be 1.6 million cases of Ebola that they would be all over the world,
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  including throughout the United States. And President Obama and our teammate, I think, a bold
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  decision to say, you know what? Instead of that outcome, we're going to send American troops,
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  American humanitarian partners and global collaborators into three West African countries
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  to fight the disease there. And when we did, we made that decision, by the way, we didn't know what
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  the solution was going to be. We didn't actually know how this particular variant could be beaten
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  in the context of reducing contagion. We had to figure that out by experimenting on the ground
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  in those countries in a very, very tough environment where people were literally bleeding to death
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  in the streets. It was a hemorrhagic fever that was horrific. And I write about my own visits
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  there during that time. But it's doable. And it was very cost effective at the end of the day and
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  preventing a million plus cases from getting out of that region into Europe and the United States
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  was, was well worth the cost of deployment. And some of the most cost effective things we can do.
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  Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so
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  you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the
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  links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.