Excerpts From My Letter to a Philanthropic Advisor

We live in a flow of economic warfare. There are no markets. There are resources, politics that weave into highly complex legal and regulatory issues, as well as operational and market issues which impact the economics of doing anything. So this is the ecosystem. And the most powerful players on the chess board get pleasure from and enjoy evil and many players just see the world that way. If you want to play on that chessboard, you pull up your chair and you play with all the tools at your disposal in one integrated fashion. Your philanthropy informs and feeds and benefits your investment, ditto your social venture, ditto your investment. It’s one thing.

You have been operating in a non-integrated fashion. You were trying to avoid dealing with the real deal as a marketing matter — it has not been respectable to speak of it. You are trying to address philanthropy divorced from investment. That can not be done. The financial difference in nominal dollars between a financial plan and a financial plan that shifts significant assets into philanthropy is determined by assumptions. The market knows intuitively (although the market is not going to speak of it as it is not socially respectable) that the assumptions that traditional financial plans use are wrong.

What is called for is a vision of the map, the environment and then a vision of how a client can have a financial plan that does well even in the worst case and then a philanthropic plan that invests in those things that reduce the risk for the client and the world — transformation comes because proper use of social venture and philanthropy makes the world safer for the client (per the clients definition of safe which varies) and for those that the client seeks to serve.

In this environment, there is no time for the 26 step process that we invented to keep busy in a bubble economy and avoid the real deal. Now is the time for integration.