Integrated is to investing as healthy is to eating. Imagine yourself gorging on food – fatty foods with high salt and high sugar content, genetically modified food, produced in obscenely inhuman, unhealthy, chemically-enhanced conditions. Imagine yourself stuffed until your waistline expands, your whole body aches, and you’ve gained 50 pounds. Unhappy with the hugely unhealthy, food vacuum you have become, you decide to turn things around, go on a diet, and shed the excess weight you’ve put on. You might start exercising again. If you are really good you might actually keep it up. Or you might keep it up for a few weeks until a juicy burger calls out to you from the fast-food restaurant or a super-sized bag of popcorn, laden with artificial butter, rears its fatty head at the movie theatre. You find your percent body fat and blood pressure rising and embark on another health kick and diet. Your body weight see-saws in a dangerously unhealthy fashion until one day you decide to choose a more sustainable alternative and not fall victim to the gluttony-diet yo-yo. You choose healthy foods, to eat in moderation, and opt for local and organic food when possible. You drink two litres of water a day and perform regular exercise each week. Your weight is sustained at a more moderate level, you feel healthier, happier, and feel more grounded having left the food-diet roller-coaster.

We have been presented with investment options that offer fat, juicy financial returns. The marketing is sweet and saccharin. The taste of high financial reward seems satisfying. However, they are just empty calories.  These financial rewards, like the high-flavour, high-fat foods, may also have been produced in obscenely inhuman, unhealthy, artificially-enhanced conditions.

Integrated Investing is an approach and a philosophy that endeavours to cut through the jargon and opacity by informing you why we invest, what you need to know and be aware of in order to invest, and how to make an integrated investment decision.

We have been gorging on unhealthy ways of investing. It is time we invest in a healthier, more integrated way.

Impact is Personal

I believe impact is fair and equitable access to resources for all. By resources, I include food, clean water, shelter, education, information, energy, transportation – anything that is a resource that enables people to do the things they need to do to have a thriving, fulfilling life. More specifically, the things that had the most significant impact in my life were access to education (specifically deep literacy in financial matters), guidance from people who identified and supported potential, not just performance, and being in careers where building relationships was a daily necessity. It is no coincidence that the social venture I have created is focused on investing in earlier stage entrepreneurs with potential, building a community of investors and increasing investment literacy, and building relationships between investors and entrepreneurs. I support and serve women investors because I believe growing the community of women investors will have the most positive impact and knock-on effect on the world.

Ask a handful of people what they believe “impact” is and get a handful of different answers. Impact is personal. It depends upon personal experiences. What someone experienced in their life will influence what they believe is impact. Just take a look at how organizations and businesses are often formed. Many are solutions to problems or challenges faced by the founders themselves. Founders create impact based on their personal experience of what would have greatest impact.

In his post, Ben writes that “introducing the promise of monetary reward can actually reduce the motivation to do good – and throwing more money at the problem doesn’t yield proportionate returns.”

The issue is not “doing good and pursuing monetary reward, where one competes against the other”. It is most definitely not about one as motivation for the other. They are distinct, but complementary goals and desires. Each has its own motivation and each yields its own, complementary outcome.

The promise of monetary reward triggers an analytical part of the brain, potentially motivating a person to maximize monetary reward. However, to increase the motivation to do good, we must consider the key influencers of decisions to do good, such as feelings of fulfilment, contentment, joy, and love. For each person, these key influencers to do good are going to be different and personal.

Ben notes a study in 2000, where researchers offered subjects the opportunity to earn money for a charity at varying levels of financial reward. The study shows that monetary rewards alone do not motivate good acts. Feelings of creating fairness, emotional drivers, physiological conditions, and mindset all could have influenced the decisions to generate more money for the charity or not. How motivated each subject was to generate more money for the charity would have been influenced by their personal experiences.

The Purpose of Money and Monetary Rewards

The connection between the study’s subjects earning money for themselves and impact investing is that in order for doing good or doing purposeful work to be ongoing, it must be economically viable. To be economically viable, we must also earn money. More accurately, we must continually produce, generate, recycle, and reuse resources in order to sustain ourselves – money happens to be the measure and currency of those resources.

It gets even more complicated and interesting. Money and monetary rewards are not themselves motivators. Instead, I believe it is the purpose of money that motivates people. Dougald Hine gave a great presentation on the purpose of money, in which he describes five main purposes:

• Subsistence – a means to stay alive or sustain one’s self
• Security – a means to manage your future, to make the world less unpredictable
• Luxury – if something is a luxury, then you’re not dependent upon it
• Status – games by which people establish, hold onto, and change status
• Accumulation – the idea that more is in and of itself better

Relating the above to investing, the purpose of money or more specifically the purpose of a financial return is:

• to create an income to sustain one’s self or others
• to grow financial reserves in order to manage the future or manage change or be re-invested in other ventures and projects
• for luxury, if investing is not one’s main source of income
• for status as a successful investor
• simply as a way of keeping score, if you treat investing as a game

Integrated Decision-Making

Impact investing is a complex decision-making experience. We seek multiple outcomes from an impact investment – economic viability and positive impact in the unknown and uncertain future. To achieve these multiple outcomes, we require multiple inputs into the decision-making experience or process.

We all make decisions using analysis, emotion, intuition, and body. Reflect upon the biggest decisions you have made in your life – choosing a college, university or course to further your education, choosing a career path, or choosing in what city in the world to live. All of these decisions are similar to those faced in impact investing – they each come with different monetary implications and each may have impact. There is a high likelihood that you conducted some analysis and reflected upon the emotions you felt given your choices. Your physiological state and a dose of intuition likely would have affected your decision. I suspect monetary reward alone would not have been a sufficient motivator where impact is important to you.

These ideas, concepts, and approaches – that impact is personal, the purpose of money and investing, and integrated investment decision-making – will be discussed further in the book I am writing on investing in an integrated way. Chapter excerpts will be posted on this website throughout early 2013.

1. Build relationships over time. Over the past year or two (sometimes longer), I have been cultivating relationships with people that are now leaping in to work with me.
2. Look for the mutual desire to work together. When I meet people, I get a sense of whether there is a mutual desire to work together. Usually the conversation is full of positive energy and there is a strong sense that we are on the same path, often unspoken, but we can tell we really like each other and what each is doing. We keep each other in mind and think of ways to work together because we want to.
3. Look for mutually beneficial relationships. I help you, you help me.  I help them, they help me.
4. Be the first to give. I always try to give something, even in the first meeting or conversation, be it a book recommendation, my own insight, or offer to make a connection for the other person. When I am the first to give, it makes it much easier for me to ask them for something later.
5. Make it easy for other people to say yes. I think about how to make helping me easy for them (i.e. cap the time required of them, for example usually only an hour or two). I work around their schedule, I work to their strengths. Sometimes I stretch people, so that their reward for helping me is a learning or growth outcome. This is especially important if there is little or no financial reward for their participation.
6. Learn the art of invitation. Firstly, I invite people to help me. Everything is an invitation – it is welcoming and they can accept or decline. It’s a subtle difference from asking and is a useful approach when making an initial request of someone.
7. Make the ask. But there comes a time, when you must be clear, direct, and make the ask. A major change in mindset for me recently was that, I’m not asking people to help me like they are doing me a favour. I am asking them to help me because it is awesome for them. They want to be part of something cool. It is an opportunity for them.

These tips apply to seeking investors, co-founders, customers, partners, funders, you name it.  Try them out and let me know about your experience.  Bon courage!

• Know its customers (like never before)
• Connect and share with colleagues instantly
• Make every customer interaction social
• Engage everyone with social experiences

Two years ago, a much smaller company in the UK called itself a “social enterprise” because it created opportunities for people to meet, connect, exchange ideas and learn from each other – i.e. to socialize.

Contrast this with how Social Enterprise UK describes “social enterprise”: businesses that are changing the world for the better.  They are businesses that trade to tackle social problems, improve communities, people’s life chances, or the environment.

Social Enterprise London says they are businesses which exist to address social or environmental need.

How about the Enterprising Non-Profits definition: businesses operated by non-profits with the dual purpose of generating income by selling a product or service in the marketplace and creating a social, environmental or cultural value. [emphasis my own]

MaRS describes the social enterprise business model: “social enterprises” apply business solutions to social problems.

Even Wikipedia is in on the action: A “social enterprise” is an organization that applies commercial strategies to maximize improvements in human and environmental well-being, rather than maximising profits for external shareholders.

Although highly un-scientific, what this quick search of my brain and Google demonstrates is the variation in the definitions of “social enterprise” across a small sample from the UK and Canada.  I work with investors to support “social enterprises” and “social purpose businesses” (note that I almost always say the two together, sometimes “social ventures” sneaks in there as well).  So I wondered whether I was simply in a bubble – “social enterprise” is familiar to me, but is it familiar to others “outside” my bubble, such as salesforce.com?  My quick Google search yielded definitions that were generally within this theme of business solutions or market-based strategies to address social issues, improve well-being, or create social value.  Surely salesforce.com knew where they were treading by attempting to claim or redefine the term?  It certainly isn’t in keeping with their “expertise” in social media.  A Twitter search and Facebook search of “social enterprise” yields similar results.

I started writing this post because friends in the UK working closely with “social enterprise” also started to raise concern.  At first I thought this “battle” with salesforce.com was potentially distracting social entrepreneurs and taking precious time and effort away from their much needed work.  I believe there are weaknesses in “social enterprise” as a brand or label for the sector – I typically throw in the other terms as mentioned above or have a long-winded description involving social mission and alignment with values because “social enterprise” does not necessarily resonate with everyone I meet.  Instead, having done my basic, “any 5-year-old could have done it” Google and social media search, I think salesforce.com’s attempt is simply bad business sense.  I’m no branding or marketing expert, but their description is even weaker than the existing variations that have the theme of social purpose or social value.  I cannot imagine what it would take to optimize search engines to track to their definition.  Search engines currently lead to the above definitions supported by organizations working hard and meaningfully to create positive social change.

I’m not so sure Social Enterprise UK needs to worry too much.  Ironically, on social media and in the cloud – the people have spoken.