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What Prompts Us to Give? Balancing Head and Heart
Ask most people what motivates philanthropy and they’ll probably say, “generosity.” But generosity isn’t simple. People give charity for...
Philanthropic Arrogance (and how to avoid it), Part II
In order to succeed as philanthropists, we need to better understand and accept the views of those who are in positions of less relative...
Arrogance of Philanthropists, Part I
Many people acquire power precisely by having a great capacity to be empathetic, or, at least, to be well-attuned to the emotional...
Do You Fund Like Chairman Mao?
All that death and destruction could have been avoided with honest and timely feedback. One of the greatest famines of all time took pace...
On Persistent Illusions
When medical students in the Middle Ages opened a body and pointed out discrepancies between what they saw in front of them and the...
Empowered Humility: Andrés Spokoiny's Address to JFN 2016
JFN President & CEO Andrés Spokoiny's annual address to the 2016 JFN International Conference was entitled Empowered Humility: Leveraging...
The Next Big Thing, or the Next Near Thing?
Let’s declare a moratorium on new Big Ideas and look at the possible Near Ideas that abound in our community. If I had a penny for every...
Engineered Serendipity: Creating Space for Innovation and Risk-Taking
We sometimes pay lip service to failure but our actual tolerance for risk and failure in the Jewish community is limited. We don’t...
Funders and Typists—The Failure Series
For most Argentineans my generation, the name "Pitman Academies" produces a sort of nostalgic smile: a bizarre reminder of a bygone era....
Funders and Apes: Seven Steps for Constructive Failure
Friday, I wrote a bit about how funders, like all humans, are programmed by millions of years of evolution to hate failure. But our DNA...
Funders and Apes: Our Troglodyte Approach to Failure
Last year, influenced by the hype around Darwin’s 150th anniversary, I developed an interest in evolutionary theory. I read a few books...
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