Tiffany - socially responsible?

You never really think socially responsible when you think of the Tiffany brand. I mean they mine the earth for shiny things to sell to Americans so they can adorn themselves with said shiny things. But if you can get beyond the basic issue of the luxury business and that mining destroys mother earth, then Tiffany is really an impressive organization.

Today Andrew Hart, from Tiffany, came to my social entrepreneurship class to talk about Tiffany's approach to doing the right thing. Tiffany is on the leading edge of pushing environmental standards for mining. They take their responsibility for social good very seriously on conflict diamonds, to living wage issues. Lots of impressive stuff that I won't get into.

But at the end of the day, they pursue these only because it is synonymous with the Tiffany brand. Can you imagine socialites buying diamonds if someone did an expose on Tiffany and conflict diamonds?

They have come up with a template for determining living wage to figure out what they would pay their diamond polishers in Vietnam. This is very innovative, because very few have an actual model for this. But they won't advertise this on their site, because the amount ($140 a month) is still something that would shock their clientele as being too low. But 140 is twice the minimum wage in Vietnam, and by making this model public they are in a position to shame their competitors into doing the same thing. It is a really powerful position to shape the behavior of an industry. But here is where the for-profit and social good conflict arises. The potential negative publicity for their brand prevents them from pursuing this social good (and what a powerful social changer this could be).

Now at the end of the day, they are really doing a lot of great stuff (def more than what I have ever contributed to date). It's just interesting to see how this line gets drawn and how original intentions and motivations play out. The counter argument is - so who cares what the original intention is. Sure they could do more, but what they've done already is really great.

Okay - have 3 midterms next week, I really shouldn't be spending my time blogging.

Bottom up approach to development

Just got out of a lecture by William Easterly - the big proponent of bottom up development (very anti Jeff Sachs & millennium development goals).

For someone like me who is a big believer in social entrepreneurship, Easterly's perspective of innovation and individual entrepreneurship as the key to development is very exciting. Although, I have to admit I don't think I got a lot of what he talked about. There's very little data and he kept coming back to how development has a lot more randomness than what we're comfortable with. It was interesting to talk about our human biases, where we are uncomfortable with randomness, have a huge success bias (studying successes instead of studying both successes and failures), and finally always want to attribute things to leaders. It's interesting how our inherent biases influence the way we operate and the theories we gravitate towards.

The subject matter is fairly dense and boring, but Easterly has a biting sense of humor and it was an enjoyable lecture.

In other news -
1) Today was a thoroughly unproductive day. Whenever I spend my time at Puck (Wagner building) I end up socializing and do very little work. Tomorrow I'm going to the library, lot easier to work there.
2) I registered for the Net Impact conference in Nov. Really excited about that.