How do we get talented people out of a ‘bullshit job’ and into aid?

Several months ago, billboards sprang up in the Dutch financial district. “If you’re so talented,” they said, “why do you work here?” They were the brainchild of The School for Moral Ambition, a new project which aims to tempt the best and brightest away from jobs in finance, law, and consultancy, and into causes that help tackle the world’s most serious problems. The school is the latest idea of Rutger Bregman, the Dutch historian and author who famously lit up Davos in 2019 with a tirade against rich philanthropists who don’t pay taxes. It’s a philanthropic project backed by a small group of funders, including Bregman himself, who is contributing all the royalties of his book, “Moral Ambition: How To Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making A Difference.” Bregman has a message to lawyers, financiers, and management consultants: You might be making money, but you’re wasting your time doing something pointless. His theory is that people aren’t really in these jobs for money. They do them because they’re perceived to be of high status. So we need to redefine what it means to be successful, and persuade people that there’s more status in helping to make the planet a better place. “One of the problems in this whole do-gooder space is that we’ve convinced ourselves we can’t spend any money on branding, on communication, on overhead, because that’s not the real thing. I think that’s utterly misguided.” --— Rutger Bregman, author and co-founder of The School for Moral Ambition “I've always been fascinated by those people who go to a fancy university — take Harvard, for example — but then get a job that doesn't really contribute anything to the world,” Bregman said. “I think it's 45% of Harvard graduates [who] go into consultancy or finance. I'm not saying all that is totally useless, but it sort of is. And so that waste of talent, I think, is one of the greatest wastes of our time. “And we want to help people who are currently stuck in — I think the technical term is — a bullshit job. We want to help them to transition towards a job of high impact.” Bregman described himself and his colleagues as the “Robin Hoods of talent” — stealing talented staff from big companies, and putting them to work helping the world’s poor. He cited William Wilberforce, the British abolitionist who led the fight against slavery, who, he said, saw it as his life’s work to “make doing good more fashionable.” And the School for Moral Ambition is trying to achieve the same things, around 200 years later. Speaking in the Pro Lounge of Devex World after his time on stage, Bregman talked about the power of philanthropy to support change. It was time, he said, to once again try to change culture and behavior to make it more fashionable to work on improving society. “It has happened in the past. Certainly it can happen again,” he said. He squared this with his position on taxes, saying that while taxation was the most important source of capital for social benefit, philanthropy also has a powerful role to play. The abolitionist movement, he said, had not been funded by governments, but by individuals. To engage people in both philanthropic behavior and more meaningful work, he said the right mix was “20% shame, 80% enthusiasm.” Bregman also talked about the importance of building communication skills in the aid sector — and elsewhere in the nonprofit world — in order to make the case for more resources. “One of the problems in this whole do-gooder space is that we’ve convinced ourselves we can’t spend any money on branding, on communication, on overhead, because that’s not the real thing,” he said. “I think that’s utterly misguided.” If you are building a movement, he said, you need to invest a lot of money in communication, and hire people who are really talented at it. “And maybe convince some people who are really good at it to quit their marketing jobs,” he said. “Stop selling chocolate bars, and come sell something that makes a difference.”