Curiosity Before Judgment: Interview with Abby Falik, Founder and CEO of Global Citizen Year
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Abby: I’m passionate about dispelling the myth of the straight line — the idea that people we look up to and admire had it all figured out from day one and it was a straight shot from “A” to “Z.” Anyone who has ridden the waves of disappointment and failure knows this couldn't be further from the truth. I love Steve Jobs’ quote: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.”
My entrepreneurial journey didn’t start with a lightning bolt “eureka” moment that some people imagine; I’d describe it more as a slow and steady cook.
When I finished high school, I was hungry for an experience that would stretch me beyond my comfort zone and teach me things I knew I wouldn’t learn in a college lecture hall. I’d been a good student, checked the boxes, and gotten into Stanford — but I knew in my gut something was missing. I was terrified that I’d let school interfere with my real education.
I called the Peace Corps asking if they’d take me; and my heart sunk when they told me I needed a college degree before applying. It didn’t make sense that we funnel millions of 18-year-olds into military or religious service each year; where was the secular and civilian opportunity to teach us who we were and who we wanted to become?
I ended up going straight to college, but after two more years of classroom learning I was itching to test what I was hearing through real experiences out in the world.
I took a leave of absence from school and headed to Salvador, Brazil with a backpack, a book of Portuguese verbs, and a slip of paper with the name of an NGO my professor thought might take me as a volunteer. Finding an apartment, making friends, and navigating a foreign city before the age of smartphones and GPS was enormously challenging — but enormously rewarding as well. . In hindsight, my time outside the classroom was the most formative part of my education, but it had nothing to do with my formal education. I learned a new language through immersion, identified the things that get me out of bed when there’s no alarm clock, and triggered questions that I wanted to answer even when there was no syllabus or final exam.
I learned that talent is universal, but opportunity is not. And that the privilege of where and when I was born, afforded me both power and responsibility. As a mentor of mine once said — we all have a social-justice nerve; once you expose it there’s no ignoring it.
The experience was so profound, that ever since I’ve been fixated on creating a new blueprint for young people on the cusp of adulthood — an accessible and purposeful experience that shapes values and identities in ways that classroom learning alone cannot.
I spent the next decade apprenticing myself to other social entrepreneurs working at the intersection of education and global development. Eventually, I decided to go to business school to develop the networks and skills I knew I'd need to launch a scalable enterprise. Winning the annual pitch competition at Harvard Business School was my moment of commitment — I was finally ready to launch what would become Global Citizen Year.
Adam: What are the best leadership lessons you have learned from leading a non-profit organization?
Abby: My first thought when I hear that question is that we have the terminology wrong. “Non profit” defines an entire sector by what it’s not — rather than by what it is. I’d love to see a collective rebranding of social impact work as the “for purpose” sector.
One of the best leadership lessons I’ve learned over time is the value of knowing — with whole-body conviction — what success looks and feels like. There’s a lot of talk today about double and even triple bottom line businesses; but when push comes to shove, one line is on the bottom. If you’re on a mission to drive social change, you can’t equivocate: everything must be designed in the service of maximizing impact; a singular, clearly defined bottom line.
Adam: What are your best tips for fellow leaders of non-profit organizations?
Abby: Social impact leaders must approach their work with the same rigor we expect in the business sectors. We also need to be smart about spending money to drive impact. Too often organizations in our sector get stuck in a starvation cycle — underinvesting in staff, R&D, or marketing. We need to be willing to raise and spend real money if we’re going to make a dent in society’s most intractable problems. And we can’t be shy about asking for the resources we really need to get it done.
Adam: What are your best tips for fellow social entrepreneurs?
Abby: My favorite definition of entrepreneurship is “the pursuit of opportunity independent of the resources currently under control.” In the context of social entrepreneurship, the task is to apply an entrepreneurial approach to the opportunity of solving for something where the market has failed. The term “social entrepreneur” combines two things we haven’t traditionally associated — but I envision a day where it’s a redundant term. Why shouldn’t we expect that entrepreneurship is about purpose, not just profit?
There are more than 1,500,000 non-profits in the U.S., and two-thirds have budgets of less than $500,000. Just 5% have budgets over $10M, and fewer than 150 have achieved breakthrough success with budgets of over $50 million. For context, $50 million is the average revenue of a single Home Depot — and yet these are the organizations we’re counting on to solve society’s most wicked problems.
I share these data points because the world probably doesn’t need new non-profits trying to solve our same old problems. What we need are values-driven, entrepreneurial leaders who find what’s working and take it to where it’s needed. I believe we’ll get further faster by encouraging young people to become solution-accelerators, not just problem-solvers. I think of this skill as discerning between the “feel good” and “real good” in driving social change.
Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Abby: I’m a huge believer that leadership is a lifelong practice, not a position, title, salary, or arrival point. Yet too often, we conflate titles, money, and power with leadership. We venerate the unicorn founders and billionaires, holding them on a pedestal as exemplars of success, celebrating the “what” of their accomplishment (revenues, market share, net worth), but rarely asking questions that probe into the “how” or the “who.”
By rewarding and celebrating financial wins, we generally ignore the cost of these achievements on things like our well-being or the health of our planet. In the context of unprecedented prosperity, inequality is growing. In the context of unprecedented technological advances, we’re destroying our environment. In the context of our connected world, we are failing to solve the global challenges that threaten our planet and future.
At Global Citizen Year, we’ve defined a set of behaviors we believe are essential to 21st century leadership, and our experiences helps young people from all backgrounds develop and master these skills:
Practicing curiosity before judgment
Building empathy by connecting across difference
Aligning one’s life with one’s convictions
Championing equity and opportunity
Having the courage to do hard things
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to business and civic leaders?
Abby:
Humility and confidence are not opposites; they grow together and in equal proportion.
A good student learns from every teacher; the onus is on us to find the learning in every disappointment, failure, or roadblock.
People are people are people. When we can look past pedigree or position to recognize that we are all, ultimately, human. We never feel bigger or smaller than anyone else – and there’s anything we learned from this pandemic, it’s that we’re all the same size on Zoom.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading and managing teams?
Abby: Real talk? I’ve never been a great manager… but have worked hard to build a team of folks who are. Any advice I have on building, leading, and managing teams comes from what I’ve learned by watching my truly extraordinary teammates in action. We were recently named the #1 place to work by Outside Magazine, which is the thrilling result of our team’s mighty and consistent efforts to put people first, to create an environment where folks feel fully seen and where everyone is invited to bring their whole self to work.
I love Frederic Laloux’s framework for reinventing organizations — and specifically the concept that a team is like a brain — a living breathing organism that functions best when every part contributes its full intelligence to the functioning of the whole.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Abby: “If the path is clear you’re on someone else’s.”
I’ve spent too many years hitching my sense of self-worth to others’ opinions and judgments, and know I’m not alone. Social media makes this natural human tendency so much worse — we are constantly comparing our (messy) insides to other people's (polished) outsides. The only way to figure out how to use our precious time is to turn our attention inward and figure out what issues we can’t not do something about, what unique abilities and experiences we bring, and how we can lead at the intersection of the two.
We make the path by walking it — and when I remember this, I find the faith to keep moving forward even (and especially) when the next steps are unclear.
Adam: What should everyone do to pay it forward?
Abby: The old model of spending the first half (or more!) of our lives in a thin scramble toward personal gain and achievement is misaligned with what our world needs now. We can all pay it forward by ensuring that the rising generation doesn’t wait for a midlife crisis to align their work with a higher purpose; everyone can begin as soon as they know it’s possible. And now it’s our job to help them find their way.
Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Abby: Our crises are getting worse, and our leaders need to get better. As pandemics rage, border disputes escalate, and temperatures rise it’s never been clearer: we’re all in this together. If the future is going to look better than the past we need a generation of leaders with the real 21st century skills — resilience, empathy, agency, leadership — that can’t be taught in a classroom alone. As Arundathi Roy writes, “The pandemic is a portal.” We can’t just go “back” to our old paradigms; it’s time to re-invent them. Given the stakes — we can’t afford not to.
Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.
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