The Banality of Good: Scott Curran on Musk, Bezos and MacKenzie Scott

A few days ago, B-school prof Chris Marquis came on the show to argue that we should shut the business schools down because students arrive wanting to do good but graduate with banal corporate jobs. Today’s guest, Scott M. Curran, went to law school but then spent a decade doing good as general counsel of the Clinton Foundation. So doing good is his thing. His calling.

“There are two ways to run this world,” Curran told me. “Guns or lawyers.” No prizes for guessing his preference. In his new book Better Good, Curran argues that it’s not the seminar room that hammers the good out of us. It’s the banality of our monthly mortgage payments. So maybe the best way to build the good is by bringing mortgage rates down.

Anyone who has ever sat through a TED conference knows that good can be a four-letter word. But it doesn’t have to be that way, Curran argues. Yes, he acknowledges, Musk’s foundation barely clears the five per cent a year the law requires, and Bezos has far more and gives much less. But good, he argues, can be found in the most unexpected places. The luxury watchmaker Rolex, of all corporate ironies, is wholly owned by a charitable foundation — the watches being just its fundraising arm.

And then there’s Bezos’ ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, who has given away over twenty billion dollars with almost no strings attached. So philanthropy can still work, Curran argues. MacKenzie Scott didn’t even go to B-school. And she probably doesn’t wear a Rolex. Or have a mortgage.

FURTHER READING

•   Better Good: A Simple System for Creating Lasting Impact (Simon & Schuster), by Scott M. Curran.

•   Curran’s website.

•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Chris Marquis on shutting down the business schools, and Eric Ries on why good companies go bad.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Scott M. Curran is a lawyer and social impact adviser who spent a decade at the Clinton Foundation, latterly as its general counsel, as it grew from a library fundraising effort into a global operation working in forty countries. He now advises foundations, nonprofits and companies on doing good more effectively, and teaches social enterprise law. Better Good: A Simple System for Creating Lasting Impact is published by Simon & Schuster. He lives outside Chicago.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.