The elea Way - Preview

elea’s FOUNDATION AND OPER ATING MODEL

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•• Engaging with professional credibility : Along the lines of the additionality principle, elea chose its fields of engagement according to its distinctive profiles and skills. The professional backgrounds of its staff are mostly economics, business, and law. Therefore, investment themes were selected where these skills would make a difference, and areas where elea lacked professional credibility were discarded (e.g., healthcare, where solid medical expertise is essential). •• Analytical, systematic decision-making : While all decisions clearly have strong emotional and intuitive aspects, at elea we uphold high standards of transparency, conscientousness, rationality, and honesty in our decision-making processes. That is why we joined forces with McKinsey & Company at the beginning, to help us become more familiar with the sector and to guide our thought pro- cess. We were as conscientious as possible in our decisions. As an example, when we defined “Fighting absolute poverty with entrepre- neurial means” as our purpose, we constructed a decision tree to sys- tematically identify and evaluate alternative options for deciding on our purpose (see Figure 3.1). Furthermore, we made a commitment already then to create a systematic approach to measuring and man- aging impact (which later turned into the elea Impact Measurement Methodology; see Chapter Six). •• Alignment with ethics : As we strongly believe in ethics and val- ues, we checked all of our decisions thoroughly in terms of their fit with our liberal ethics framework (the starting point of which is individual liberty) and our guiding virtues to avoid basic inconsist- encies that challenge our integrity. One example is our decision to focus on individual entrepreneurial initiatives rather than on collec- tive public-policy measures as drivers of impact. Moreover, we make investments step-by-step with tangible and measurable progress, allowing continuous learning and improvement, given our humble realization that changing the world radically in just one generation is simply not a realistic undertaking. These critical reflections, which were made at the time of elea’s creation and initial development stage, have been regularly reviewed in acknowl- edgment of the fact that philanthropy oftentimes does not face the same level of scrutiny that is faced by politicians or business executives. Only