Bono by The Editors of New Word City

Author:The Editors of New Word City [The Editors of New Word City]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business and Economics/Leadership
ISBN: 9781612307244
Publisher: New Word City, LLC
Published: 2014-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

The Organization Man

If celebrity is a form of currency, Bono spends his wisely. Besides a pope and a U.S. president or two, the rock star’s list of supporters reads like a Who’s Who of international figures. Financier George Soros, former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, former British prime minister Tony Blair, former South African President Nelson Mandela, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have all backed his efforts.

Finding it necessary to build an infrastructure to support his philanthropic endeavors, Bono has used his own integrity as the foundation. He has been careful to avoid the perception that he is a celebrity dabbler, and takes pains to polish his credibility by demonstrating detailed knowledge of complex issues like debt relief and monetary policy. Former Iowa congressman James A. Leach, who now heads the National Endowment for the Humanities, lauds Bono as “the real deal.”

But from the start of his crusade to help the world’s poor, Bono worried that his outsider status might hamper his progress. So he enlisted insiders like Bobby Shriver, the son of Eunice Kennedy and Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps, along with former Republican Representative John Kasich of Ohio to introduce him around Washington. Kasich described Bono as “transcending celebrity,” while Shriver has called him “the young man’s Nelson Mandela.” But the subject of these encomiums said it felt strange to be “wandering around the corridors of power, rather than placarding the gates outside.”

However uncomfortable it may have felt, the wandering paid off when the Congress voted for African debt relief. Kasich led the fight on the House floor that turned a $60 million plan for debt relief into $435 million of debt forgiveness in 2000. That victory led Bono and Shriver to start DATA as a way to raise awareness of the issues that gave the initiative its name - debt, AIDS, trade in Africa.

In 2002, as President George W. Bush announced a $5 billion foreign aid package, Bono stood at his side impulsively flashing a peace sign while the president offered a wave. Bono later told an interviewer that the president whispered, “There goes a front page somewhere: Irish rock star with the Toxic Texan.” Then, the following year, the president went even further in his State of the Union address, proposing a $15 billion emergency plan for African AIDS relief that Congress enacted the following May.

Bono’s eventually merged DATA with another of his initiatives. Since 2008, the aggressive lobbying work has been done by ONE, a group Bono co-founded in 2004 with the leaders of ten other antipoverty organizations. ONE seeks to mobilize grassroots support on a global scale to fight extreme poverty and prevent disease in the poorest countries.

Political power is not Bono’s only weapon. Having sold millions of records, countless concert tickets, T-shirts, and other memorabilia, he has a keen appreciation for the power of consumers. “We don’t sit around thinking about world peace all day,” he once said in reference to U2.

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