Rooting for Rivals by Peter Greer

Author:Peter Greer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian Leadership;REL109000
ISBN: 9781493414970
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Myth of Scarcity

If you’ve ever taken a stroll around Stanford University, you know the place practically glitters. It’s manicured, green, gorgeous, and groomed to perfection. You cannot help but reflect that the ground upon which you are walking has been home to some of the greatest minds of our age. But forget brainpower, these people have serious skills in landscape architecture. If there were ever a shrine to higher education, this place would be it.

This is the work of John Hennessy, Stanford University’s most recently retired president, widely considered to be one of the greatest presidents in Stanford’s history. Hennessy’s impact on Stanford was remarkable. Doubling the university’s endowment, Hennessy made way for the Palo Alto campus to expand its interdisciplinary research in bioengineering, bioscience, energy, and computer science, while significantly enhancing financial aid.3

In short, Hennessy was a visionary. He contributed in leaps and bounds toward building the Stanford empire.

In an interview with journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell, Gladwell asks Hennessy point-blank, “How much is enough for an institution like Stanford?”4

After struggling with the question for a moment, Hennessy responds by saying that because Stanford’s ambitions are always growing, so is their need for funding.

Halfway through the interview, Gladwell pushes the issue further.

“Hypothetically, if Bill Gates or Larry Ellison came to you and said, ‘I’m giving you $10 billion’ . . . would you say, ‘We don’t need it,’ or would you say, ‘We could put that money to good use’?”

To quantify a number that large, Gladwell explains that “$10 billion is a few billion more than the gross domestic product of Barbados, and $4 billion shy of the gross domestic product of Jamaica.” In order to understand the scope of this question, Gladwell rephrases the question to his podcast audience, “Basically I’m asking, ‘What would happen if someone gave you, Stanford, the average economic output of an entire Caribbean country for a year, tax free?’”

Hennessey pauses for a beat. Two beats, to be exact. And then in exactly that amount of time he comes up with a way to spend $10 billion! Mind you, we’re not talking about millions, but billions. “The one area where I think there is opportunity for significant incremental funding is in the biomedical sciences. If that were an endowment . . . I could find a way to spend a half billion dollars a year in biomedical research,” said Hennessy.

And just like that, he spent $10 billion.

Finally, Gladwell asks Hennessy if there would ever be a situation where he would tell a funder that their money might go to better use at another institution—if he would ever concede that they have no need for such a large sum of funding. Hennessy’s answer, in short, was no.

For faith-based nonprofit leaders, when it comes to funding we’re all John Hennessy. We become so consumed with satiating our own hunger that we lose sight of the world beyond our organizational boundaries. Every opportunity becomes one we are best suited to pursue now. Cutting-edge biomedical research needs

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