Sometime a Paradox

A  few months ago, I was driving up the West Side Highway in a car teeming with discontented children (alright, there were only two of them), when we hit heavy traffic.  Needless to say, we were running late, anxiety was high and the relentless sound of childish whining was unbearable (and that was just me).

After crawling for what seemed like hours, I saw the problem: a half-marathon was underway.

We were hitting the tail end of it.  The winner had probably passed the finish line 30 minutes earlier.  But there were still hundreds, thousands of people running toward the finish line.  As we crawled up the highway, the parade became attenuated and the remaining participants -- the stragglers -- looked increasingly exhausted.  Yet it went on and on.

The sheer volume of people up early on a Saturday morning was astonishing.

And it occurred to me that it is probably easier to recruit thousands of people to do something hard -- run 13 miles, say -- than it would be to get them to do something easy.  That's the always-surprising paradox: people love challenges.  We tend to get bored by experiences that are easy and embrace the ones that are hard.

I thought of that recently during a friendly debate among some colleagues about board giving.

My colleague was arguing that setting a specific high financial obligation for new trustees would turn those new trustees off.

I disagree. In fact, the challenge is part of the attraction.  

Smart, well adjusted, ambitious young people want to go to a school that will make them work hard in order to learn a lot (and then get good jobs).  Serious athletes want to compete against the best.  Mountain climbers want to scale mountains, not escalators.  (I prefer escalators, but I digress.)

I think board members, at least the ones we really want on our team, are likely to feel the same about their financial participation.  They want to know that the expectation of them is serious and significant -- so it is an accomplishment when they achieve it.

I think we make a serious error when we intentionally avoid presenting our board members with a clear expectation of what to give.  It puts an undue burden on them as they try to figure out how to avoid cheapness on one side and ostentation on the other, and it sends the message that there is nothing particularly exclusive about the club they just joined.

In a variation on the Groucho Marx joke, many of them wouldn't want to join a club that would have them as a member even if they didn't make a contribution.  Or would have the guy sitting next to them who hasn't given much of anything.  No one wants to be the only person chipping in for the pizza.  If there is no stated giving requirement, then every board member has to worry that they are over paying in relation to their peers.

Let's all do our board members a favor: tell them, in writing, what we expect them to pay.  It's the least we can do.