Transcript
BOBBY SAGER: Hi, everyone. Actually I’m going to show you, just ’cause I think in the interest of time there’s about a three-minute intro kind of video that I’m going to ask you to please bear with me and watch. It’s a little bit embarrassing but
[VIDEO]
SAGER: Thank you. I want to start off by thanking Peggy. This, the people that I’ve met last night, last year, the year before, and the whole energy that surrounds this event, last night’s event, yesterday’s more intimate discussion we can feel you in every corner and in every conversation. And all of this effort is very much appreciated. Thank you. So just to fill in the kind of blanks there 15, 16, now years ago my wife and I decided, “That’s enough business. We made enough money.” We only ever wanted to make money so we could have choices in life and then it’s a matter of what you do with those choices. We, as it said in the piece there, we took our kids out of school. At the time they were eight years and six years old.
We said, “What we’re going to do is, is go live around the world staying in a place long enough and close enough to the ground to really understand what’s going on, to really listen and to really understand.” And from experience doing this now for 15 years most of the year for all 15 of those years I see very often people coming into situations and not listening, and not understanding. And it almost never-or maybe actually never works out, at least not in a sustained way. So the idea was take the kids out of school, see if there was a way that I could reapply the same skills that I used to make money to make a difference-knowing how to hire the right people, knowing how to make a plan, just knowing how to do deals and, you know, and get things done. And, but the, but the most critical part was my wife, whose name is Elaine, and I saying to one another, “How do we, you know, we’ve seen kids that have a lot of resources that get burdened by those resources, that sometimes even disabled.
How can we use our resources to, and I know there’s so many of you, I’m sort of preaching to the converted here, but there’s so many of you in the room that do something very similar, how do we use the family resources to, to help to make the kids more thankful, more filled with gratitude?” because from our standpoint, and I’m sure that you would agree, you, being thankful is the absolute center of being happy. And living in a, you know, in a kind of a, a bubble of, of money and so, you know, rich people hang out with rich people, artists hang out with artists, academics hang out with academics, everybody lives inside their own kind of bubble. And our idea was to go outside our bubble of, of privilege and to, you know, if you say to the kids, “We really care about the world and etc.” Somebody was talking about this yesterday but you don’t actually, you know, walk that talk kids smell, you know, bullshit sort of a, you know, a million miles away.
So the, so the idea was, “Let’s go into the world. Let’s go outside of our bubble. And as a result of that let’s try to help a whole bunch of people in a way that you can’t do from a distance.” So everything that we do is we make a judgment. Can’t-, is being there somehow extreme value added? Is there something that we can do by being on location in this, with this particular issue or this particular circumstance that we wouldn’t be able to do from a distance? One of the really kind of obvious things is hiring the right people. You know, just like in business that it’s really, and just like in business all the great ideas don’t mean anything unless you execute properly. So, for these something like 16 years now we have lived mostly two months at a time, sometimes it’s a week, sometimes its six months in the places that we’re trying to help.
The countries include-I think maybe it said there, I forget-Rwanda, and Palestine, and Pakistan, and Nepal, and difficult places, difficult issues and difficult places to, to execute. So one of the things from 15, 16 years ago is the start of this foundation, which-and we don’t accept any donations, everything’s funded ourselves so this isn’t a commercial-it’s called the Sager Family Traveling Foundation and Road Show. And, and when we hit a place it’s a little bit like kind of a rock tour coming into town. And there’s all kinds of other sort of good stuff that comes from that. The other thing that happened 15 years ago was the beginning in this organization called The Young Presidents Organization of a series of networks and the Boehms have been very involved in, actually shown a real leadership role in this YPO organization in terms of using the organization to make a difference in the world.
I don’t know if people really got the statistic there. If you add together the turnover of the companies that the YPO-ers are presidents of and you just sort of simplistically say a turnover dollar is a GDP dollar it’s the equivalent of the third largest economy in the world. There’s about 20,000 members, about half in the States and half everywhere else. And, I was the founding chairperson of something called the Peace Action Network. And the idea of the Peace Action Network is to bring business leaders together from different sides of conflicts, and to have very frank, confidential discussions, and to take the insights that they learn from those discussions and also from trips that we do back into their spheres of influence, their businesses, their families, their, in many cases the national leadership of their countries.
Just last week we had a group of 25 presidents of businesses from all around the world in Iran. We’ve had trips to North Korea, and to Cuba, and to Rwanda. And these, these basically are sort of an investment seminar kind of trip. But a lot of it is just about stripping away filters and really understanding at that kind of like eyeball-to-eyeball level. So in terms of the philanthropy that we do, we don’t do charity. We never give handouts. Other people do that and I’m glad that they do but that’s not what we do. We only ever help people to help themselves. So they always have skin in the game. There’s always something required. We focus on execution because as I said before, and as everybody already knows, sort of self-evident that it doesn’t, nothing really happens without execution.
And the biggest part of execution is sustainability, because, again, I’ve seen over these 15 years many, many well-meaning organizations and well-meaning people come into a place and set up something that they think could be useful without listening enough, without understanding enough, and without engaging the local people heavily enough because ultimately it has to be their thing in order for it be truly sustainable. And, and so here’s their examples just quickly, a minute or two on each of some of the things that we do. And I don’t talk about what I do because I want you to think that they’re good ideas or anything. I hope that when I talk about some of the things that I do that it stimulates some thinking in your mind about what you could do with your own passions, your own circumstance, your own timetable and so forth. And I would encourage you to think about the fact that the, the point I’m making in this little video thing is the power of being hands on, and the power of being eyeball-to-eyeball because when you’re looking into the eyes of the person that you’re trying to help, and feeling their humanity, and letting them feel yours that’s just a, it’s just a whole different math.
And when you’re saying to them, “I’m not,” because it has, this has to do with human dignity, this has to do with sustainability, ultimately this has to do with results. So, my family’s Jewish. The first program that I talk about is something called handsupnothandouts.org. And hopefully before we’re all gone today there’ll be some gifts here for you. This is a program that my daughter founded and runs. She’s now 24. It employs 300 Palestinian women in the West Bank. And this is her looking at, in our various trips to the region, these women in a cooperative that were making big, embroidered tablecloths. It would take them like a year to make. And, there’s not that big a market for multi-thousand dollar embroidered tablecloths, at least not in Kalandia Refugee Camp or in Ramallah, and so forth.
So Tess, my daughter, using the exact same designs, created bracelets that use the Palestinian design and so forth and sells these in Fred Segal, and Donna Karan, and so forth. And the lesson from this program is, and I heard people talk about it yesterday, you know, the old story about of course it’s better to teach ’em how to fish than to simply give ’em the fish, but this, this is a great example of, yeah, of course it’s better to teach ’em how to fish. But unless you teach ’em how to sell the fish then all they’re ever going to be able to do is eat fish, right. So, in Rwanda where we do micro lending by being on the ground and by un-and micro lending is a great thing but it, but just the return of making poor people less poor wasn’t a big enough ROI for me.
I’m very demanding about if I’m going to spend my time, and money, and security issues, and so forth it better be a big deal. So in Rwanda, I’m sure I don’t have to tell people in this room, genocide and so forth, the program is women-and this started 18 years ago now, so it, which was just two years after the genocide so it’s the there’s less and less of this profile-but the program started as women whose husbands were murdered in the genocide. The widows of genocide would, would get a loan together with another group of women, and they’re usually groups of about eight or ten, with another group of women, so about half and half, whose husbands are in prison because they committed murder. So the wives of the murdered and the wives of the murderers, we get together and, you know, pursue their dreams together. And ultimately the whole point of that program is, is reconciliation.
And then the final program I talk about is this one. This is an indestructible soccer ball. You can stab it with a knife. You can drive a truck over it, which we have. We’ve had elephants stepping on it. They can’t break it. It’s made out of the same material as Crocs shoes. And so this was a response to seeing kids in really difficult places play. I’m sure many of you’ve seen the, with the balls that are sort of made out of rubbish really that are tied together and that last, maybe if you’re lucky, for a game. So this scientist had this idea to make this indestructible ball. I thought it was like incredibly interesting. I was inspired because of a child soldier that I had met three or four years before, and I had taken a photograph, which is in this book that some of you will be getting afterwards, of his soccer ball.
And so, again, we don’t give these balls to kids. You have to earn this ball. The only way you can get it, it’s called the hope ball-says right there-the only way that you can get this is by going through a program that uses soccer to teach life skills. It teaches about drug abuse, or it teaches about whatever, older men, or leadership, or obviously teamwork and all these kinds of things. And so when I mentioned the child soldier before when I was distributing these balls to child soldiers that had gone through this program I was able to say to them, “Because it’s indestructible,” and this part of the sort of return from doing something like this, “the ball that you hold in your hand today, the ball that you’re receiving for having gone through this program, it’s indestructible, pretty much indestructible.” People have said to me, “Yeah, but my dog could probably destroy it or something,” but pretty much indestructible.
”And as a result think about the fact that-” now these kids are sort of like, I don’t know, ten years old, or 15 years old or something-” think about the fact that one day with this indestructible soccer ball maybe you’ll play soccer with your sons and daughters with this very same ball that you hold in your hand today,” to start to make that possibility tangible, to have that light at the end of the tunnel. So, just to finish, we, the most important reason that we decided to do the kind of philanthropy, hands on, road show kind of philanthropy that we do is that we wanted to have our kids grow up to be the most thankful, grateful human beings, and, and compassionate human beings possible.
A year ago I came, and some of you know this, and I had circulated to, through Peggy to some of you a note that I had written about this. A year ago I came within less than a minute of being burned to death in a house on an island near Boston. And so, this was about 4:00 in the morning. And I couldn’t possibly have known when I was putting my head down on the pillow that night that just a few short hours later I’d be fighting for my life. And it makes me think a lot about how much we take tomorrow for granted. And we all know we’re going to die and all that kind of stuff but we basically have tomorrow, yeah, you know, check that box. It’s going to, you know it’s going to happen. But when you start to really reflect on the fact that, that there is obviously no guarantee about that, I’m writing a book right now and what I’m writing about is, and it’s a book about thankfulness.
What I’m writing about is the idea that too many of us, myself included, wake up on Monday and wish it was Friday. So we’re wishing, and the math of that is that we’re wishing away something like 70% of our life. And so the trick then-I don’t know, maybe “trick’s” the wrong term-but the, to me the response to that is how do you-and what I’m writing about, the term I’m using is “Tuesday afternoon.” Tuesday afternoon is meant to represent the everyday, the so-called ordinary. And the observation is that life happens basically in between the big, you know, your birthday, and New Year’s Eve, and whatever, that that’s the icing, but that the cake is the other 300-whatever days in between. And, that means that you better find out how to make Tuesday afternoons as vivid, and as full, and as rich as possible because that’s what our life is about.
And that’s why I do the philanthropy that I do because I’m trying to make every one of my days as vivid and as full as possible. And that’s why I said at the end of that video, and I’ll say it again now, “Be selfish. Go help someone.” Thank you.