Should Successful Careers in Business Always Follow a Straight Line?

Should successful careers in business always follow a straight line? The conventional path maybe with a double major in college, then the graduate school for an MBA and the first job at a startup or an established company. However, there are many others like Sean Hinton who went from music school to Mongolia and then to McKinsey & Co. to an impact investor spurring economic development in post-conflict nations.

During a recent talk at Stanford GSB’s Global Speaker Series, Hinton, now the CEO of the Soros Economic Development Fund, shared his views on impact investing and the diverse paths to a successful career.

He says he had not intended to a social investor but wanted to be a conductor. While he was studying music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, a fellow guest at a dinner party suggested he study music in what was then known as Outer Mongolia.

By a stroke of luck, he found that the British Consul was offering a scholarship to study in Mongolia. He got a nine-month stipend but spent seven years “in and out of Mongolia,” including a two-year stay with a nomadic family in that country’s remote western mountains.

The Open Society Foundations, with an annual budget of nearly $1 billion, is an international network of agencies that make grants with the aim of promoting education, social justice and a free media.

On return to Australia, at the prompting of yet another dinner guest, he applied and got a job at McKinsey. “You couldn’t draw the straight line from music to McKinsey…There was a set of things you’d have to do. And it wasn’t going to Mongolia. There wasn’t a strategic model or a career counsellor that would’ve given that advice. And yet, it was the shortest distance,” he says.

His next assignment was as a principal of Terbish Partners, a consultancy he founded in 2007 to focus on mining and energy investments in China and Mongolia. Later, as an adviser to Goldman Sachs, he joined the Open Society Foundations in 2015 to lead the Soros Economic Development Fund.

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The Open Society Foundations, with an annual budget of nearly $1 billion, is an international network of agencies that make grants with the aim of promoting education, social justice and a free media.

About social investment, Hinton says that he and his colleagues question the conventional thinking that economic growth is a goal in and of itself. “Nor should we believe that economic development and democracy naturally go hand in hand, that if “you do one, the other comes. You get more democracy, you get more economic growth. (But) it hasn’t worked out like that. Instead, economic development should be used as a tool to develop open societies,” he says.

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Similarly, capital is needed to ignite development. but it’s not enough to jump-start social progress. He points out that those who invest in an emerging market impact business knows that very often the failure is not because of a lack of capital. The failure is almost always the policy environment in which that investment takes place or the lack of capacity in that society to absorb and to work with those investments.”

A common reason for failure is the tendency to proceed with projects without engaging local people and institutions. “Decisions are made in rooms in which the people who are the so-called beneficiaries of these investments and so-called beneficiaries of these interventions are not present. They’re not designing the outcomes. They’re not even in the conversation,” he says.

Thus it becomes a recipe for failure. Following the failure of a 10-year project by an agency that builds roads, schools, clinics and internet infrastructure in Sri Lanka, a minister explained that the local people were never involved in the process. “They never asked us what we wanted. We don’t have cars to drive on the roads. We don’t have teachers to be in the schools. We have this economic development that you gave us. But we’ll burn it all down if we’re not involved,” Hinton quotes him as saying.

He says while he believes that there will be significantly more impact investment in the future, it would be worth asking whether the next generation of impact investing will address the root causes of inequality. Historically, social investment, even when well intentioned, has often failed to benefit the people it has targeted. Unless those lessons are learned and social investors shift their strategy, they may well fail again, he adds.

Sean Hinton’s observations appeared in the blog, Insights by Stanford Business.