I was born in Calgary and have lived my whole life here. I began my professional career in my twenties as an industrial designer after a short stint selling lemonade when I was seven. Alberta does not have the large industrial base that exists in the US or Eastern Canada, so throughout my five years of design school it was always abundantly clear that I was not likley to get a job at a manufacturing company. I was going to have to hardscrabble my way into my own consulting business.

Entrepreneurship was not an unnatural posture for me. Calgary and Alberta in general have a long and storied entrepreneurial history dating back to the pioneering spirits of the people who settled here (both indigenous and European) and the farmers, ranchers and the wildcatters who raised their families and fortunes here. I had already launched my first business manufacturing climbing mitts while I was still in engineerting school and managed to get into design school on the basis of that adventure. I was raised by a single mother who started and successfully ran her own business to raise my brother and me after a nasty. divorce. She was born in a small town in Northwestern Ontarrio and was the the most entrepreneurial of her siblings, so going west to the most entrepreneurial of cities was a natural choice for her too.

Part way through design school I joined a new industrial design consulting business started by one of my professors and a fellow student. After a year that business imploded and I started getting calls from clients with unfinished projects. And just like that I was in business. What a stroke of luck! In the next few years before graduation and after, I made just about every mistake a young entrepreneur could make learning to run a business. But eventually my partners and I built one of the top firms in the province. I did not waste a rare and precious opportunity, even though I did not appreciate how rare and precious it was at the time.

About six years into the design business I had my first crisis of purpose. Up until that point I thought my purpose was to solve problems for clients, but this ran deeper. I had met an important mentor while still in design school and he took me to an introductory session to a personal growth course called, "the Pursuit of Excellence". The course was the creation of Randy Revell, who helped to pioneer the whole industry of personal growth in Northern California in the late 70s. Randy had worked for a venture capital firm doing due diligence on potential investments.

In time, Randy came to appreciate that the most successful of the firms investments were with entrepreneurs who "knew themsleves the best". He developed the philosophy of his new personal growth venture that I made my own, "it's what I don't know about myself that tends to hold me back and what I think is true that isn't". I enrolled and began what turned out to be a new career entirely.

My largest design client was a group of entrepreneurs who in retrospect did not know themselves very well. They were more interested in making money than they were in making a difference and made a single decision that not only blew up the project but me with it. This project was so large that it became my only project. When it went down I ended up bancrupt, divorced and out of the design business.

I partnered with Randy Revell to undertake a radical transformation of his personal growth business: not the programs themselves but how the business built community and generated clients. I unfortunately blew this venture to smithereens. Wanting to make a bigger difference was not enough. There was still obviuously a lot to learn about running a successful business, but I did leave this experience learning something very important about purpose.

Randy said several things that informed the launch of my coaching business. I had by then several painful examples of the idea that something I didn't know about myself was indeed holding me back. The second idea was that everyone has the same purpose and that purpose is to "contribute to the human condition". The third was "the calling springs forth from the wound". (Given all the suffering and damage I had experienced as an entrepreneur it seems inevitable that I would launch a business to coach them.)

For almost thirty years now, I've had the good fortune of coaching some of Canada's finest entrepreneurs and management teams and I can count among them some of the most generous philanthropists like John Francis in Toronto and W. Brett Wilson in Calgary. This is not surprising to me. Like most of the very successful people I coach, they're both fiscally conservative and socially liberal: they invest in both their business ventures and in their communities.

In the province of Alberta, and Calgary in particular, much of the prosperity we enjoy today was built on the tax base and risk taking pursuits of generations of entrepreneurs. This has paradoxically allowed Calgary to also be one of the most generous in terms of philanthopy. And this is not just noblesse oblige (giving out of guilt). Brett, as just one example, refers to himself as a "compassionate capitalist" and has done more than his share on both fronts. He refers to philanthopy as not an obligation but an opportunity. The idea of "equity" has two faces and has resolved them.

To most entrepreneurs, the idea of "equity" is primarly an economic one. As an entrepreneur in this way of thinking, I take the risk that an investment of my time, energy, ideas and whatever cash I have today, will return something better for me and my family tommorow. Wealth is the reward I get for my effort and the risks I take. I've earned it and on top of that I pay my taxes. I'll refer to this notion of economic merit as the "profit" thesis going forward:

There are a great many social entrepreneurs and charities that have emerged to deal with the suffering in society not directly covered by the more commercial sector. How do people in the social sector think about equity?

Obviously, since the time of Karl Marx, there has been strong and vocal criticism of capitalism and the unfettered pursuit of profit. The DEI (diversity-equity-inclusion) movement is the latest iteration of that criticism and it won't be the last, even as the movement itself has its own critics. At the root of the resistance to the "profit thesis" is the carnage that it creates. A great many people get left out of the prosperity promised by the entrepreneurial optimists as the wealth inequality increases between the people with obscene amounts of wealth and the masses without. The idea of "structural inequality" is the antithesis to the merit-biased profit thesis.

I could sum the argument against pure capitalism with the idea of "privilege"– the idea that the more wealth someone has, the easier it is to create even more. This cumulative advantage extends to the family and successors of entrepreneurs and capitalists. And, as at least as an unintended consequence, it locks alot of people outside of the game. There is no such thing as a self-made man from this perspective: opportunities are not equally distributed, and some people by virtue of the accidents of their births are in a better position to capitalize on them (myself included). The widening wealth inequality just seems unfair to people suffering to acquire even the most basic quality of life. We might charitably acknowledge that effort and risk taking count, but they don't tell the whole story. Access to opportunity needs accounting for. A just and truly prosperous society takes care of it's citizens and expands participation in a higher quality of life.

I'll refer to the social equity thesis as an "opportunity" bias going forward.

My colleague, the ethicist Morgan Hamel, defines moral polarization as:

the increasing division or divergence of moral and ethical beliefs within a society or group, resulting in a perceived moral “gap” between in-group and out-group members; this, in turn, leads to a deep ideological divide characterized by judgment of others’ behaviour as immoral, evil, or bad, and demonization of out-group members, resulting in a self-reinforcing cycle of hostility.(In other words, I disagree with you on a moral topic and see you not only as. wrong but evil.

If a just and sustainable society is one that supports both entrepreneurship (economic equity) and the expansion of quality of life throughout the community (social equity), then how do we reconcile the apprarent polarity? It doesn't work to try to guilt the people with means into giving more my suggesting they are privileged. So what works? What is the best of both worlds? How do we solve the merit-privilege paradox? What is the opportunity for (not the obligation of) people with wealth, talent and time to contribute more of that capital to improve the human condition in our community?

The answer to that question and most of the other really interesting questions in life is purpose.

Before I was an executive coach still practicing as an industrial designer, I met Rich Thompson. I would eventually learn that Brett and Rich are very good friends, but back then, he was a prospective design client. I never did land him as a design client but I eventually shared office space with Rich. We got to know each other over several years of dinners and lunches and evenrtually I earned the right to coach him.

Rich back then was also on the global board of YPO (Young President's Organization) and he was working to improve their mission statement, which back then was some version of "creating better presidents through education and networking". This might have been the functional purpose of the organization but it did not capture the "heart of the community". Rich founded one of the most successful marketing firms in Alberta history and understood that the statement of purpose needs to capture the essessence of the brand proposition and the deeper problem it solved. He proposed "changing the lives of the people changing the world". I had just published my first book called "higher purpose higher profit" but still struggled to explain my higher purpose to prospective clients. Ironic. When I heard the phrase Rich was proposing for YPO, it hit me right in the heart. I wish I had written it. It was the best way I had every heard to capture what I felt was my higher purpose–my version of contributing the human condition. Eventually the YPO global board rejected the phrase and I started using it.

There is no inherent conflict between purpose and proft or between merit and opportunity. They are two sides of the equity dialectic. People like W. Brett Wilson are both very successful entrpepreneurs and happy philanthropists. They have resolved the conflict by staying grounded in their purpose to contribute to the human condition and they do that both in the economic and social contexts.

So what is the more enlightened definition of equity? It's the synthesis of merit and opportunity.

Purpose names the enduring problem an institution commits to solving, even as its strategies, structures, and language change. It moves the perspective from short-term profits and short-term suffering to long-term sustainability.