than a bit of hand‐wringing, Bob agreed to sell his construction business and move across the country with me for a new adventure. This was 10 years after the Stonewall demonstrations, and we envisioned ourselves heading toward some sort of gay Mecca where we'd be surrounded by like‐minded activist couples while I pursued my degree. At least, that was the plan.
New York, however, turned out to be different than we'd anticipated. Despite the city's reputation for wild liberalism, its gay community in the mid‐1980s remained ghettoized. Of the few gay students in my law classes, most were deeply closeted due to fears that being “out” might dash their prospects at the Wall Street firms where they hoped to work. Bob and I, meanwhile, had applied for married student housing. (By then, we'd been together for five years.) When we learned we “didn't qualify,” I found myself arguing with the law school dean on my very first day. He was a highly regarded constitutional lawyer but informed me that making the case for a male couple to get into married student housing would be “way too awkward” for the women in the campus housing office. Bob and I were packed off to a tiny room facing an air shaft, where we had to pull out our futon bed each night and roll it up again every morning. This went on for three years. Add in the everyday challenges of being an openly gay couple in the 1980s—when anti‐homosexual discrimination in housing, employment, healthcare, and military service were rife—and my sense of injustice was beginning to boil. Then came AIDS.
It is difficult to capture the swirl of terror and outrage I felt as this disease moved from a media story to a force claiming my classmates and acquaintances, one by one, particularly after Bob and I returned to Seattle after graduation. We became caretakers for dying friends, attended funerals of men in the prime of their lives, and lived in abject terror of the virus. I suddenly found myself—a studious kid from a conservative community—at street protests and gay rights parades. Marching channeled my rage, but it left me frustrated. Protesting was necessary but insufficient to produce the tangible outcomes, like funding for AIDS research or changes to insurance laws, that would improve the well‐being of our community.
This was the moment I began to appreciate the important difference between frontline demonstrations and deeper reform. It was also the dawning of my realization of the power in behind‐the‐scenes practical activism. Let me be clear: I am profoundly grateful that there were, and still are, people driven to speak up loudly for change. Even when strident or off‐putting (like the ACT‐UP protests at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York in 1989), public actions garner the attention of media and influencers, which is essential for pushing an issue onto broader public consciousness and, eventually, the agenda of policymakers. Indeed, considering the many harmful policies and the extraordinary affronts to our democratic systems today, I believe much more of this vocal activism is necessary to have any hope of leaving a better world to our children. Every tool matters, from advocacy efforts, to street marches, to effective social media campaigns (beyond merely sharing our outrage by “liking” a headline on Facebook).
But I knew even then that I was more effective as a behind‐the‐scenes strategist. Shaping policies (on anti‐discrimination and pro‐marriage laws); building alliances (with straight allies and the business community); designing programs (like Lambert House for gay and lesbian youth in Seattle); donating and raising money (for scores of LGBTQI college scholarships and LGBTQI rights organizations); or working on longer‐term systems change—these are the things that charge me up. The work of many activists across multiple platforms and generations laid the building blocks for each of those steps, paving the way for social change. We wouldn't have same‐sex marriage across the United States today without winning early legal fights to amend healthcare laws so that AIDS patients could be covered and their partners seen as family. Nor would Bob and I have been able to adopt our son without the underlying work of so many activists who fought to change family law and societal norms.
Thinking back to those years, I can hardly believe the dramatic changes generated by the undercurrents of gay activism and China's ascendance—complete transformations in just a few decades! The notion of legal same‐sex marriage was simply inconceivable to me as a young man when I first came out in Taiwan. The idea of China as a global superpower would have been impossible to reconcile with the poverty and isolation I saw in 1983 while traveling on third‐class “hard seats” through rural Shandong Province. And to have raised an adopted child from China who grew up the legal son of two dads belies anything I could have dreamed of as a young irrigator in Montana. Yet here we are. Change on a grand scale is possible, and it can happen relatively fast.
The third undercurrent of social evolution that I rode came largely from being in the right place at the right time and willing to leap into the unknown. With my graduate degree in hand, Bob and I returned to Seattle, where I worked in international law and he taught in low‐income elementary schools. But after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre dashed the hopes of many for a more democratic China, I pivoted from human rights to focus on another type of rights: intellectual property. Here we were, living in an emerging tech capital just as software was beginning to transform the world, and my law firm was merging with that of Bill Gates, Sr. (father to the Microsoft co‐founder). The next thing I knew, I had a front‐row seat to the digital revolution.
In 1993, I was recruited to work at Corbis, the groundbreaking startup founded by Bill Gates, the tech pioneer. It sounds old hat now, but Corbis was at the forefront of developing technology through which media companies could access and digitize millions of art and photography images. This meant we were also rethinking copyright law and business models; traveling the world to evangelize for this kind of broad access; and meeting with prominent figures in the worlds of art, photography, and technology. It was a heady and extraordinary opportunity, chock‐full of some remarkable achievements and many painful failures. We produced several award‐winning products and documentaries using these new technologies, developed cataloguing schemes and rights‐management tools, and built alliances between artists, technologists, and businesspeople. After a few years, I was tapped to become the CEO and led Corbis's expansion into a global firm. That time of my life could fill a whole separate book; suffice to say, the Digital Revolution opened my eyes to the power and possibilities in innovation and data. This new undercurrent would influence my activist agenda by making clear that world change would come through the deployment of new technologies, including what we then called the “information superhighway,” later known as the internet.
About 15 years ago, these three forces intersected with a fourth undercurrent that would shape the rest of my life and career to date. At the turn of the century—while I was head‐down running a pioneering internet company, worrying about Y2K, and wondering if people would ever use credit cards online—in New York City, every member state of the United Nations had endorsed eight Millennial Development Goals (MDGs). These were benchmarks that would measure global efforts to tackle poverty, improve health, and address inequity by 2015. I had no idea this was happening, but my then‐boss and friend Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, were part of it, alongside other philanthropists and political leaders. Under the enlightened leadership of UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, the MDGs would hasten a revolution in the fields of global development and social innovation.
I could not resist this. Such a powerful global movement presented a fertile field to till with the lessons I'd learned through a lifetime of work in leadership and social activism. So, in 2007, I left Corbis to return to promoting opportunities for impact at the intersection of innovation and social justice, becoming global director of social innovation at McKinsey & Company, where I worked on social sector projects worldwide. I also served on several corporate and nonprofit boards, including at PATH, then known as the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, a global nonprofit focused on innovations to advance human well‐being. I fell in love with PATH's mission, later serving as interim director of its India program, and then its CEO for almost eight years. That fourth undercurrent and my experiences working within it are the primary basis for the ideas in this book.
Leading PATH provided me with a master class in practical activism. I learned a great deal about when to push, where to pull back, and how to get stuff done—a lot of stuff. During my tenure, we raised more than
