Jeff Raderstrong

This is an edited excerpt from the book, The Social Impact Advantage: Win Customers and Talent by Harnessing Your Business for Good, by Tynesia Boyea-Robinson, published by McGraw Hill.

Not many 16-year-olds get to work at NASA, but there I was: a summer high school intern working at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. I was a part of SHARP (Summer High School Apprenticeship Research Program), working on the International Space Station Alpha (ISSA) initiative.

My first day there, they gave me a thick folder containing packets and booklets with the straightforward name of “Information Kit.” It contained massive amounts of paper and contained things like the Kennedy Space Center strategic plan, a map of the series of buildings I had to navigate, a SHARP student handbook, and other documents that would help me understand what my job was and how I should do it. I lugged this “kit” around with me every day that summer.

I learned two important lessons working with nerds. First, I was a nerd too. I had always been nerd-curious, focused on my studies and gravitating towards the sciences. But, as a young Black woman, I wasn’t able to identify with nerd culture. A nerd was a skinny white man, not a short Black girl. After working at NASA, I knew there was a place for me among the nerds. This insight helped me take every other step in my life from studying engineering and computer science in college to working in e-commerce at GE, and even running Year Up, a nonprofit supporting youth in accessing technology careers, a decade later.

The second lesson I learned was related to that nondescript Information Kit: Everything was so complex, but that didn’t mean everything had to be overwhelming. While our goal was a literal moonshot, we had step-by-step plans in that Information Kit that helped us build our shared vision. From the lowliest intern (me) to the most senior leader, we were undeterred by aiming for what had never been done and motivated by what we could create together.

This dual appreciation of both the mindset and what it takes to achieve that mindset is missing from much of our work in business and society. We may focus too much on the end goal, and not enough on setting the right targets to help us get there. We may have big ideas, but we are unable to execute on them (or undervalue the work that it takes to achieve them) because we lack the information kit that will lead the way to getting there.

The Moonshot Mindset for Social Impact

Flash forward many years, after some time at GE and Harvard Business School, and I’m leading the Year Up expansion into the DC area. Year Up works with young people who had graduated high school but did not have many opportunities after that. They put them through training to receive college credits and set them up with apprenticeships in technology companies to help with project management, IT, and other tasks.

During my time at Year Up, I saw what it took to achieve substantive, positive changes in the lives of people who needed it. At NASA, I had seen what an organization could do with the right processes and ambition to achieve unfathomable tasks. I knew that the process behind both of those things was essentially the same.

Yet I also saw at Year Up that there was a “siloed” nature between the world of business and work that had social impact. Part of the reason I was so successful and raised so much money at Year Up was because I was able to connect with the corporate leaders in DC and speak their language from my time at GE and HBS.

But oftentimes, it astounded me that I needed a translator. Year Up ‘s work was about creating opportunity for young people and breaking down the barriers that society has set up for them. These business leaders in DC were also breaking down barriers and creating opportunities, the difference was that they did it with technology and business. We were talking about the same things, so why didn’t we all speak the same language?

The Business of Business is Business?

The reason for this divide between business outcomes and social outcomes is longstanding and deep-seated in our Western, capitalist society. We have been living in an era defined by the Milton Friedman’s maxim “the business of business is business.” Business leaders see their role as maximizing profit and creating the most value for their customers, employees, and shareholders. Why should they be concerned with anything else? With these profits, the corporate leaders who maximize profits can then choose to give their funds away to help improve society.

This division of labor among the sectors has been essentially unchanged since the first major era of philanthropy began with people like J. D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. But we are beginning to see those walls come down. Consumers are looking more and more towards businesses to be social and political leaders, and companies are facing increased pressure from boycotts and digital organizing to make statements in support or against social causes. The millennial generation, in particular, are more interested in civic engagement and giving back and are making consumption decisions based on those values.

Yet businesses continue to treat social impact as a “side dish” rather than the main course of their operations. I saw this working with companies through Year Up. Some saw our work with them as a charitable act—something they were doing to our students to help out “disadvantaged youth.” Few saw it for what it really is, or could be—a talent recruitment tool to gain highly qualified staff with a high probability for long-term retention.

Making Impact the Main Course

Year Up was offering something that broke down the silo between business and nonprofits. It gave companies a chance to improve their bottom line while also improving society. Time and time again I saw this offer accepted, but without companies understanding what it really meant for them. I knew that until the business community saw things like Year Up for what they really were—a true win-win—we would not only fail to solve society’s biggest challenges, but also fail to unleash the true power of business and the capitalist engine that drives it.

After dedicating several years to Year Up and getting to a place of sustainability, I decided to move on and start working on a new moonshot: to change how the world does business.

I certainly have not yet achieved my bold moonshot, but through my impact investment and advisory firm, CapEQ, I have helped dozens of companies change their practices to improve their bottom line while also improving society. I’ve worked with major industry players like Walmart, the Carlyle Group, Athleta, and others to help them leverage the power of social impact—what I call “equitable impact”— and engage with their customers. I have seen what businesses can do when you no longer think of impact as a side dish, but the main course.

This work isn’t easy, but we can do it. We have the information kits, we just need to implement them. My new book, The Social Impact Advantage, walks readers through a step-by-step process for what it takes to achieve this moonshot in their own company. I hope you will join me and use it to harness the true potential of your business.

This article originally appeared on Chief Executive under my byline.

Publishing a book remains one of the best ways for an executive to stand out. As the 2024 Business Book ROI study found, when done well, a book can sharpen a leader’s market position, boost their brand, help achieve business goals and ultimately turn a profit. And leaders who offer insightful, authentic writing amid the onslaught of AI-generated content will form deeper connections with readers and potential customers.

Authors can leverage AI as a tool to reduce the time and cost of writing a book. It can organize transcripts, summarize research, structure chapters and produce promotional copy in minutes. But while AI is opening more doors for authorship, a completely AI-driven process can actually decrease your potential return.

Having worked on around about 10 books using AI in some way, there are some clear use cases—and some that will create massive headaches:

Brainstorming: AI can be helpful, but don’t rely on it too much. Outlining: A strong use-case for AI. Research: AI can be a timesaver and a lifesaver! Trust, but verify. Writing: Tread lightly… Editing: Tread very lightly… Miscellaneous tasks and promotion: Depends on what you want to do, but AI can be a huge help.

Start with these two general rules of thumb:

• AI can do less, not more. If you expect AI to draft a 70,000-word manuscript from a one-page outline, sorry—that’s not happening. AI struggles to expand text in a coherent way, but it is very good at taking a lot of text and producing shorter prose. (Why would you want to go smaller when writing a book? More on that below.)

• Use AI as an over-eager intern. Many people have observed that AI is excited to serve you but does not have the capabilities or knowledge you might expect of a person with its level of confidence. Do not give AI any task you wouldn’t give a 22-year-old college grad.

1. Brainstorming

Lots of people use AI in their ideation processes. A sparring partner, trained on the entire knowledge of the internet, could only help sharpen your ideas—right?

Unfortunately, after seeing several authors brainstorm with AI, and using it myself on occasion, I think “ideation” could be the worst use case for AI. Its feedback is not situated within the full context of your thought leadership. Telling it to be “more critical” can lead to it picking ideas at random and tearing them apart for no reason. It does not understand the logical structure of what you want to communicate, so it cannot help strengthen your ideas in a coherent way.

There are some exceptions to this: If you are brainstorming for examples, or specific research, AI can be quite helpful with the right prompts, much like an intern directed to explore the internet for a day, albeit with results in just a few seconds.

2. Outlining

AI is fantastic at outlining—if you give it the right inputs. When I work with someone on a book as a collaborator, I start with in-depth interviews. This produces a lot of ideas, recorded in transcripts. It takes considerable time to reduce all of this down into a clear outline for a book or a chapter. AI can do it much faster, often in seconds. This is when “more to less” is a huge help.

You do not even need to be interviewed about your book to benefit from AI’s analytical skills (although it helps to have a human sparring partner, see above). I worked with someone who had hours of recordings of him talking to himself about the book that a research assistant spent days going through, but it could have been synthesized by AI in no more than a few minutes.

3. Research

Research is a common use case for AI and I can confirm AI can be a huge timesaver for business book research. It’s an intern-level research assistant at your fingertips. Make sure you are verifying the information (like you would do with any research assistant), but in my experience, there has been less AI “hallucination” in the last few months than two years ago.

4. Writing

Using AI to write your book is a sticky ethical problem. If AI “writes” the book, can you claim ownership of it? (As of right now, probably not.) But that’s less important than AI’s current inability to write compelling prose beyond a few sentences. If you want a book, AI can write it. If you want a coherent book, AI cannot.

There are some caveats to this: AI can generate portions of text that might be useful, with the right prompting and context. If you upload a series of case studies from your company, for example, it can synthesize those into a paragraph or two for an example in a chapter. I worked with someone on a highly technical book and we uploaded probably five times the amount of text required for a book-length manuscript (including manuscript drafts we had previously written and a variety of articles), and AI delivered a decent draft.

An AI draft can be a starting point (or what Anne Lamott calls a “shitty first draft.”) Getting to that point can be the hardest hurdle to overcome. But it will likely then need to be revised with more compelling and logically sound prose. Relying solely on AI for writing robs you of the thinking that goes into writing, which will help you make a better book, which will help you connect with readers and create more opportunities.

5. Editing

I’ve assumed in the past that because spelling and grammar is dictated by clear rules, AI could be a competent book editor. But unfortunately, the massive amounts of text, and the complexity of sentences, seem to confuse the technology. It makes up edits, ignores glaring problems or stops halfway through. Maybe AI can improve on this‚ but it’s not there yet.

6. Miscellaneous tasks and promotion

AI can help with many other tasks that go into book writing: formatting references; creating indexes; generating graphics, especially diagrams or charts. These tasks can take up a lot of time (and can be the rote, boring tasks an intern could take on).

AI can also create the supplemental content required for promotion: social media posts, newsletters, collateral, launch event content and more. For example, if I upload a chapter into AI, it can create a reasonable draft of a teaser newsletter to promote the book.

Business leaders should not be afraid to use AI in their book writing process. Used well, it can save time, reduce cost and improve organization. But it should not be allowed to replace the thing readers actually want from a leader: their unique thought leadership and judgment.