Leading across great divides

IAN BASSIN: the night of January 19th, of course, is the famous Inaugural Balls.

There are a bunch of Inaugural Balls around D.C., and so I get my tuxedo on, go to an inaugural ball, and I get a message, probably a BlackBerry message, saying go to this random address in D.C. and pick up a package.

BERMAN: That’s Ian Bassin, lawyer, activist and executive director of Protect Democracy. Ian is taking us back to January 19, 2009. The night before the historic inauguration of President Barack Obama. Ian is joining the administration as an associate White House Counsel. His job? Ensuring the ethics and proper rules of governance. Basically, one of the people who keeps our democracy functioning as a democracy. 

BASSIN: So I duck out of the ball, it’s raining that night, I run across the district in the rain, and I get to the building, there’s a doorman who hands me a plastic grocery bag bursting at the seams with three thick binders, like school binders, right?

And it’s got my name on the outside of the bag.

BERMAN: This sounds like this may be a foreign operation?

BASSIN: Totally, right? Like, it’s like look for the Jason Bourne and not me, right? I bring them home that night, and opened these binders to look at what they were.

And they contained memos, going back to the Eisenhower administration, that White House counsels and chiefs of staff had sent to White House staff and executive branch officials explaining the rules. Explaining what people were allowed to do and were not allowed to do in the performance of their duties.

And what was striking about it, and became, so clear over the next three years, where these binders became my Bible, was that a lot of these rules are not legally binding. They were just traditions. They were customs that were passed down from administration to administration. And when people in the White House had questions about what was allowed, I’d consult the binders.

And if they didn’t contain the answer, I called Emmet Flood, who did my job for President Bush. And if Emmet and I couldn’t answer it, we called Beth Nolan, who did it for President Clinton. And it didn’t matter whether we were working for a Democratic president or Republican president, the rules were consistent over decades.

BERMAN: The handoff sounds kind of crazy, right? There’s no three-hour sit-down and a walk-through, and let me help you understand how this works, et cetera. It’s in the dark and stormy night. You’re being handed a grocery bag full of binders. I mean why aren’t these things codified? And why isn’t the process more formalized?

BASSIN: So I didn’t understand quite why that was the handoff at the time and I’ve come to understand it since. So I bring these binders in with me on noon on January 20th of 2009. And then I served for about three years, almost three years. I left the fall of 2011. And I left the binders for my successor so that my successor could use them.

Well, flash forward to November of 2016. Donald Trump is elected and I was concerned about what’s going to happen to these binders and the incoming political movement that has essentially been organized in opposition to customs, traditions, norms like that might disregard them entirely. And so I reached out to the White House counsel’s office at the end of the Obama administration. 

I said, “Hey, I know that you need to keep a copy of those binders because they are a presidential record under a federal law known as the Presidential Records Act. But the physical copies that you have were mine. I brought them into the administration with me. I carried them into the building on January 20th, 2009. I’d like them back.” 

But ultimately they said no and I was told if I wanted them, I could file a Freedom of Information Act request for them, which I did, and I was recently informed by the National Archives that they will process my request in 20 years. I all of a sudden realized – light bulb went off. I see why someone might have just taken these in a plastic grocery bag and handed them off to the next administration.

BERMAN: Ian’s story of binders in the night is shocking. We don’t expect decades of rules and guidance for government ethics to be passed down in such an ad hoc way. It shows how heavily our system rests on seasoned professionals having a respect for democratic norms. 

But his story of the binders is also reassuring. It shows how so many people, across political eras and divides, have worked so hard to uphold the standards that our lawmakers need to follow.

And it’s that preservation and passing on of standards that Ian Bassin went on to make his life’s work. He left the White House, and drew on his experience as an Administration lawyer to found an organization called Protect Democracy where, full-disclosure, I am a founding board member. The mission? You guessed it, to protect American democracy. Ian’s not-for-profit has had a huge impact. And unlike most policy and litigation-focused not-for-profits, they’re also a tech organization, having built and launched software called Vote Shield which helps secretaries of state ensure they are running free and fair elections.

I want to emphasize here that Masters of Scale is not a political show. We explore how to scale businesses. And that’s the focus of this episode: massively scaling an organization with a specific, important mission. We invited Ian on to learn how he’s built strong partnerships across opposite ends of the political spectrum, and how he’s done it with a 100% distributed workforce, long before the pandemic work-from-home era began.

I’m Jeff Berman, your host, and this is Masters of Scale.

Today I’m in conversation with my good friend Ian Bassin. Ian is a co-founder and executive director at Protect Democracy. It’s a not-for-profit dedicated to preventing America from sliding into authoritarianism. He has over 100 staff members with a wide range of political views. They do things like safeguard free and fair elections, by tracking voter registration data and ensuring there is nothing nefarious at play. They provide legal counsel for election workers and others being threatened and defamed for their nonpartisan patriotic work.

Ian and I explore how to work together to address massive challenges with no obvious solutions – and how to share best practices with your predecessors, your successors … and occasionally even your competitors.

Copy LinkIan Bassin’s time at the White House

First, let’s hear a little more from Ian about his three-year stint in the White House.

BASSIN: The thing that was so striking was that everyone understands from the president on down that we are temporary occupants of an office.

We hold an incredibly precious and valuable public trust that we, the people, the citizens, give to us temporarily only on the condition that we will exercise it in their best interest, on their behalf. 

And it was part of my job to drill that into, you know, the minds and the hearts of every way that everyone operated in the building and in the executive branch. And that, that really did, you know, for the most part, transcend, parties and administrations. 

BERMAN: There’s one part of this that I’m really struck by, which is, it doesn’t matter. what party, you all were working together to preserve the rule of law and ensure that the White House was operating in an ethical manner. 

Is there any prep for this job? Do they give you any context for what you’re doing, or do you just walk in on day one and say, I guess I’m working for the president?

BASSIN: So, a little bit of both. So one thing that’s kind of staggering, and I remember this feeling vividly when we walk into the building, noon on January 20th, is the West Wing Executive Office building, the rooms are empty. The desks are clean. There are no papers. There’s a computer there for us and nothing else.

And this is the seat of the most powerful government in human history. And you walk in and it’s just empty for the new group of people. And it was just a wild experience to realize that every four years, there’s the opportunity to just swap out the old people and bring in the new and start afresh. And a new group of people come in and they take the keys and they take over running the federal government.

It’s a remarkable thing that we’ve been able to do in this country for 247 years, 

BERMAN: We’ve covered the concept of refounding plenty of times on Masters of Scale – most recently in my talk with Reid Hoffman, which you can find in our episode feed. It’s something I’m focused on as the relatively new CEO and re-founder of WaitWhat, the company behind this podcast. 

It’s not easy. So, the idea that the Federal Government goes through a complete refounding every four to eight years is mindblowing. And the reason it works…at least, most of the time… is the deep respect for not just the office, but the rules and conventions that came before. The goal of “a peaceful transition of power” speaks to the dance every refounder must perform to make their own indelible mark on an organization, while keeping its mission in tact.

After almost three years working in the Obama administration, Ian took on a different challenge in 2011. He went to the not-for-profit Avaaz, which is focused on global organizing to protect the environment, human rights, and freedom of speech. It was here that Ian learned a foundational lesson about building a scaled organization that can sustain a succession of leaders. 

BASSIN: The thing that was, for me, the most eye-opening was not the substance of the work, which was fascinating and meaningful and important, it was how it was done. 

It was led by a management savant in how to think about intentional culture in a workplace, that built the culture from the ground up from the beginning as the DNA of the organization and wove it into everything the organization did, how it tested in hiring, how it onboarded and trained people to operate within the organization, how it injected that culture into every team meeting into every interaction so that ultimately as the organization scaled, that DNA replicated.

And even if the organization grew to be a thousand, ten thousand, however big you wanted to be in every meeting, even if the original team was not present, you could sort of assume that the way the people in that meeting would approach the problem would carry with it these sort of core principles. 

BERMAN: In 2015 Ian left Avaaz and joined another not-for-profit where the approach to culture was, let’s say, less rigorous. 

BASSIN: Culture became kind of those principles on the wall or like on the website. But if you tapped anyone on the shoulder in the middle of a work day and said name the values of the organization, they couldn’t recite them.

And certainly if you said, when was the last time that you invoked them with a colleague in the course of your work? Never. Right? And so it was like a human AB test for me. I was in two different organizations, seeing what it was like to do intentional culture and seeing what it was like to put cultural principles on a wall and nothing could have been more powerful at proving the importance of doing that.

Copy LinkHow did Protect Democracy really begin?

BERMAN: The opportunity to closely compare two vastly different approaches to culture is a gift to any leader. It hammers home what’s needed. You can’t just speak an effective company culture into existence. You need to set the example of living the culture. That is how you truly empower your team to embody the culture themselves.

Fostering a culture of empowerment, communication, and similar values is crucially important. It cultivates a sense of leadership within every team member. It establishes a common language and mindset that facilitate effective execution of tasks. And it shapes the way work is accomplished.

It’s a lesson Ian would draw upon when he founded Protect Democracy in 2017.

But I’m jumping ahead. For now, let’s stay in 2015. Ian had taken a role at a second not-for-profit, coming in as Chief Operating Officer. However, his role was soon thrown into turmoil, along with his self-confidence.

BASSIN: I came into that organization as the COO, and within three months I was at dinner with the founders and they said, this isn’t working. You’ve lost the trust of the organization. We’re going to have to demote you. 

And I had to appear in front of the entire organization to announce my demotion. I asked if I could announce it, and they said, no, we’re going to do it. So you can imagine how humbling an experience that was.

BERMAN: Okay, let’s just pause here to appreciate how this must have felt for Ian. He’d been successful in the White House, as one of the President’s most trusted advisors. And now he was being very publicly demoted. 

It’s hard to stumble professionally, but it’s brutal to have your failures publicly paraded. It’s also not the end of the world. You can springboard from experiences like this to build your tolerance for failure and your comfort with risk. And that’s one heck of a perspective to have when you’re leading through uncharted terrain.

Let’s jump to November 9, 2016, when the seed of what would become Protect Democracy was planted.

BASSIN: I was in voter protection headquarters in Philadelphia in this law office.

I was one of the earliest to see what was happening. There was an empty box on the floor, and out of frustration, I wound up to kick the empty cardboard box into the wall, and it wasn’t empty.

And so the box didn’t budge. And I broke my foot, so I wake up the next morning with my broken foot, and there’s an email from a friend and former partner in other projects who had also been in the White House Counsel’s Office, though a little after me by the name of Justin Florence.

And the email said, should we get the White House Counsel alumni together and talk about what’s coming and whether there’s something we can do about it.

BERMAN: Justin’s email brought to Ian’s mind that bag full of binders he’d been tasked to collect on that Washington DC evening back in 2009.

BASSIN: The insight was that all those binders that I talked about, all those unwritten laws, all the ways in which Presidents of both parties had understood that they were restraints on their office and on themselves and that they held a public trust that we recognize that with the election in 2016, something fundamentally different was about to happen.

And so the question was what would happen if someone threw out those binders and said, these rules are for suckers? 

BERMAN: Ian and Justin immediately began brainstorming ways they could deploy their expertise to counter this imminent threat. 

BASSIN: We had a very clear mission statement from the get go, which was prevent American democracy from declining into a more authoritarian form of government. 

BERMAN: As an entrepreneur, that mission resonates because it identifies an urgent need in the market. Specifically, the need to protect American democracy. The next thing the founders had to do was make the case for why they were the ones best placed to help in this monumental task.

BASSIN: We felt like we had some comparative advantages because, having been the lawyers inside the White House, one thing we really understood was how actors outside of government could influence and impact actors inside of government because we’d been on the receiving end of that. 

BERMAN: This was their unique selling point. Ian and Justin had seen firsthand the potential for democracy to be undermined by bad actors. Just as white hat hackers use their understanding of a computer network’s vulnerabilities to shore it up against malicious attacks, Ian and Justin would use their inside knowledge to protect the nation’s democratic processes and institutions. The precise tools they would use to do this, however, remained unclear.

BASSIN: We knew the Achilles heels in government. But the actual products we were going to need to create was a little bit TBD. And so we had to build a pretty nimble company, from the beginning.

BERMAN: This is such a smart way to approach launching an organization. You see an urgent need. And you know you have the expertise and drive to address it. But you lack a specific product. 

If Ian and Justin had waited around until they had concrete approaches, it might have been too late for American democracy. So Ian’s insight to focus on how to be nimble and how to pivot was an inspired approach. Especially when you consider the breakneck speed of politics and the news cycle at the time right after that election.

Time was of the essence. Ian and Justin had their mission. They had their theory of action. They had their nimble approach. So what did they do next?

BASSIN: Uh, nothing. About two or three weeks go by after the election. And are we really going to start a new organization? We just didn’t have, quite, the confidence we needed to do that, because it takes a lot of chutzpah to start a new organization.

BERMAN: Hey look, we’ve all been there. These feelings are usually in direct proportion to the size of the task. And what could be bigger than saving American democracy? As is so often the case in these crisis-of-confidence moments, the reasons not to act started piling up.

BASSIN: You know, at the time, not only did I have a broken foot, but I had my first child due in two months. I had a good job at another really wonderful nonprofit at the time called GiveDirectly. So this notion of like, are you going to start something new? We just didn’t have that oomph to get over that hump that I’m sure a lot of founders know that moment.

BERMAN: We’ve heard it so many times on this show before. But it’s still hard to imagine for leaders as capable as Ian. 

Fortunately, he soon received a call that helped him rebuild his confidence. It was from two of his former colleagues in the White House Counsel’s Office, Karen Dunn and Blake Roberts.

BASSIN: They said that there had been a meeting in Washington, D.C. that day of a lot of leading lawyers in the district, people who had led the Department of Justice, also had been in the White House Counsel’s Office, and that there was a discussion that there was a need for a new organization, given the moment we were in, and my name was floated as someone who should lead it, and everybody agreed.

BERMAN: That’s quite a moment.

BASSIN: Yeah, it was a, you know, moment I’ll never forget, both for it’s “what? people really think I can do this?”, right, that sense of it was humbling. It was flattering. But most importantly to the story, it was confidence-building, and maybe not just confidence-building, but there was also a little bit of “oh-oh, people expect me to do something”, right?

BERMAN: Well, and also you just recently suffered this gut punch of being demoted publicly in the company, in the not-for-profit you were working at. So I hear you on the, it takes chutzpah to write out these cultural principles and this mission and then to get this phone call. Where did you summon the confidence, having just recently been knocked down a peg? How did you manage through that? 

BASSIN: I remember vividly getting the call from them and flashing back to when I started in the White House Counsel’s Office as a baby lawyer in 2009. And I went into the White House Counsel’s Office and I thought I don’t know a lot about how this place works. I should really sit back and listen.

And so I would go into every meeting in the West Wing or the Executive Office Building and the first thing I would do is I would take the seat furthest from the center of the room. I would go sit against the wall as a wallflower, and two of my colleagues, who were pretty much the same vintage attorneys that I were, they’d go sit at the head of the table. And you know what? People treated them like they ran the meeting.

And it was a real lesson in “people will treat you the way you act”. And that doesn’t mean that you have to be overconfident. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t an important place for humility and curiosity and listening and asking questions. But if you treat yourself as on the outskirts, then you’ll be treated as on the outskirts.

Copy LinkHow Ian Bassin seized the moment

BERMAN: With this lesson in mind, Ian seized the moment.

BASSIN: And I remember saying to myself, when you get on that call, you take charge. You sit at the head of the room, and you tell everyone what we’re going to do. You listen, but you definitely lead.

BERMAN: “You listen, but you definitely lead.” I love this phrase. It’s a concise and strong summation of the constant balance all leaders need to maintain. And it’s applicable far wider than the c-suite. 

It’s something that every team member should adhere to. If everyone acts like they’re invested in the mission, and listens like a learner, you’ll build resilience, belonging, and a propulsive sense of mission throughout your organization.

With this vote of confidence, Ian was reinvigorated to launch this new organization — which they named “Protect Democracy”.

[AD BREAK ]

Copy LinkTaking an idea from a concept to a scalable organization

BERMAN: Welcome back to Masters of Scale. I’m Jeff Berman with our guest, Protect Democracy founder Ian Bassin. If you want to hear our entire conversation, you can find that on our Masters of Scale YouTube channel.

Before the break, we heard about Ian’s rocky journey in the run up to founding Protect Democracy. I asked him about those early days taking the idea from concept to actual, scalable organization.

BERMAN: You have this concept that you build out. You get this call from Karen Dunn.  You identify the problem. But now you actually have to do the thing, right? Just like an entrepreneur in the private sector, you’ve got to raise some capital, you’ve got to figure out how you organize. So, how did you actually get this organization off the ground?

BASSIN: I think the first thing that a lot of people listening to this who either have built or trying to build organizations, either have learned or should learn now is that nobody quite knows exactly how to do it. And so the first thing we had to overcome was this notion of, well, we don’t know how to do this. Who knows how to do this? There must be an expert way to do this. And the answer was nobody really knows. And so we had to come up with, for example, a budget. Well, how do you build a nonprofit budget? I Googled it. I Googled, how do you build a nonprofit budget? And then we started mapping out what a nonprofit is, and first off, just having the sense that there is no secret way.

BERMAN: This brings to mind a favorite Masters of Scale metaphor (courtesy of Reid Hoffman): Entrepreneurship is like jumping off a cliff and building the plane on the way down. 

A lot of the time, you make that jump without even knowing how to build the plane. And you also need to hope that you can somehow source the essential components – the wings, the engine, the fuselage – all while you’re in freefall.

In this case, there were plenty of people who believed passionately in Protect Democracy’s mission and were prepared to hand airplane parts to Ian and Justin. Those people included Reid Hoffman – who I introduced to Ian around this time. 

I knew of Reid’s deep belief in the need to protect our democratic institutions. Reid also brought a venture capitalist’s eye to investing in Protect Democracy.

REID HOFFMAN: One of the things that I think is most fundamental to the health of our society, the health of our democracy is to pursue the rule of law. And so it was like, okay, if classic Silicon Valley venture investing was to say, okay, if you, Jeff, rate Ian, then we should put in money, we should get it going.

And it was the equivalent of a seed bet in venture. It was okay, good talent, good plan, really important outcome, go. 

So there’s a clear parallel for setting up the organization, where the organization starts with no demonstrated product service, you need seed financing for it to be doing that. That was essentially what I was providing. And ultimately as part of providing that then, Ian and Protect Democracy could start showing that they were part of trying to keep the system at a high integrity and coherence in the rule of law, such that it was bipartisan, or actually, frankly, multi-partisan.

And so once it got there, then they could do fundraising and get grants from foundations and other kinds of things once they’d proven the venture out. And then that allows them to get on a path of scale.

BERMAN: This venture seed funding also helped Protect Democracy secure a position that is coveted in the world of business: first mover advantage. 

BASSIN: We were first to market, people were incredibly disoriented, alarmed, concerned about what was happening in this country, we got to them first. And we had a proposed set of solutions that we thought we had a pretty good theory behind and we had a network.

Because we had all of those things, we were able to assemble the money, the talent, the partnerships, the media attention. There were a lot of organizations that came along months after us trying to do some similar types of things, I think at a much tougher time because they didn’t have that sort of perfect set of inputs that we had at that moment. 

Copy LinkOne of Ian Bassin’s best pieces of advice

BERMAN: Early on, Ian received key advice that ensured those early, vital stakeholders would stay engaged with Protect Democracy.

BASSIN: One of the best pieces of advice I got was from Bre Pettis, one of the godfathers of 3d printing. He said, look, with your group of investors, just send them a quick 10-minute note. Every, like, three weeks with what’s going well and what you’re worried about. Keep them invested in what’s going on and solicit them for advice on what your problems are.

You will create not just investors, but partners in doing that. I’ve done that for eight years. Every couple of weeks, we send a really candid note to all of our key partners. Here’s what we’re working on. Here’s what’s going well. Here’s what we’re worried about or what we need help with. And what we’ve built is a community of investors and partners who are not just people who cut a check and then go away, but are intimately involved in the success or failure of the organization day to day.

BERMAN: It’s an incredible note. I think it is going to be helpful for a lot of people to think about how to engage investors and, and frankly, other stakeholders, because I think we often underestimate how much people want to help when they’re aligned with the mission, whether you’re a for-profit or not-for-profit or other.

BERMAN: Ian layered an extra challenge on top of the founding of Protect Democracy: the decision to be a remote organization from the outset. Now, this was back in 2017, three years before Covid would force companies to hastily pivot to remote working. I asked Ian why they made that choice.

Copy LinkBuilding an invested culture 

BASSIN: I had been at some remote organizations before, and some of the things I observed about them was, I think distributed organizations are able to be much more intentional about setting the kind of culture that they want. And are able to be a lot more efficient because people don’t have the problem. That you have in an in-person organization where you’re in your zone, you’re in your flow, and then someone walks up to your door, and they come into your office, and it’s good for them to talk right now, but it’s not so good for you to talk right now because you are in your flow, but now you’re like, well, this is my colleague. So there’s a lot of inefficiencies about the physical office space that you eliminate a lot when people are distributed.

And so we have staff in probably about 26 states. And for us as an American Democracy organization, that’s also crucial because if we’re going to play any role at trying to protect and ultimately strengthen and advance American democracy, we need the wisdom of people from all over this country.

And if we were to confine ourselves to just the talent in Washington or just the talent in New York, we’d be limiting the talent pool enormously. And who we’d be competing with would be challenging as well. Whereas once we brought into the entire country, we get access to all sorts of talent everywhere.

BERMAN: I hear all those benefits, and I love that you’ve leaned into what others might perceive as a challenge and turned it into a strength, there are two elements of this that I’m struggling with, for the first time leading a distributed organization, and I’m curious how you deal with them. 

Number one, so much of my learning in my career is similar to that seat that you took on the back bench in the White House where you’re listening, and you’re learning, and you’re seeing how it’s done. That’s really hard to do in a phone and video conference environment. Two is the interstitial time. You’re walking through the office, and yes, someone’s in flow. You don’t want to interrupt their flow, but you can see that something’s off with them, and you’d say: hey, let’s go take a walk, let’s go grab a coffee, whatever, and just check in and how are you doing? everything, okay?; So, have you figured out how to solve for that? And if so, how have you done it? 

BASSIN: Well, this goes again to the point that you can do all of those things, and they’re much more intentionally injected into what we do. So, for example, on the sort of learnings piece, right, what you observe and learn, we have a practice where midway through and at the end of every project, we do an after-action session where we look at what’s working, what’s not working, what lessons can we draw from here for other things, and then we read those out to the entire team. So everyone benefits from those lessons.

BERMAN: I’m going to break in here and punctuate Ian’s in-depth answer to my question. It contains so much actionable material for building an invested culture – whether you’re fully remote, fully in-person, or somewhere in between.

In this instance, Ian is intentional in building out moments of reflection. This has a deep impact on the tactical, strategic, and cultural levels at Protect Democracy. People gain clarity on what they need to do immediately and why; they get a bigger picture view of how that action will meaningfully move the needle in terms of mission; and these moments reinforce a culture of inclusion, in which everyone has ownership of decisions.

Okay, on to Ian’s next insight about the benefit of being remote from the very beginning.

BASSIN: In terms of the interstitial picking up on how people engage with each other: we’ve adopted a practice, I think originally came from Priya Parker, whose work you may know, talking about the art of belonging and how people get together, which we start every meeting with people sharing their state of mind.

Zero, one, two, three on the positive side or zero negative, one negative, two negative, three on the negative side. We go around. Everyone quickly says, where are they on that scale and what might be informing it. And that immediately gives people the signal that, you know what, Jeff’s a negative two today. At the end of this meeting, I might grab him and pull him aside, and see what I can do to help him.

BERMAN: This is a terrific example of how to bridge the emotional disconnect that can come from working remotely in a fast-paced organization. Let’s turn to one particularly surprising pillar of Ian’s approach to making a remote organization work. It’s one I don’t think is widely considered. 

BASSIN: This is really important: no headquarters. If you want to be a distributed organization successfully, you can’t have one place that’s the headquarters, and everyone else is sort of somewhere else, there can be no headquarters.

Cause otherwise, the people who are not in it, they feel second class. They feel like they’re missing something, and there’s a locus of energy. It’s got to be fully distributed. 

BERMAN: This is more than just a naming convention. How Ian has achieved it speaks to how intentional he’s been from day one regarding culture and his commitment to distributed working. Post-pandemic, there are so many organizations grappling with the challenge of remote and hybrid work. I think this question of having a headquarters – whether in name or in spirit – is overlooked. Working remote should not mean feeling remote.

BASSIN: You’ve got to bring people together for multi-day off-sites multiple times a year. And what’s important about those off-sites is they’re not about, let’s come up with our strategic plan, right? What are our OKRs gonna be for next year? That’s not what you use them for. You can do that when everyone’s back in their hometown. Those are for really building those deep connections with each other. 

BERMAN: Building connections is also at the core of Protect Democracy’s work. As we’ve heard throughout this episode, the only way Protect Democracy can succeed is through building a broad coalition. One that cuts through political divides. It is, I think, a singular problem that Ian faces – and I asked him how he tackles it.

BERMAN: You’ve assembled a team of people who have worked for everyone from Elizabeth Warren to Ted Cruz and Jim DeMint and John McCain, how have you created a culture where people with such radically different political belief systems, political philosophies on so many issues, can come together and focus in on the single mission so well?

BASSIN: Well, first off, we have to do this as a country, right? If we can’t, in an organization committed to protecting democracy, bring people together across political differences, how do we expect the country to be able to do it? 

There are those things that are necessary and fundamental for a country to be democratic.

Can you peacefully protest your government without being violently attacked by the government’s military without any accountability?

Can you, if you’re an eligible voter, easily access the ballot. Have your vote counted. When someone actually gets the most votes in the rules that exist at the time. Are they the person who gets inaugurated? Or is there an effort to thwart their inauguration? Those are things that are foundational to a democracy, and those are the things that we work on.

And that actually brings together a lot of Americans across a lot of political differences who fundamentally agree with that. The majority of Americans agree with that. 

And so we’re able to bring people together who disagree, but we agree on the fundamental values of democracy.

We’re a company like any for profit company that has a specific thing that we do, a widget that we sell, a mission that we try to serve. It is for us, it is to prevent American democracy from declining into a more authoritarian government, just as for Pepsi, it’s to sell soda, right?

BERMAN: How do you think about both competing with and cooperating with other entities that are focused on the same mission that Protect Democracy is?

BASSIN: We have a word for it, we call it co-opertition, which is one of the unique dynamics of the non-profit sector, in the for-profit sector, it is assumed that companies will compete against each other. It is considered a good, a necessity, because as they compete, they force each other to out-innovate one another, and the entire sector moves forward.

Um, and the assumption in the non-profit sector is that, we should all just be cooperating with each other and that you’ll hear this a lot from investors from donors saying, well, are you guys duplicative of each other?

And, you know, my response is, well, you do want us to cooperate with each other. If we develop an innovative strategy to advance the ball of our democracy, we should share it with the entire sector.

We do that in the nonprofit space, it’s really important because we do have a shared mission. At the same time, the notion that we should collapse all of the entities in the nonprofit space and just have one and no duplication.

You’d eliminate competition. You’d eliminate innovation. You’d actually create a less good customer experience and less advances. You want a little bit of competition because I will tell you the truth is because we as an organization have to compete for donors, we have to compete for talent, we have to compete for media attention, we have to compete for meetings with legislators that drives us to do better.

And so the non-profit space has to compete and it has to cooperate.

It has to have co-opertition.

BERMAN: One of the other interesting points of commonality between for-profits and not-for-profits is success on mission tends to buoy or depress spirits, right?

I’d love to hear, one, where you are on mission, and, two, how you keep the team’s spirits buoyed when they’re concerned that they’re not achieving mission?

BASSIN: You know, it all rests upon that cultural foundation we talked about earlier, but there are moments that I have my doubts as everyone on the team does. And I remember one of them came in the fall of 2020 as we were approaching the election. And as an optimist, I generally think that it is more likely than not that we will end up in a better place in the future.

And I had dipped into a place where I thought it was actually only a 49 percent chance that we would end up in a better place and that more likely than not we would end up in a very dark place. And I remember I reached out to a mentor of mine. I said, how do I lead a team if I actually have dipped into that place of pessimism?

And he said to me, you may think there’s only a 49 percent chance of success, but do you believe that you and your team and the American people have the agency to add that 2 percent to tip us back to 51? Is that within your control to do? And I remember thinking absolutely, we absolutely have that agency.

He said then lead from there. And I bring that to the team, and I encourage the team to think that way as well, which is that authoritarianism thrives on hopelessness, on despair, on a feeling of isolation and that nothing can possibly get better. And democracy as a form of government isn’t just a set of laws or amendments in a constitution.

Alexis de Tocqueville referred to the habits of the heart in America that make us a democratic society. It is what we carry with us every day and what we do. It is that belief that we have the agency to chart our own future. And so even in a moment when members on our team or listeners to this podcast think we’re trending towards a dark place, the truth is that we have the agency to change that outcome. 

And I look forward to being able to do that so that hopefully we can do one thing that a nonprofit should do that perhaps a for profit should never do, which is put yourself out of business.

If we’re ultimately successful, then we will no longer need to exist.

BERMAN: I love that. And I love what I’m going to start referring to as the 2 percent principle, because this idea that, boy, if you’re just on the wrong side of that optimism-, pessimism line, if you and your team really believe that you can tip that scale just that small amount, you don’t have to get it to 100%.

You just have to get it to 51 percent to really believe and get back on the horse and ride into battle. I think that’s an extraordinary lesson and principle for us to take into our workplaces, not-for-profit, for-profit, or other. So thank you, Ian. I’m grateful for that insight, for those lessons and for your time today.

BASSIN: It’s always good talking to you, Jeff.
BERMAN: I’m Jeff Berman, thank you for listening to Masters of Scale.