You make good points here. EA can’t scale without hard conversations about resources—and we also can’t scale if every financial decision is also a cause prioritization decision AND an assessment of our own expected future contribution. That’s impossible and nuts.
Let’s borrow from the private sector some good heuristics about money (transportation rules of thumb, ex: coach for flights under 5hrs and business class for 5hr+, or literally anything like that). Get smart finance people, have them set policies, and then let the rest of us stay accountable but otherwise not think about it.
I like this! It’s a very clean solution that saves a lot of time and hassle. Maybe the downside is that it takes away some autonomy and feels a little paternalistic and onerous to have a list of rules, but I think it could be simple enough and is not an unreasonable ask such that the benefits may outweigh the downsides.
For personal spending, it should just be guidelines / recommendations that people can follow at will. For EA orgs’ money, it can be more like “we usually don’t comp first class plane tickets, talk to us if your situation is different”
You make good points here. EA can’t scale without hard conversations about resources—and we also can’t scale if every financial decision is also a cause prioritization decision AND an assessment of our own expected future contribution. That’s impossible and nuts.
Let’s borrow from the private sector some good heuristics about money (transportation rules of thumb, ex: coach for flights under 5hrs and business class for 5hr+, or literally anything like that). Get smart finance people, have them set policies, and then let the rest of us stay accountable but otherwise not think about it.
I like this! It’s a very clean solution that saves a lot of time and hassle. Maybe the downside is that it takes away some autonomy and feels a little paternalistic and onerous to have a list of rules, but I think it could be simple enough and is not an unreasonable ask such that the benefits may outweigh the downsides.
For personal spending, it should just be guidelines / recommendations that people can follow at will. For EA orgs’ money, it can be more like “we usually don’t comp first class plane tickets, talk to us if your situation is different”