Sienna Jackson
Appearances
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
Yeah, I think it's not that that wasn't the real me or that wasn't a valuable time of my life. It's just that I think it's important to have healthy boundaries between your personal identity and your identity at work. I think Americans live to work when it's something that you do to live. And like all industries, fundamentally, their jobs, right? They're just their industries.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
I see LA as like a company town in the same way that like a coal mining town in Virginia is a company town, right? Or DC is a company town because everyone works in politics and it's just work. And L.A. is very much like the D.C. of the West Coast. When you think about like our consular core and all of the different geopolitics that are actually L.A. makes itself very relevant to.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
So like all of these different industries and there's a lot of overlap, too. So when I was, again, in that period of time during the Obama years. There was a lot of overlap between DC and Hollywood, like a lot, a lot.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
And it's funny that people that I've run into or the contacts that I have in my phone vis-a-vis that that relationship, that special relationship, especially when the person who ran your company was like a major Democratic donor.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
As someone who advocated for creators' rights, I don't think, first of all, AI is not new. Like the generative AI that we're seeing, we've had algorithms driving things for a long time now. And a lot of the underlying technology that we're talking about is actually not all that new. And algorithms have been influencing us and influencing our lives now.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
As consumers, as people who are exposed to media for a long time, you think about the curation of your social media feed, the algorithm that drives what you see every day. When it comes to generative AI or open AI as an example, I don't think it is a positive change for the industry, for these larger companies to think, oh, here's our excuse to either eliminate people's jobs or to underpay people.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
Because at the end of the day, generative AI, it's not generating anything unique. It's taking what's given, right? And regurgitating out. It's not even, I wouldn't even call it a derivative work because there's no work being done by a person. It's not creation. We don't call it creative AI. It's generative AI because you're just generating something from a prompt.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
When people say that part of the reason why WGA and SAG-AFTRA and other unions were renegotiating their contracts with the studios and were picketing is this idea that AI is going to be used to abuse workers, which very well can be. And we see that that's what happens. And to create content that isn't really art. So some people say generative AI, AI generated art is art.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
And I think that's a misnomer because it's an excuse. Art is an action. It's something that you do something and it reflects a craft. It reflects technical skill that you have to develop over time. And when, you know, you as an artist, you as a creative are making something or expressing something, you're expressing a point of view that is your own. You have to be the author of
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
That point of view or that thing that you're creating. And it requires technical skills. And if we say that someone who's like a prompt engineer sits down and throws in a couple of prompts to chat to PT and generates a screenplay, that person is not a writer for having inputted a full different prompts and generate...
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
because they don't know how to write if you were to put a gun to their head and say write like a 20 minute short they couldn't do it right because they don't actually have the skill so i think a lot of the way that gen ai is being used abusively or could be used abusively in the industry is it's an excuse not to develop the real skills to create
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
And what it robs people of is the ability, first of all, to learn and improve at something through hard work and real talent and just achieving a certain amount of technical prowess. And then it also robs people of the ability to actually engage with each other.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
art is not just about creating content right that can be monetized or commercialized art is really about expressing something that is incohate something that is internal to you something of your own interiority that you're making tangible to the world so that other people can see it and understand it and connect with you so that human connection piece is the critical function of art like when we think about
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
critique of art or we think about, if we look at a painting that was painted in the 17th century, the techniques that are used, the choice of color, like the decisions that the artist makes when they create that piece of work tells us not only something about the artists themselves and their point of view and the life and times that they were living through in their own human experience, but it also gives you a glimpse into the world that they lived in.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
It gives you all of this rich context and subtext. That AI just doesn't have because what it's doing is taking a bunch of existing IP, chopping it up like a chopped salad, fitting it out. And there's a reason why you mentioned like OpenAI partnering with news and media. There's a reason why they're being sued by multiple of those parties because their work has been taken advantage of.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
without compensation and without consent. And that's the problem with a lot of these like LLMs and these large data sets that are used to train these models. They're just vacuuming things off the internet willy-nilly and not being forthright about where they're sourcing
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
the data, which is why we've had certain, there's been a couple of scandals where child abuse materials were used to train AI models and showed up in outputs. You've got, I think Elon Musk with rock, he's, he's turned off all the safety controls or the content controls on what images can be used and what IP is being exploited. So I think the thing about AI is it's such a convenient tool.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
It's a convenience. It's really more than anything else. It's not truly intelligent. It's not a problem solver. It doesn't come up with anything new. It just spits out what's given. That's the reason why people actually use like tools like ChatGPT. It's finish out this presentation for me, because I don't want to take the time to actually, I'm too tired. I'm too busy.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
I don't have the time to actually sit down and think about it. So just do it for me. In the same sense that when it comes to like art and creativity, when people use JNI, it's because it's an easy excuse not to have to do art. Like, why am I going to sit down and read a book that no one could be bothered to write? Why would I sit and watch a movie that no one worked on?
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
There is pretty substantial research. So that actually has a sense of the work I do now in social impact, because a lot of what I'm focused on now with Zorin Creative Strategy, my social impact consulting firm, is on how we quantify either good or harm, right?
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
I deal with situations where companies will say, oh, we're making so much of a great impact in this and that way, or this, that, and the third. And I'm like the auditor who comes in and says, okay, all right, by what degree, by what measure are you making that impact? And who are your stakeholders? Who are you impacting and why and how? When it comes to generative AI currently, it uses up
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
Thank you so much for having me, Vince. This is so much fun.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
10 times more electricity. It's 10 to 30 times more energy. The demand for data centers has major environmental impacts. The mental health damage. There was a headline I saw recently about tenions who are being paid like pennies on the hour to train chatbots and algorithms. And they're just being fire hosed with the most energy. awful, disturbing content.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
And they're having to like, so they're a real human. So it's not just a smart machine. There are human beings at the other end of the pipeline. A lot of them are actually really suffering to develop, to deliver this convenience to us, wealthy consumers. And I'm saying that as someone who, yeah, Gen AI is very convenient. It's very useful. Like I've used those tools. I've played with those tools.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
I think it's important for people to know and understand how those tools work. I think it's, it's important for us to like understand to not be afraid of learning about new technologies that are available because if we don't know them and understand them, other people will. And those are the people that are capitalizing on.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
And if you think about like algorithmic bias now, think about the impact of using AI tools to evaluate health insurance claims. Think about the potential fallouts of using AI to evaluate a housing insurance claim. Because there are, I'm also a member of the National African American Insurance Association, so I have some feelers in the insurance industry.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
There's been some significant issues with bias, algorithmic bias on the axes of race when it comes to how these tools are applied to who gets it. an insurance policy or not, or how much coverage they receive or not. And you start to see patterns. So what a lot of Gen A does, it's garbage in, garbage out. It will just, it will reify or reinforce patterns. So if you're giving it biases...
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
implicit or not, it's just going to reinforce those biases. The risks are pretty great when it comes to both the human costs and also the environmental costs, which is ultimately something that we foot the bill for as human beings. And then I think another thing to consider is just the spread of disinformation and deepfakes.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
Now that Sora is available to the general public to pay subscribers, you're going to see a lot more flooding of our social media with altered images, right? Altered video that will look so convincing and so persuasive.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
And if people don't develop the skill sets to recognize what is real and what is fake and how to differentiate, but the problem is like human brains are not good at differentiating between real and fake evidence. We tend to take things in as given and doing the critical thinking later of, wait, did that make sense? What I just saw? People don't really do that unless you really train them to do it.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
It's not our first instinct to be like, your first instinct is doom scroll and your brain is just vacuuming up what it sees and not saying, Hey, wait a second. That was how many fingers were on that hand? That's where we'll stop for now.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
Gotcha, so me in a nutshell. Okay, let me try. My name is Sienna Jackson. I'm a two-time founder. I'm born and raised Angeleno. I used to work in the entertainment industry for many years on a lot of film and TV projects you may have seen. And like I said, I'm a two-time founder. I've built a social impact consultancy.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
that works on driving change at the intersection of cause, culture and capital. I'm also a tech founder and I'm building a B2B SaaS company. So I wear a lot of different hats and I think that's probably going to be the bulk of our conversation is why I wear all those hats and how I fit them on this hair.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
Yes, the company that I'm building is called Norcara. It's a HR compliance automation tool, which is quite a pivot away from working in the entertainment industry, but actually not quite so much when you look at my history.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
And we're focused on identifying and managing risks, telling an employer, hey, based on your current practices and the data that we're seeing, here's your likelihood that you will be sued by your employees for things like discrimination, wrongful termination, harassment, all the rest.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
It was a lucky break, to be honest, because when I was a teenager, like I'd started college when I was 14 years old and I was majoring in journalism and political science. So my real passion was to work in either journalism
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
or maybe working in the public sector, like specifically like State Department or in intelligence, because when I started college at that time, it was right before Obama won his first term in office. So that was like a really different, optimistic, exciting time. It was amazing to be engaged. in the news and current events.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
And I was personally very interested in international relations and international and current affairs. So I was doing things like during the Arab Spring, I was reporting on that. I was talking to students that were protesting in Tahrir Square in Tunisia and asking them questions like, hey, I'm a student reporter. from the United States and I'd like to talk to you about why you're protesting.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
So I was really interested in what was going on in the region. I was like one of the senior staff reporters for my college paper when Osama bin Laden was killed. And I remember filing the story about that for my college paper.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
The night that was announced, like, I was at a cafe or something that also reported on really serious issues like the honor killing of one of my classmates when I was 16 that was within the Armenian community in Los Angeles. So I was really interested in, like, serious stuff. But my whole family works in the entertainment industry and I thought I was going to be the one to not do that.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
Like I was going to be the rebel that would do something that would be a reporter. But I got the opportunity to have an internship at the Weinstein Company when I was just turned 17. And I walked into that interview and I walked out with the job and my boss at the time, Richard Glasser, who is of like... classically old school. He was born in the forties.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
He's worked with like Quincy Jones and Stevie Wonder, and he's been just absolutely all over the place when it comes to the music industry. He really saw a lot of potential in me and mentored me and gave me the opportunity to work part-time as I was getting my following degrees. in journalism and communications. This was around 2008. No, it was 2010 when I started interning there.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
And at the time we were post recession, job security was scarce. So I was handed this amazing opportunity. I was like, this is not my plan, but I should take it and run with it because Who would turn away an opportunity like that? And because of that, I got to work on a lot of amazing projects, like a lot of Quentin Tarantino's work up through Hateful Eight.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
When I started there as an intern, they were in post-production on The King's Speech, which put them off that run, that kind of legendary two, three year sprint of getting best picture over and over. So it was like The King's Speech, The Artist, Silver Mining Playbook. getting a lot of Oscar noms in those early years, those Obama era years.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
And then I did a lot of other things on the side during that period. So it was just like, it was happenstance that I got that opportunity, but I took it and I ran with it.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
Yeah, so working in a music department at a studio, typically those departments are pretty substantially large. At Weinstein, for so many reasons, just about the way that company was managed, our music department was never more than three people maximum. So that meant I was doing day to day. both creative and admin on all of our filming and TV projects.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
So that was all the Quentin Tarantino films, all the Oscar Beatty films that we did, all the TV shows like Project Runway, it was like Scream and Scary Movies, like the Dimension label films, stuff that was like Radius TWC. It ended up being like clearing music for our trailers. doing sometimes in-house music supervision. So that's like how music that you see in a film.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
So say you're watching a scene in a movie and a popular song comes on. Someone had to choose that song for that scene and someone had to go and negotiate the rights to use that music. Sometimes I'd be doing that. We also did a lot of original songs with folks like Taylor Swift and U2 and Eminem, Lana Del Rey, Gwen Stefani, Pharrell Williams.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
So being part of the process of negotiating those deals and dealing with our rights, I also worked on our internal music catalogs, everything that we have the rights to. Copyright wise, I was in charge of managing and pulling together those rights because we had a global community. We had a global publishing deal with BMG, which is a very large music rights company.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
So it was a lot of things that typically would be split amongst multiple teams, but it was just usually me and Richard for most of that run.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
Yeah, so it's interesting. Looking back now, because it was such a Wild West sort of environment, I feel like that job prepared me for entrepreneurship in retrospect because having to manage every little piece of something is the life of an entrepreneur. So I was already doing it without realizing. And sometimes it really did feel like we were bootstrapping or building things as we went along.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
Listen, it was like my teens and early 20s when I really got my feet under me in that career. I was going out to like shows every night. Like I was on the invite list for different parties. So for me, it was great because I got to enjoy that life at the perfect period in my life.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
But to your point about maybe not being fully contented with that, I spent a lot of my time when I wasn't at the office or going to an album listening party or screening or any sort of thing after dark or after hours, I spent a lot of time volunteering. and doing things like extracurriculars that were non-promotable labor within the company.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
Richard and I were on the LA Music Leaders Roundtable, which was, it was like a think tank, essentially. We were lobbying Congress and working very closely with Congresswoman Judy Chu under the House Judiciary Committee to advocate for creators' rights. So I was getting to do some, like, government affairs and lobbying work before I was even legal to drink. Right.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
I was before the drinking age, I was just 21 in the US and I was doing grassroots organizing with ACLU in California and doing all these other things on top of my day job, which was focused on using music to bring stories to life or working with artists and creatives to make original songs that were deeply impactful or that tell a story.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
And some of the projects that we worked on, that company was really an important mini-major studio in American cinema when you think about the history of American filmmaking and how films are bought. So we were doing a lot of cool, innovative stuff.
Chief Change Officer
#344 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part One
But I always found time to pursue my other interests because I'm the sort of person where it's like, I can't just do one thing because I'm not content. And I think by the tail end of that 10 years, I really was feeling like, what am I, what else am I going to do? Because I can't just do this forever.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
People are communicating to each other. And especially if it's cross sector, if you have one party here, who's like in the nonprofit world, they really only know how to talk to other nonprofit people. But you have someone over here who's either private sector, maybe they work for a big firm and they only know their industry, but they want to make a difference on this problem.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
How do you create a bridge between these two poles? Because of my background and the diversity of experience I have, I can speak to each party in their own language and draw them together and build a coalition. So I think that skill set of being able to speak to people in their language
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
put together coalitions that are intersectional that bring stakeholders from very different backgrounds together and get them on the same page and then have a goal and guiding them to achieving that goal that's my superpower and what i do and that takes just time and trying and thinking about always you have a goal
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
Have that vision in your head of what it is you're trying to achieve in the world and then work backwards from it. But ask yourself, what is it you really want to see happen? And then say, okay, how do I make that happen? And who do I need on my side to get to this objective?
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
I think for anybody in your audience that wants to use their work to make a difference in the world, who wants to do good, understand that every single person has their own unique way of doing good in the world. You have something unique to offer.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
that's entirely yours it's kind of going back to the idea about art as self-expression there's something in you something unique about your background or your experience or your point of view or your skill sets or your talents that you can uniquely apply so if you look out at the world and you see a problem that really bothers you first ask yourself Where are the helpers?
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
Who are the people who are already doing good work in this area who are addressing this problem? And then how can I uniquely contribute to that work? How can I roll up my sleeves and help the helpers? Because that's what I find usually yields the most immediate results. And it also helps if you feel like overwhelmed with the world and overwhelmed with all the things that are going on.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
And you say, oh, how can I possibly make a difference all on my own? You can't. Look for the helpers and help them. And then you won't be alone and you'll also be doing a lot of good at the same time.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think even with a show like that, and you've already heard me tell you, I think a show like this, if you're connecting to people who might not otherwise get the chance to hear this certain perspective, or maybe they're in their own career journey and are really struggling or they're really seeking something.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
So again, it's like everyone has their own special and unique way of doing good.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
put that into two buckets. So like when I was in a kind of mid 20s, by the time I was like, yeah, approaching like 27. No, even earlier than that, it would have been a couple years even before that. So as I was like moving on through my career, I was doing all this stuff on the side for free of just like meddling in politics and doing things that were social good oriented.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
But even before that, I wanted to be a journalist, right? I wanted to be a citizen of the world and use storytelling through the lens of reporting for good. But I saw that journalism as an industry was already in a very bad way when I pivoted into entertainment. And by the tail end of my time in entertainment, so much had been changing in the industry.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
And I would say to like friends, I'd be like, streaming is going to become the new cable. We're going to want to cut the cord streaming. They're going to do bundles. Of course, like four years later, that's exactly what was happening. And I was just ready to pivot.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
I think I have a diary entry from like December 2018 of Santa, you need to figure out what you want to do with your life and you've got to like figure it out and just do it. That was 2018. I didn't start the startup, my consultancy until 2020, but I had created the LLC in 2019. I started like, I bought a domain. I started like...
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
Just subconsciously doing little things that were like my offering to get ready for the pivot. It wasn't like a plan that I had in mind. And then in January of 2020, right after Grammy week, I sent an email to like my top, you know, top couple thousand most relevant industry contacts. I was like, I'm doing social impact now. Okay. And that was it. And then March happened and lockdown started.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
And I was like, oh, great timing to start a business. That was the year 2020 was such an inflection year culturally in the United States after the murder of George Floyd. People were calling me up and asking how they should think about things because people already had known me and knew what I was about. They knew I was always interested in the world and current events and
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
I had my fingers in a lot of different pies and I had relationships and networks outside of the entertainment industry. People already knew that I was eclectic in my areas of interest. So people would hit me up and I said, OK, I'm happy to have the conversation, but you have to pay me for it. And so that's what kicked me off is like one email.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
And that kicked off my entire career as an impact consultant. And as I started doing that, like right out the gate, I worked on like 2020 presidential election. So I worked on a big get out the vote campaign that ultimately registered like 114,000 voters. So I was already like right out the gate doing a lot of really cool projects.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
And it became quickly apparent to me that people were jumping on the impact campaign.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
train this idea and making a lot of claims that were it was just like it was just like marketing shtick it was like hollow marketing shtick or like in these trying times we love you so much and we believe that we shop our products it's for the good of the world and I was just I didn't like it I was not impressed and I would ask myself it's when people talk about change or they talk about making a difference or doing good
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
How are we defining that? Like people talk impact all the time. Very rarely will they follow it up with a workable definition of what impact is. And impact is simply, it's the net positive change rendered as a direct and material result of your actions.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
So if you input an action, you should get a specific reaction or outcome that you can measure, that you can quantify, that you can predict, right? That you can build a model that says, okay, if I am investing... X number of hours at this much money, this much capital, this much this, I should expect this to be the result. And I wasn't seeing that. And I took a while to find
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
a community of practitioners that were in the space of, it's called IMM, impact management and measurement, right?
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
People who are actually do things like an SROI analysis, like social investment analysis, who are applying global best practices or accounting standards for how we account for social value, how we build up models that actually give us like a predictive analysis of how things get done for real. So now I'm also a board member at Social Value International's U.S. branch.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
So Social Value International is like 60 member countries that used to be the SROI network 20 years ago. But there's all these organizations globally that work together with the U.N. sustainability, sustainable development goals. There's Global Impact Investing Network, which is JIN. There's the Impact Management Project. There's a lot of
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
academic, nonprofit, NGO institutions, like large institutions, investors, foundations that are all engaged in this work of furthering best practice, identifying global reporting initiatives. So it's like, there's so many now at this point. There's IFRS, there's like SASB and IASB that have their own sustainability accounting standards, right? So that was the area I wanted to play in.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
And for me, what was cool is that because of my entertainment background, my background working with creatives, with producing, with creating content that has a lot of impact on people that like grabs people and grabs attention. That was excellent because I could marry that background with this new, very academic work that I was doing. And I thought two master's degrees under my belt.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
I've got an MBA and I've also got the master's of science. So this also allowed me this pivot to pursue my more academic career. inclinations anyway. But basically by starting my own thing and being my own boss, it gave me the opportunity to take all the things that I've always been interested in and always cared about and always wanted to see wedded together. And now I get to do that.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
My kind of slogan is I'm approaching change at the intersection of cause, culture and capital. So how do we marry those concepts together? How do we leverage capital and how do we influence culture to further a cause. How do these things work together? Like these three C's of pain-taking for me. And that's been like a really cool journey. So now I'm going into like my fifth year company.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
And right now I'm working on a very large, my largest project yet, which is an international collaboration. I'm executive producing one of the largest non-dilutive funding events on the African continent. Specifically, in Ethiopia. So I'm executive producing the Great Rift Valley Innovation Summit, co-leading that. And that's going to be next year.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
So I'll be traveling to Africa for the first time, be watching like a live pitch competition. We're partnered with the UN, the United Nations Development Program for this initiative and a bunch of other public and private sector institutions, large institutions to deliver money right into the hands of Ethiopian entrepreneurs
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
Founders who are doing great work in healthcare and education, agriculture, and making a big difference in that country, where the median age, by the way, is like 90. It's very hungry, very innovative. A lot of things going on. So I'm excited about what I'm doing in that space.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
Hey, I'll take any excuse to hop on a plane and go somewhere new. It's really cool because I think that speaks to just the global nature of this work, which is really great because it's such a large community of people that are so smart and so multi-talented. And everyone is really motivated to make a difference, to make a meaningful, tangible impact.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
I often say to people, like I'll point out to my peers, it's every problem that we have in the world is a man-made problem. Which means that there's a man-made solution for every problem by that same token, right? So like we can, we understand the contours of why things are the way they are. Or if something is wrong, that something's amiss, we can understand the landscape and then build solutions.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
tactics and strategies and put things into operation that can make a difference. And part of my job is to explicate, first of all, the vision of where we want to go and then the tangibles of how we get there, which is always, it's a lot of project management work I have to do at the end of the day. It's a lot of, it's a lot of ops. It's a lot of operations, actually.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
Yeah, I think the big thing that I noticed right out the gate was a lack of professional peer community and network. Really what we're talking about is the whole global landscape of like philanthropy, right?
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
When we're thinking about like corporate social responsibility or ESG or evaluation and measurement, all these overlapping things, it's a lot of different skill sets that come to bear in this sort of work. If I'm an accountant, I'm going to be a CPA. I'm going to join my national association of whatever. I'm a lawyer. I have to pass the bar exam. I have my JD. I joined my local bar association.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
Right. You don't have that similar clear cut career progression for people. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of professionalizing the industry, at least here in the United States. So part of what I am working on now. in my leadership role at Social Value is creating an industry survey.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
So again, this entertainment thing, I told my peers there, I was like, in the entertainment industry, we have industry surveys where we know how many people are employed in the entertainment industry. Know how many like above and below the line. We know what people's salaries are. We know what titles are. We know what roles are.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
We know who is doing what and what qualifications they need to succeed. We don't really have something equivalent for our industry, our discipline, and we need that. That's something I'm going to be rolling out sometime in the new year. I was lucky because I had the initiative to hunt people down.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
I knew I needed peers, I needed colleagues, and I needed people who were in this space longer than me and that were more knowledgeable. And I took the time to hunt them down. And I think that's something that maybe not everyone getting their start has the benefit of that. So usually when I talk to young people, because I do a lot of talks, I do a lot of public speaking, I teach workshops.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
When I talk to young change practitioners, people who want to work in impact or sustainability and have no idea how to get started, I usually come at them with a list, get on this newsletter, get on that newsletter. Here's this party, this event series that happens or this networking session that happens in LA.
Chief Change Officer
#345 Sienna Jackson: From Hollywood to Hard Metrics — Part Two
So when it comes to impact sustainability space here in Los Angeles, I feel like I have good handle on that. The thing that I will tell people all the time is you can't silo yourself. I think one of the big challenges I see in my space especially when I'm like dealing with my clients, it's like siloing. Like the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.