Wayne Suiter Matamoros: “Whether they ask for it or not, how do you bring impact into the conversation?”

Wayne Suiter Matamaros is a professor, mentor, and Partner at Empathy, a design and innovation company based in Latin America.

If you know Wayne, you'll know he’s truly a positive force. Since the moment we met in 2010, I’ve watched his career evolve in beautiful ways. He leads by example, aligning his talent as a strategist and design thinker with the causes and communities he cares about. We’ve always connected in our determination to bring representation through our various roles.

In this installment of my interview series on purpose-driven leadership, Wayne discusses the value of doing work you love and how to think about having impact, while working in the private sector.

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🗨 Hi Wayne. Can you tell us who you are and what you do?

Sure. So, my name is Wayne Suiter Matamoros. I currently reside in Astoria, Queens, New York. What I do is a couple different things. I'm a strategic designer and I'm the US Partner for a firm called Empathy, which is a strategic design firm based out of Latin America. I'm here growing that business. That's my professional side.

Outside of that, I'm also an Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern School of Business, where I teach innovation, and at Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, where I teach design thinking. And then I also do a lot of mentoring of young people of color, who want to go into design; which is something that for me is just more important than ever.

And then of course I'm a husband to my wife, and a father to my dog.

🗨 I love it. You know, the news right now is heavy. How do you maintain focus?

Yeah, it's difficult. It is very difficult maintaining focus. I attempt to maintain focus, but with so much chaos and cruelty happening throughout the day, you can't help but be distracted. I try to limit the amount of news I'm consuming, so that it doesn't come in little interruptions; and that helps somewhat at a very tactical level. The other way is by actually focusing on the things that matter. When I talk about what I do in my day-to-day—mentoring, being a professor, a board member at Dreamyard—I’m trying to harness my energy and focus it on things that matter. It’s the closest thing I can do to not blocking out the outside, but feeling like I'm doing something that might be, even if just a little bit, worthwhile and impactful.

🗨 Very smart. What hard choices have you had to make in your career to live up to your values and sense of purpose?

So, it's funny. As I mentioned, in my talks with young people, I talk a lot about my purpose and values driving all of my decisions. So, honestly, it is kind of how you keep minimizing your ego. I've had, you know, offers for a couple of different positions that had very lofty, incredible titles and that my ego gets drawn to, and I’m like, “Wow, imagine if I called myself that!” And then what comes with those is also these big salaries. What I've come to realize, and—we’ve talked about this quite a bit—I'm making less than I have in over a decade, yet I'm much happier, and I feel like what I'm doing is more important and I'm working with people I love working with. The title just just doesn't matter to me. So, I think those are the big ones: not chasing the money, the title, but actually thinking about what you really need to live happily. And it's not a title, and it's not the money. There's obviously a base that you need to make, but really past that, it's something where we convince ourselves that we need more than we actually do to be happy.

🗨 Yeah, I think it's so smart. I was just talking with someone yesterday about this. It's a tech person, and they have an offer from a really cool CPG product, and he's like “Can I leave tech?” I was like, I'm industry agnostic and people-loyal. Who are you going to be working with day to day? Do you believe in the product? And it hit him. People have to get there to really know what environment they will thrive in and get alignment across all aspects of career and life. I think we're all getting savvier, or not, you know.

Yeah. It's funny, because I coach a lot of people, really a lot of people. And a lot of people tell me the same thing: “I wish I could do this other thing I really want to do, but I just can't.” And when we get down to it, they always talk about, you know, it's just a salary that they’re making. 

But I have a theory. I like to claim it as my theory, and I don't know if it's true, but I'll pretend it is. I call it the Closet Theory. That, with as many closets as you own, you will fill them up. So, if you have ten, you fill them up. And so, salaries are the same way. You think you need to make as much as you do because you make an amount, and you're able to spend it, but that doesn't mean that you actually need it. And so, I talk with a lot of people about the Closet Theory. Again, my salary is reduced to half of what I used to make at my peak earning. I live fine. I'm happy, and I enjoy my day-to-day. So, I think that’s a fallacy. My point is: the sacrifice is not as bad as you might think it's going to be.

And that’s the upside of it. Yes, I hustle. I have a bunch of things going on, but I'm doing really cool projects for NYU. I love teaching. What I do with Empathy is worthwhile. I love the people I work with, and that it's based in Latin America. So, like 90% of my day is in Spanish now, which is fun. And I'm genuinely happy, even though I'm making less. People grasp onto the idea that I have to make this much to be happy. And unless you've made terrible financial decisions, you probably don't need to make this much. You have to disconnect from that concept.

🗨 That's right. What’s something you've worked on recently that links to the broader impact you want to have in the world? Maybe you touched on it if it's NYU, or just something specific you can talk about.

Something I did very recently was with the World Bank’s IFC. It's a program called Digilab, which I had worked on with Fjord like six or seven years ago in Bogotá, Colombia, but essentially we work with banks who want to provide better services for those who are not included in the financial system. In Latin America there are some countries, where as much as 50% or 60% of the population are not part of the formal financial system.

In this instance though, a few months ago with IFC in the Eastern Caribbean, I was facilitating a workshop for an entire week with the heads of five different banks around how they could focus on purpose and come up with products and services that are going to help the unbanked and underbanked actually participate in financial systems so that they can start having more transparency, build equity, and start businesses—things that were really tangible. 

Even though my role was facilitator for these executive teams for the banks, you would talk to them, and the concepts they came up with, and their desire for impact, was so real because they're from the community they serve. So, just facilitating this reminded me why I do design: because they're going to take these things to market, they're going to actually go out, and help people in their communities.

That was just the most recent thing. But I mean, with NYU, I'm constantly doing projects with either students, or other partners of NYU. And then Dreamyard in the Bronx is something I also make time for. So, I always have multiple things going on.

🗨 You’re impacting so many people, and sometimes we don't stop to think about all those chats you're having. The class you've taught, the clients, the students at DreamYard. And it also goes back to the themes we were talking about earlier. You have to have a shared experience, or a lived experience as a leader, if you're going to approach the work in such a passionate and committed way. From your banking clients to being a Professor at NYU, or a board member serving communities. It's so important.

If I could add to that, because recently with the other Partners for Empathy, we were together for an offsite, and we were talking about vision, and one of the things that we came to, is how we can have impact in everything we do. We can be working with a commercial client, on a commercial challenge, and still bring up values of environmental, social, and impact. We can still ensure that the solution that comes out, even if it’s a financial product, has some aspect of impact in it.

I refer to this sometimes as “backdoor impact,” which is—as designers and consultants—whether they ask for it or not, how do you bring impact into the conversation? Because 10 out of 10 times in my experience, even with big corporate multinationals, when you bring it into the equation, they jump at it, and when they generate an idea out of it, a concept of product strategy, they're prouder of it, because they can say “Look, this actually does some sort of good in the world.” So, that's kind of the thing where people working in the corporate spaces and the private sector should still see themselves as being able to push impact into conversations.

🗨 Yeah, that's so funny you said ‘backdoor.’ I use the same term, and I learned it from another recruiter, who mentioned it to me. Because there's not a lot of representation in recruiters, and so we call it “Backdoor recruiting.” It's like our candidate pool will always be 70 to 80% representation. That’s just it. That’s who we got, and they’re all incredible. Other recruiters can’t seem to find them

That’s a perfect example. I love that example because they're incredible candidates at the end of the day, but you are actually giving them that elevated platform that they're not going to have without you. You know, that's huge.

🗨 Yeah. I just have one more question, but I feel like I want to keep talking. What's a book, or a podcast, or a thinker that's shifted your perspective lately?

So, aside from all the ghost podcasts that we listen to, and ghost books that we read (especially my wife, because she’s Mexican-American, she’s obsessed by it), I'm working on Higher Ground by Allison Taylor. I'm actually working on a project with her in a couple weeks. She's a professor at NYU Stern. The subtitle says, “How business can do the right thing in a turbulent world.” What I like about Higher Ground, and the reason that you know her and I have been talking to her, is that it's a very ‘no bullshit’ approach to impact. What her book says is that this is really freaking hard, but you need to really make your bets deliberately and be committed to them. And so it's kind of a whole framework for corporations. Instead of trying to do everything halfass, or instead of running away from things because you don't want to be exposed, you make sure that you actually focus on what your core business is, find the closest kind of impact space where you can really have a significant impact, and build on that. It doesn't mean you don't do the other things, but it means that you really put the majority of your bets on someplace where you can do something real, instead of what we've seen in the past. She gives great evidence: ‘We’ll do a little bit of this, a little bit of this, a little bit of this, a little bit of this, and it’s so diluted that it doesn't affect change.” Whereas I love that she's just kind of like you can't do everything. Do what you can do really really well. I like that approach. For me, as I talk with clients, and I'll cite things from it, it resonates, because it's really like how do you put impact into your corporate strategy, so it's not just a separate discretionary allocation. It's not something you give, or a day of volunteering. That's nice. Nothing wrong with that. But it actually ties to core business. On the business side, that is that one.

On the personal side, I read a lot of Mariana Enriquez, an Argentine horror writer. Yeah, she's really good. I don't read very many business books, to be honest. I read more Spanish fiction, I think, than anything.

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