How can leaders of entrepreneurial revolution help Obama develop a different world from that monoplosed by top-down globalisation? 

Inquiries welcome on the new genre- innovating collaboration - chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk

washington dc tel 301 881 1655

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Yes We Can

MicroGuide to 5 collaborations to end poverty and sustain humanity

 

We hope you enjoy our MicroGuide to 5 Collaboration Games that Dr  Muhammad Yunus, his alumni including the extraordinary mother of President Barrack Obama, and Bangladeshi networkers have been helping people communally practise for a third of a century.

 

1 What is SOCIAL BUSINESS? The most exciting entrepreneurial game people play ...	2 What is MICROCREDIT? Designing the safest banking system so that the poorest are also included in developing the world	3 What is MICROSUMMIT? Designing processes to gravitate collaborative networking around the most urgent sustainability goals of our worldwide generation .	4 What is FUTURE CAPITALISM? Designing partnerships to innovate the most vital human services which integration of global and local free markets can sustain
5 What is Trillion Dollar Industry Sector Sustainability? - Joyfully mediating choice of experienced peoples’ visions of what deepest human purpose each global industry sector can sustain.   For markets to be free:  engage in severe contests between intelligence which presses forward, and an unworthy timid ignorance obstructing our progress

 

ROUGH GUIDE TO COLLABORATION’S WHOLE PLANET

 

In this young 21^st Century, Yes We Can social action networking involves collaborating round the maximum of all our human potentials. Our 1^st worldwide generation urgently needs:

*safe banks that care about the future’s sustainability investment in peoples and communities everywhere

*timely, simply linked maps which treasure collaborative human networking and actionable replication of solutions people need most

*organisational systems designed to value governance around sustaining vital human services

*the world’s most powerful people understanding both the compound consequences and the local responsibilities of their global decisions including what assumptions they use

*stories of what’s possible debated worldwide - started by deeply experienced elders and webbed by curious youth. Today’s exciting space race involves grounding millennium goals on planet earth. Community empowerment thrives on generating “yes we can” optimism to focus a human race that goes beyond possessive image-making to world service reality-making.

 

YOU & US   Collaboration Games are designed to end poverty and resolve historic system failures wherever they have unwittingly trapped children and women in unhealthy or unproductive lives. The search is on for replicable solutions that can empower the creative ability of every being, and develop the sustainability of every community. This is our generation’s worldwide networking responsibility.  Digital and geographical divides can be bridged as local to global win-win-wins blossom.

INTERACTIVE INVITATIONS   Collaboration Games can be a search of happiest pursuits of our generation. We welcome nominations of other collaboration games emerging around the world and will publish them at interactive resources cited in this guide. Typical resource webs are 20+ short videos www.yunus10000.com of good news conversation starters contributed by Dr Yunus and his founding team at Grameen www.grameen.com www.grameensolutions.com www.yunusforum.net www.socialaction.tv

1 What is Social Business? The most exciting entrepreneurial game people play.

 To be a success, Social Business requires integration of 3 challenging solutions into one organisational design: 

A) Serving a purpose so important to human life that you’re entrusted a free loan to bring the organisation to life

B) Prove business model’s sustainability by achieving a communal surplus of cashflow every cycle

C) Reinvest surplus to improve system or to replicate its networking reach with partners who will need collaboration support

 

If you are successful in focusing invention, sustenance and open replication of a Social Business, you will be involved in integrating one of the most purposeful organisational systems in the world. However micro your organisation: aim to become a market’s or a network’s centre of gravity capable of wholly attracting communal pride. Just do it by truly connecting individual passions to make a difference - web weaving together the future of people’s productive lifetimes.

 

FREE MARKETING OF END POVERTY

Muhammad Yunus Nobel Laureate Acceptance Speech 2006 Almost all social economics problems of the world will be addressed through the social business ... The challenge is to innovate business models in such vital contexts as health care for the poor, financial services for the poor, information technology for the poor, education and training for the poor, marketing for the poor, renewable energy for the poor------------------------------------Gordon Brown to Muhammad Yunus, 10 Downing Street 21 April 2008: There is so much goodwill around what you are doing

Being a Social Business means that positive cashflow recycles every social business dollar invested over and over. This is in stark contrast with the dynamics of the traditional charity with its one-time spend of every dollar fundraised. However in many other respects, the social business strategy dares to selectively break with rules that MBAs are trained to standardise.   A better for the world organisation does not need to be fronted by image-making advertisements:  reality-making is the purpose which a Social Business inspires people to gravitate around.   The Social Business investment celebrates community-rising exponentials, ie sustainable growth over time. The organisational system needs to be mapped the other way round from management powering over people. Quite simply, empowerment’s authority to lead is seen through the transparency of an open win-win-win system - one that networks through local franchise replication. It does this to continuously generate the most service buzz and to multiply more human goodwill than competitors whose performance is only measured by quarterly extraction.

  

HI-TRUST FLOWS

The quality of communal trust needed to flow through a social business organisation cannot be built in a day. Entrepreneurial revolutions capable of exponentially progressing humanity’s lot usually take many years of iterative development by a small team who are prepared to learn by doing. Dr Yunus’ first social business emerged from 7 years of social action teamwork. When the founding team of four, who still work together at Grameen, started providing loans to poor women in 1976, they never imagined that they would build a bank let alone the worldwide’s happiest networking system –for more on that see: what is microcredit?

 

What Grameen’s founding team did from the outset was to plant village centers for 60 poorest women borrowers at a time to communally voice their needs :

· to develop themselves as successful business people

· to prioritise collective actions

· to honour micro investments in taking their community out of poverty by ensuring the highest repayment rates banking has ever seen

 

From these members’ dialogues and communal choices, we can map the DNA of Grameen’s gravity of “banking for the poor” and so the compass of investment and innovation responsibilities of what has become the collaboration world’s favourite brand.

 

Grameen’s double-loop support for poor women is designed to lovingly and relentlessly interconnect :

· Empowerment of their own peer to peer self-confidence in becoming microentrepreneurs

· Designing vital service franchises whose sustainability and economics gains from open communal replication instead of individual reinvention of the wheel.

 

Grameen’s catalogue of social business franchises provides an exciting record of how to sustainably map thousands of parallel communities out of poverty through a third of a century’s search to end poverty. In Bangladesh, social business modelling is the core organisational typology for 25000 Grameen employees, and thanks to BRAC and other energising social business networks more than 100,000 grassroots community servants of sustainability and micro-investment.  (See Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business, Future of Capitalism, by Muhammad Yunus 2008)

 

Alongside the famous microcredit, Grameen’s mature social businesses, each grounded in at least 14 exciting years of exponential-up sustainability, include:

 

- DIY village homes with rainproof roof and pit latrine (whose health advantages won an early prize Aga Khan award for architecture)

-Fish farming taken over from the government – once poorest local villagers had partial ownership of ponds, 10 times more fish production was possible as villagers guarded the pond from thieves and others disturbing breeding seasons

-Developing the brand “Grameen Check” to empower fair trade village textile production

-Mobile village telephone ladies whose connections across the 100000+ village centres (Grameen banks grassroots knowledge hubs) have become the worldwide benchmark for ending digital divides

 

Banker for the Poor becomes Internetworker for the Poor   In 2008, California’s museum of technology awarded Dr Yunus its number 1 prize as hi-tech humanitarian – a prize previously reserved for the likes of Microsoft’s Bill Gates & Intel’s Gordon Moore. In the pursuit of ending Eastern poverty, Yunus insisted that huge social business value could multiply around a franchise of the village telephone lady operating a shared mobile phone - similar to how telegram offices in the 19th century connected the wild west.   This led Grameen Bank to make one of the smartest sustainability investments of our generation of going global.  Yunus’ entrepreneurial wit seized on early 1990s global consultancy groupthink as likely to be 100-fold wrong in forecasting that Bangladesh would only use quarter of a million mobile phones. So, The Bank for the Poor picked up a nationwide mobile licence for cents in the dollar. A decade later, over 30 million Bangladeshi’s use mobiles and with India their countries have become number 1 in designing mobile businesses. Those whose leadership strategy is to leapfrog over the high costs of service businesses whose outlets are tied to bricks and mortar. Unlike banks of a bygone era that specialise in foreclosure, sustainability investment banks like Grameen help people to foresee the future’s connections which an open knowledge networking age can co-create – see eg the Grameen Solutions partnership with an Indian company http://bankabillion.org

 

Collaboration networks have even more to celebrate when we see heroic social business innovations motivated by responding to the most desperate of prospects. Among 100+ million people nations, Bangladesh has the most to be concerned over the risks of global warming. Its low lying lands are likely to be the first to be washed away. So it was natural for Grameen Bank to assign its number 2 social business entrepreneur to solar, biogas and other carbon-zero services. Since 1996, the Grameen Energy teams have been developing a sustainability exponential with ever greater excitement. In 2008, they installed more solar units than the whole of the USA. By 2012, they intend to have created 100000 green jobs for villagers. We can race towards thriving carbon negative economies if we treat the knowledge these social businesses have openly systemised as a collaboration gift to the world. If your nation has sunshine, why reinvent the wheel of green job creation when yes we can make a fast start by seeing Bangladesh as the collaborative developing nation that wants to help take network economics way above zero-sum games.

 

PRICING PUZZLES

End-poverty practitioners like Dr Yunus, and academics like CK Prahalad, have found that serving a vital need to the bottom billion peoples may involve continuous innovation of an organisational system that offers the same basic standard of safety that rich citizens are used to demanding but at 10 times lower cost. That takes deeply caring relationship understanding to compound collaboration goodwill flows between service workers, customers and societies as you unite to determine the future of what is possible through true sustainability investment. 

 

Thriving social businesses from community banking, to ending unnecessary blindness by providing cataract operations, have found that one key to staying low cost is to base all communal exchanges on trust – no lawyers fees taking an ever bigger and more complex slice of every transaction.

 

There are many other interesting pricing puzzles to work through such as asking different customers to pay for what they can afford as well as for what level of personal customisation they demand. Moreover, the social business franchise often finds a way to vocationally train the most disadvantaged people to create lasting jobs in the community. This helps to explain why the social business employee continuously enjoys seeing the lifetime difference she or he is capable of making through dedicated work.  The first time I met a Grameen villager she said: have you met a Nobel prize winner before, and held out her hand. Such is empowerment’s true meaning when it comes to the social business of microcredit branding.

 

Over time the consequence of social business transparency is a hi-trust organisational system –or network of goodwill partnering organisations - where people employ their discretionary energies to serve and love their work with a zest for productivity that only communally purposeful Micro’s entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs get to measure, as well as serve, learn and know. 

 

It may interest you to compare future purpose social business is designed to govern with other types of organisational systems. This is just one 4-way comparison of choices.

 

  

RECOMMENDATIONS

Seeing is believing. Go and visit Bangladesh particularly if you are young enough to have time to intern on a social business project.

Collaborate around win-win-win social business models to compound upward exponentials into the futures of communal wealth and health – and renew human fitness as nature’s most collaborative species; or other vital stuff.

 

2 What is Microcredit? Designing the safest banking system so that the poorest are everywhere included in developing the world.

1 What is Social Business? The most exciting entrepreneurial collaboration game.

 Microcredit multiplies hi-trust flows through sustainability investments geared to empowering the lifelong productivity potentials of the poorest. With caring peer to peer support, poor members of this cooperative banking system take out loans to maximise entrepreneurial actions connecting their own income generating capability and communal mapping of how to compound the end of poverty.

In 2006, approximately 6 million women and one man were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. This came as true validation for 30 years of relentless service in building the safest sustainability investment bank. These peoples had started with less than nothing - when Bangladesh won independence as a nation, it did so at the terrifying price of flattened infrastructure and a famine that killed a million people. And amongst the poorest of the poor were women villagers who were culturally regarded as the world’s least productive people.  Today, to join in open sourcing microcredit worldwide is a joyous invitation - the privilege of sharing the opportunity to action learn what is simply the best collaboration game that economists and social agents have ever played with each other.

 

FOUNDERS CREDITS

How do we check that microcredit is worth sustainability investors trusting as the most value multiplying branded methodology of our generation? As a media mapmaker and mathematician, I always like to go back to founders’ motivations to explore both the logical and human assumptions around which a world class brand system evolved and compounded its gravitational impacts. It is here that we often find the deepest insights into sustainability investment’s essence of goodwill multiplication around a transparent value exchange’s productive and demanding relationships.

 

As well as Muhammad Yunus, another Muslim man Professor Latifee, a Muslim woman Mrs Begum and a Buddhist man Dipal Barua were the start up team whose love of helping the poor designed microcredit and founded Grameen (“Village”) Bank.

 As a lifelong team, these inspiring servant leaders regularly elect Dr Yunus as their chief cheerleader and curious innovator sans frontieres. His humour and kindly boldness go to places - uniting young and old, poor and rich, hemisphere with hemisphere - that I have not seen any other local or global brand leader explore. The most telling account that I can find of what microcredit systemised during its first quarter of century of practice is this one issued by the majority Hindu nation of India.    Gandhi Peace Prize 2000Citation : Grameen bank, Bangladesh There are few institutions that inspire faith in humanity - even in the environment of material greed, soulless careerism, exploitation and pursuit of naked power - institutions that live with the credo that “small is beautiful” even when the world is being besieged by the philosophy of the big. They are the institutions that live with a soul committed to fighting the inroads of global homogenization, seeking to provide succour to the deprived yet diligent common people and proving that unity can work miracles even in an age of growing individualism.  The Gandhi Peace prize 2000 is being awarded to one such institution which has been helping the marginalized masses to reject charity and to master their own destiny instead. It has been helping them tap their innate capabilities of entrepreneurship, thereby bringing them hope confidence and cheer.  Here is a fraternity of perseverance and service that promotes dignity and adherence to truth. Here is development which enabled millions of women from poor households to acquire a new meaning in life. Here is development with a human face which is not populist but people-centred and which promotes self-help and self-respect, values dear to Mahatma Gandhi. Professor Muhammad Yunus, economist at the University of Chittagong, probably did not know that he was launching a revolution when he started his action project and lent a small amount of money to a poor woman to help her build her own life. The success of this experiment gave birth to Grameen bank. This bank radically reversed conventional banking practices with their emphasis on collateral security, practices which has given rise to the witticism that the best way to get a loan in convince the banker that you don’t need one.  Here is a new banking system in rural areas that is based on mutual trust, solidarity, participation, peer monitoring and accountability. Its operations indicate the faith of its founding father, Muhammad Yunus, that if financial resources are made available to the poor on terms and conditions that are appropriate and reasonable “these millions of small people with their millions of small pursuits can add up to create the biggest development wonder.” The success of grameen bank has won international acclaim and emulation. With its participatory approach, emphasis on women entrepreneurs, women’s empowerment and employment creation, the microcredit projects have come to be hailed as a very promising approach to poverty eradication. Mahatma Gandhi gave the world a talisman “Whenever you are in doubt or when the self becomes too much with you apply the following test Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man whom you have seen and ask if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his life and destiny? In other words will it lead to Swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and your self melting away” Grameen bank, Bangladesh is an invitation par excellence, which passes the test with great elan 

Any game - and any purposeful system of productive and demanding relationships - spins beyond current results to future consequences.  As Winston Churchill advocated, there is all the difference in the world between compounding inconvenient truth and whole truths. Knowing the difference comes down to understanding a handful of simple rules that a founder embedded into a goodwill multiplying method. In microcredit, core rules include

 Its governance constitution should be that of the social business model, ie its is communally owned by the poorest. Its primary measure is : are we compounding exponential ending of poverty over time? Its system design should proactively renew its service reach to the poorest of the poor. Moreover never try to scale up loan-making until you are sure you have a solution for what is originally causing poverty to dominate the community Its peer to peer relationship structures are designed so that everyone can see how to integrate win-win-wins between 3 levels of entrepreneurship – the individual microentrepreneur, team entrepreneurship, and sustainable community entrepreneurship Worldwide networkers who want to help create a world without poverty can honour the founders of microcredit by helping to see open sourcing of this collaboration game is played by the key rules.  Moreover, professional players including big banks or billionaire philanthropists at the top of the world ought to know that anyone who changes the key rules of Bangladeshi microcredit is playing a different game. In such cases, its not microcredit whose reputation should take a hit. It is the person, however famous, who viciously spirals opposite consequences by changing microcredit’s goodwill multiplying rules.   

SOME MICRO SECRETS OF WORLDWIDE SYSTEM TRANSFORMATION

 

Dr Yunus encourages microcredit alumni to say there’s magic in the word micro. I think he is advising creators of social businesses to experiment over and over with the key rules of your proposed collaboration game until you are sure they systemise sustainable win-win-wins;  then openly replicate the map of how to play the game worldwide to any locality that may have an analogous problem to solve to that which you intended to share your communal solution with. The reasons why micro entrepreneurs win out with the greatest innovations for humanity include experimentation at low cost and detailing patience for as long as it takes; only then replicate big as boldly as a free market or open networking can do.

 

Microcredit does not attempt to wave its magic wand instantly but is confident that wherever truly mapped it keeps on compounding up. William Gates has said of exponential system transformation change that a lot less than you might expect happens in three years and a lot more in 7 years. That’s because sustainability exponentials bend a curve in ways that straight-line numbers men (eg the global consultancy who forecast the future demand for mobiles in Bangladesh) will always get wrong. Historically evidence from Bangladesh shows that:

 

· Seven years into being a microcredit member, a Bangladesh woman villager will end poverty

· Fourteen years in there is a realistic chance that the children of this previously illiterate family will be studying to be doctors or engineers 

 

There is hope that these historical results will prove conservative compared with what can now be achieved as mobiles connect the village centres with entrepreneurial verve. This combined with a nation that has spent 21 years investing in scaling up village-connected channels of information and free marketing power of poor villagers united. Consider again the example of Bangladesh as world’s lading installer of solar units. What makes the economics of solar power work to bring electricity to rural households for the first time is community wide adoption of the same solar standard together with a long-term credit option so that 25 years of free electricity can be installed from the outset. But please note as for all true microcredit loans this is an investment in personal productivity not in fuelling consumption for some non-essential need.

 

Dr Yunus –and all of microcredit’s co-founders - love the whole of Bangladesh. And they also love to see microcredit transplanted in other continents, particularly by and for next generations. One of the most exciting transplantations is Jamii Bora in Kenya. Here the underclass deprived of the human right of credit was youth including huge numbers of teenage orphans around the slum of Kibera.

 

Micro Example: Early experiments at Jamii Bora showed that Bangladesh’s 98% repayment rates were not being transplanted in Kenya. The reason was not the community of poor African youth were any less intrinsically honest than village women but members of their extended family were falling critically ill and this human crisis diverted the loans to paying for urgent medicine. The solution :  Kenyan youth microcredit could not work without supplying micro health insurance. Fortunately, Jamii Bora found missionary hospitals that it could buy mass healthcare contracts from and this offer affordable micro health insurance together with microcredit.

 The social dynamics which need to be empowered to end the poverty among youth in Kenya are different from that of the world’s poorest village women.  But microcredit services are the core solution. Jamii Bora is now a goodwill centre of gravity attracting extraordinary partnerships including wholeplanetfoundation.org. World leading community builders including Dr Yunus and President Obama will likely cheer as loud as anyone if Jamii Bora becomes the worldwide benchmark for youth microcredit.