The interwebs connected me to Rizwan Tayabali. He is an amazing guy. Talking to him on Skype provided me an opportunity to understand and learn from a battled hardened social enterprise consultant. He travelled to more than 20 countries over 2 years on his own funding working with social enterprises.

He is chronicling his experiences in Thailand on his blog and I will pick a couple of experiences which show how good he is.

The first is about micro finance.

However it got me thinking. This concept of calling any recipient of micro-credit an entrepreneur is an interesting development in the social sector. ‘Entrepreneur’ is just a fancy word with implications beyond the reality. Street sellers are no longer just people trying to make a little money to get by as vendors or hawkers or stall owners, but are portrayed as vibrant exciting new Richard Bransons in the making.

It makes the financing entity look good, but the shame is that it obscures the human, the endeavour, and the struggle that continues regardless of the small amounts of over-priced credit being provided.

I agree with him. We should differentiate between small business or even micro business in this scenario and an entrepreneur. My first encounter with this was in Rural Indian in 2003-04 through Deeshaa. The extraordinary skills shown by some of these small business owners would make you think twice about education, poverty, skill sets and development. For example, a women selling vegetables on the street can work with 3-4 customers at the same time, weighing and selling products and remembering the exact cost for each customer at the end. However, in the end with all these skill sets the basic business model of the business would not allow her to be called an Entrepreneur and go beyond fulfilling her basic needs if that. This is what Rizwan is talking about.

The next one is about understanding the customers. And this is one area where the Radical Redesign methodology of TACSI is superior.

Through Step Ahead I met some American girls who were voluntarily working with male prostitutes in the city.

[...]

The girls were aiming to start a non-profit providing alternative work options. In this case hospitality training (cleaning and making rooms or waitering in hotels), because they’d seen that the training was available and funders were offering money to pay for it. The trouble was they just couldn’t get buy in or take up from the men they were trying to help.

After some discussion it transpired that given a choice, all the men wanted to do was set up and run their own small street stalls, mostly as food vendors. Cleaning rooms or running after hotel clients was not their idea of an improvement.

This raises a really important point in the design of social programmes. The intervening agent often works from their own point of view, assumes they know what’s best, and doesn’t actually listen properly to the people they want to help.

The intent is pure but the approach is driven by what they can offer rather than what is requested. To create outcomes that last, social entrepreneurs must listen to and work within the motivations of the people they want to help. If they cannot provide what’s both wanted and needed, they’re unlikely to be successful with lasting transformation.

A fascinating interview with Bezos. Somebody I respect a lot. Lots of interesting ideas there.

Levy: You’ve also given $42 million to the Long Now Foundation for the development of a giant clock designed to last for 10,000 years. Does that project relate at all to what you’re doing at Amazon?

Bezos: It does fit into my view. Our first shareholder letter, in 1997, was entitled, “It’s all about the long term.” If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.

In some cases, things are inevitable. The hard part is that you don’t know how long it might take, but you know it will happen if you’re patient enough. Ebooks had to happen. Infrastructure web services had to happen. So you can do these things with conviction if you are long-term-oriented and patient.