Monthly Archives: April 2011

Teaching a Woman to Fish – Grameen America

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Having signed up for nearly every progressive leaning mailing list, I’ve learned that there are both pluses and minuses to these affiliations.  The daily deluge of requests for time, money and other forms of support tend to put you in a constant state of “cause-related triage.”  Should I text 90999 to send $10 to the Red Cross to help with Japan’s relief efforts or should I send it to help Mac McClelland of Mother Jones go to The Republic of Congo? (And how would I feel if I supported the MoJo effort and something happened to Mac?)  Or maybe I should spend all day following up on the multitude of requests to berate political leaders with my beliefs.  (One interesting outcome of that process has been that I’ve been added to the mailing lists of those who I often vehemently oppose.  Imagine receiving missives which assume you are one of the faithful when you are anything but.)  One organization constantly chides me for not signing up for their phone service which purports to align with my views, while repeatedly pointing out that the other carriers are waging an all out assault on democracy.  (Serenity now!)

Fortunately, in the turbulent sea of causes, there is at least one group of organizations for which my support has never wavered.  Actually, the support originates with the individual who created the organizations and it radiates out to everything he has touched.  That fine man is Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the economics professor turned Nobel Prize winning banker to the poor.  Dr. Yunus initiated Grameen Bank in his home country of Bangladesh, when he learned that he could free forty-two people from indentured servitude by lending them the equivalent of twenty-seven U.S. dollars. Continue reading →

MNN’s The United States of the Environment (Infographics)

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Great post over at the Mother Nature Network (MNN.com) which shows the best and worst each state has to offer.  Plenty to be proud of and a nice hit list of opportunities for improvement.  There is one thing which bears pointing out.  My home state, Missouri, is highlighted for having the Most Ozarks.  My mother would say, “If you can’t think of anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all!” 😛

Link to the full article

Great Expectations

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I just found a new blog (“Rethinking Leadership”) on Forbes.com that shows a lot of promise.  The author, Karl Moore, is a B-school professor a McGill University.  His faculty page on the Desautels’ website shows that along with being a professor of strategy and leadership, he is also an Associate Professor in the Dept of Neurology & Neurosurgery. (The plot thickens!)

Professor Moore’s stated intent for the offering:

The plan is write a column one week and the next week have an interview with one of the world’s leading business professors on they are rethinking their particular areas of research and teaching, hopefully, this should keep us in the vanguard.

This week’s interview was with strategy professor Michael Porter of Harvard University.  Porter is well-known among B-schoolers for his Five Forces model of competitive strategy.  (Insert eye roll here.)  These days he’s espousing something new, the idea of creating shared value.  Porter has joined the growing movement of people who believe that a sustainable society depends on businesses that share, rather than just take, the value they create.  Check out the brief interview below. (4 minutes)  I recommend bookmarking prof Moore’s blog or signing up to follow him on the Forbes.com website.

 

Late addition: The link to Professor Moore’s initial post: http://blogs.forbes.com/karlmoore/2011/03/28/porter-or-mintzberg-whose-view-of-strategy-is-the-most-relevant-today/