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in 30 years of work as a mathematician and researcher of entrepreneurs I have formed the
belief that sustainable innovations design a map that works to unite communities' productivities and demands. And
then I ask to see specification of contextual goals and metrics. This MICRO approach is the exact opposite
of Macro professions that aim to monopolise and rule with a one fits all standard.
Does this mathematical controversy matter? In our new book, we update the microeconomics argument first proposed 25 years ago by my father at his desk at The Economist: this will be the number 1 reason for losing the sustainability of the human
race unless we get the exponential choice right. There is good news: if most of today's sustainability crises are compounded by a common mathematical error we
can start searching out micro solutions once we banish the wrong maths, and transparently network around a Trillion Dollar Audit of any global market sector that exchanges this much value annually. For example, in 2008 it is vital we start mapping how
to renew banking's future as a "whole truth" Free market.
Mr. Barua has been with Grameen Bank since its inception and has played a key role in the development of the micro-credit
model. He has been crucial in developing and strengthening the institution of the Grameen Bank. He was the Principal Officer
of the Tangail Project - the first expansion of the Grameen Bank. He was also one of the main architects in transforming the
Grameen Concept into an independent specialized bank. His contributions included:
Developing the "Grameen
Bank Credit Manual".
Developing and strengthening of Grameen Bank’s Monitoring & Evaluation System.
He developed the formats which are still in use. He also came up with the idea of " Thursday Schedule" as a way
increasing supervision and monitoring.
Developing pioneer concepts and programs for impact analysis and training.
He formulated the methodology for collecting case studies and was the first one to publish them in book "Beltoil Gramer
Jorimon O Annanora"
Mr Barua is also transforming Grameen Bank into one of the world's leading investors
in the sustainability exponential of Solar Energy
Help search of community world trade - Anglo, India, USA
Dedication - the system changing goal that can most unite Win-Win-Win worldwide is ending poverty
as my dad forecast at The Economist in 1984. So we dedicate this summit network to entrepreneurs
ending poverty everywhere and particularly all friends of Bangladesh and Muhammad Yunus for inspiring such wonderful actions,brands, purposeful businesses and learning
I Introduction
Mapping
social businesses
There are two types of mathematics used in economics. One – the mathematics of addition and subtraction
– forms the basis of accounting and assumes the world is made of separate, isolated parts that are put together and
taken apart. This is a world of straight lines.
The other – of multiplication and division – forms the basis of Mapping
and assumes the world is made of interconnected relationships where one action in one part has knock-on effects on other parts.
This is the world of exponential curves: virtuous spirals where (say) 1.1 x 1.1 leads to ever accelerating growth; and doom loops or vicious circles of (say) 0.90 x 0.90 which quickly spiral away to nothing.
In real economic
life if you don’t understand exponentials – the mathematics of relationship – you don’t understand
anything sustainable.
The shareholder value maximising capitalist corporation inevitably generates one type of exponential:
the downward spiral. Why? Because its demand that it must take the maximum possible value out of the system of which it is
a part once every three months inevitably ends up sucking the life out of that system, generating conflict along the way.
This downward spiral can be hidden from view so long as the victims of this value extraction remain silent and powerless:
people without a vote, people without a voice and/or people without money. Usually, all three come together: the only way
to have a vote or voice in a capitalist marketplace is if you have money. If you have no money, you have no ‘vote’ and no voice.
The
alternative to the shareholder value maximising capitalist corporation is not the communist regime, or a charity, or a taxation-subsidised
public service, but the social business. Why? Because the social business puts human purpose rather than value extraction at the heart of what it does, and it builds
relationships around this human purpose. It is economically viable – it pays its bills – but it does so in a way
that builds win-win-win relationships. These win-win-wins generate trust and become magnets of goodwill (a term accountants
have always used and never understood), creating a positive multiplier exponential: expanding, inclusive virtuous spirals.
The new media
and metrics challenges of goodwill branding, business and economics integrate how to design, build and sustain these positive
exponentials. This book introduces Mapping as one of the supporting tools of social business.
Almost all social economics problems of the world will be addressed
through the social business system , Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize, Acceptance Speech
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..
Real
entrepeneurship
The Mapping methodology aids ‘real’ entrepreneurship. ‘Real’
entrepreneurs don’t only come up with a new product, a new technology or a new business model – they also design
a set of mutually reinforcing win-win-win relationships around it. It is this element of ‘system design’ that
makes the new project sustainable. If it is designed with positive exponentials – the creation of a virtuous spiral
– at its heart, then if it can be created once, it can be created again and again. It can replicate, grow, expand and
spread.
Mapping also allows us to re-inspect the status quo with fresh eyes.
Today, there are at least 50 global market sectors – ranging through healthcare and banking, pharmaceuticals and property
and insurance and pensions and lawyers, food and water and energy and arms, education and mass media and telecomputing’s
new interactive media – with annual monetary exchanges of a trillion or more a year. Their current operations need to
be audited from the perspective of the exponentials they are generating.
The relationship
between the main economic entities is illustrated in Figure 1 (below). Are they simply externalising risks and costs to the
voteless, voiceless and moneyless? Or are they truly creating a virtuous spiral? How to redesign them so they shift from one
design to the other?
Figure 1: Contrasting
dynamics of different approaches to wealth creation
The different dynamics of these
contrasting approaches is illustrated by the contrasting fortunes of the western banking industry and microcredit. In the
West, banking focused on driving up consumption while passing on risk to (unknown) third parties, while microcredit was focused
on investing in entrepreneurial productivity and communal sustainability, and accepting known risks. By 1997 the success of
microcredit banking was proven in Bangladesh, where it served nearly 10 million of the world’s
poorest women. Since then, the microcredit movement has been expanding worldwide. With this exponential still rising, microcredit
has taken less than a decade for worldwide networks to reach 100 million of the world’s poorest.
Summary
The truly good news is: many
of today’s most urgent challenges are explained by the same mathematical error of accounting: a monopoly measurement
of the world as being only made up of separate, isolated parts while devaluing relationships and the trust and goodwill that
can flow through them. We have a good probability that by correcting the maths – by designing and sustaining complete
systems that work on a ‘win-win-win’ basis – we can start curing all of humanity’s problems.
2 Mapping’s Core Elements
What
is Mapping?
Traditional business and economics focuses most of its attention on just one entity and one problem: how
to increase the profitability of the firm (regardless of the costs this might impose on other parties such as employees, the
environment or society as a whole).
Mapping is based on two assumptions. First, that real, wealth creation flows through many
levels simultaneously including individuals, groups (teams, communities), organisations, networks of organisations (supply
chains, regions, nations), and global society (the environment, international relations etc). Second, that it is only sustainable
if each level is systemically a) getting its core needs met and b) contributing what it can, rather than focusing simply on
value extraction (see Figure 2 where each of the inputs links an exponentially spinning subsystem of productive human relationships
-(eg are individuals on a microentrepreneurial action learning curve up? - and each of the outputs links a value demand subsystem).
The challenge of Mapping is to design and maintain all-round ‘win-win-win’
systems where each ‘level’ benefits from its dealings with other levels. This is in contrast to the ‘win-win
conspiracies’ that dominate most economies today: where two parties ‘win’ at the expense of a third (e.g.
where shareholders and employees ‘win’ at the expense of customers – bureaucracies; where shareholders and
customers ‘win’ at the expense of employees – slave labour; where customers and organisations ‘win’
at the expense of the environment etc).
This is the central challenge of innovation: to invent or redesign wealth
creating networks and systems so that win-lose relationships and win-win conspiracies are transformed into win-win-win virtuous
spirals. This is not easy. It requires long, iteratively-detailed dialogues, series of micro experiments, trial and error
etc. So the detail of Mapping can be very deep and local which is how usable geographical maps are also triangularised.
But the idea behind it is incredibly simple: how to generate virtuous win-win-win spirals around human purposes? In other
words, how to create sustainable social businesses and keep on regenerating the most humanly purposeful organisation or network.
The
rest of the book shows how Grameen, Bangladesh as an emerging nation of microentrepreneurs and hi-trust sustainability investment
Partners have networked win-win-win Maps – and how, learning from the experience of Grameen, the theory
of Mapping can be used to help extend and accelerate the application of Grameen’s action learnings.
3 Mapping microcredit’s trajectory
Micrecredit and beyond
From a Mapping perspective, Grameen has gone through four phases, each of them opening up
new win-win-wins onto the whole ten-win model.
1976-1983 Microcredit’s Banking for the Poor. How the microcredit movement created a
virtuous spiral around a 6-win model: -productive and demanding relationships between individuals, centres/communities and
an organisation (Grameen).
1983-1995 Replicating the exponential nationally, and planting the seeds internationally.
1996-2005 An
entrepreneurial revolution in mobile. The win-win exponentials extend to all ten nodes – to society as a whole. Meanwhile,
microcredit goes global (ten win) via the microcreditsummit network.
2006 onwards: Worldwide acclaim with the Nobel Prize
awarded half to Dr Yunus and half to Grameen’s millions of female microentrepreneurs Global brand architecture with
the birth of partnerships in Future Capitalism. As the new book by Dr Yunus reveals, Future Capitalism designed from Micro-up
entrepreneurs and generating communal goodwill multipliers can sustain any deeply human purpose we focus on worldwide. However,
FC partnerships need to be openly formed between the world’s deepest grassroots service networks
- such as the 100000+ Bangladeshi’s employed in microcredit - and global corporations governed by win-win-win exponential
rising metrics. We can start bridging cultures, rejoicing in young and old, and caring about male and female - and relentlessly
prioritise the end of poverty’s broken system, -by spreading the idea of social business and cheerleading microsummits.
Grameen in 2008 is ready for collaboration agents who wish to connect www entrepreneurial summits around such deep community-connecting
sectors as solar energy and mobile ending of digital divides. These MICROsummits can invite youth of the world to join in
and track as ambitiously collaborative goals as microcreditsummit started propagating in 1997 when it was
launched by such partners as the Bangladeshi microcredit networks and the WashingtonDC
social business results.org
4 Next
steps
Spreading the revolution
Early progress mapping surveys
on solar energy, the shift from mobile to the internet (ending the digital divide), education, health and water; How social
business is beginning to revolutionise huge global sectors, one after another; How Mapping can help spread the revolution
to new industries and geographies. Staring the search for other human sustainability investment movements which include:
The Johannesburg
Cluster –CIDA Free University, BransonSchool of entrepreneurship
and Social Action Corporate Responsibility, Mandela Networks and scholarships
The Atlanta-Austin Cluster where
2 CEOs (John Mackey and Ray Anderson) of stockmarketed corporations (WholeFoods and Interface) have succeeded in setting goals
for turning the sectors of industrial carpets and supermaketed foods into ones that sustain future generations
The Paris
Cluster which is were the innovation of Future Capitalism partnerships began with Grameen-Danone, Grameen Credit-Agricole,
Grameen-Veolia and the SMBA at HEC.
Various Indian networks ranging from health cities and
mobile partnering experiments to the world’s largest social business school – the 31000 children of Lucknow City
Montessori run by a family of Gandhians.
5 Back to basics
Rethinking economic theory
How social business/Mapping forces us to reinvent economics.
The choice of seeing that human beings are not selfish, rational profit maximisers. They are
social, reciprocal beings. Economics needs to be built on the foundation of humanity: reciprocity.
Real wealth
creation can never be measured in terms of money profit.
Markets. Adam Smith rightly identified
the importance of bottom-up entrepreneurial activity and of competition. However, his writings were seized upon by traditional
economists to do something else completely: to argue that the ‘hidden hand’ of the market always creates the best
of all possible worlds. This closed off investigation of the real challenge of economics: the design of sustainable,
win-win-win systems.
Innovation. How the notion of entrepreneurship was distorted into top down,
value extraction, as distinct from creating bottom up, win-win-win exponentials.
Whole Truth solar
costing starts with a quarter century and whole community view as does other regeneration/sustainable infrastructure
work:
Grameen solar commits to products with a 25 year life
once installed there is almost no cost - vilagers
are trained in any maintenance;
Grameen members are used to take out 3 to 5 year plans to pay for things like
putting a solid (monsonn-proof) roof over their head; I dont think the plan cost for solar is that much above any of
the ther maintenance plans -remember we are talking about a free solar market multiplying value for the world's
poorest householders
The answer appears to be that if whole communities in sunshine places scale
round a basic and open solar standard -and local people are trained around an open practice service - it is way
cheaper than any other power source . Its extraordinary that our NW media does not cover this good news. This organic
organisation of your whole community around solar does not suit big corporations and their overheads. Solar communities
don't need to advertise the product; once you see you neighbour's joy of solar you want it too.
Doubtless
we who live in rich cities will find that there are regulations and other bureaucracies which need to be burst through before
we are 'allowed' to replicate solar.
SOLAR'S MOORES LAW
But the good news remains if one of
the poorest places in the world by focusing on this for 10 years can exponentially lower cost of community-wide
empowering people with zero-carbon energy, what could be done with solar if we in the rest of the world demanded it seems
very good news indeed.
It would also create local jobs in precisely those places where people and youth do
have community-building time on their hands. I think that if green ever became known as a simile for local job empowerment
, solar could help return democracy as being for and by the people.
MAGIC OF MICRO SUSTAINABILITY INVESTMENT
Wouldnt
do any harm to plant community banking as part of the same distributed empowerment dynamic of sustainability investment. Unlike
rebuilding global banks that have lost everyone's shirt which is a "cost', the solar journey grows economies
at the grassroots, makes communities steadily richer and cleaner at same time. We need an innovation of true community
accountancy to see what costs us more than our next generations can possibly afford is continuing a jot longer to
be ruled by Big-Brother sponsored measures that have spun us around a fallible globalisation this last quarter century
