My friend, Amitava, just described a very interesting perspective on charting your life. Imagine your life as the possibilities that appear on a graph with 2 axes where the x-axis refers to doing something in your life which you find fun (usually represented by a job) and the y-axis refers to the amount of material goods you want to acquire in your life. Typically, the more material goods you want to acquire, means that you’ll have to chase for more money and usually means you’ll end up doing something less fun to acquire more money. At the same time, some lucky people end up attaining the “ideal” spot where what they find fun to do also results in acquiring a lot of income. So ultimately the question for everyone is not what the meaning of life is but instead which spot on the graph do you want to occupy.

Posted via email from deviantsadvantage’s posterous

We live in a really weird world. I'm sure everyone knows this but I'd like to state and expand this point further. People in developing countries or from low-income backgrounds try to attain fairer skin colour because it's a sign of wealth. In other words, if you're fair-skinned in a low-income setting, you are able to project externally a wealthy image. On the other hand, people from developed countries or wealthier backgrounds always try to get that elusive tan. Why? This is because attaining darker skin color, projects their wealth i.e. their ability to go on vacation by the beaches in far and exotic places. Don't we live in a really weird world? The higher up we evolve in the economic ladder, the more we try act as if we are poor. Why can't we be poor, dark-skinned and cool?

Posted via email from deviantsadvantage’s posterous

could h1n1 have been purposely released by pharmaceutical companies in order to enhance sales from vaccines? check out this article to see the connection: http://mathaba.net/news/?x=621716. The article points to "huge profits generated by companies such as GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), based in Britain, which is the manufacturer of the vaccines".

Posted via email from deviantsadvantage’s posterous

With our work, we have come across some really interesting social enterprises in Africa:

Posted via email from deviantsadvantage’s posterous

I’m sure this topic has come up before, but I’d like to lay it out again - why don’t governments operate like businesses? It seems really simple theoretically. In business, if a customer is unsatisfied with a particular service or product, they either provide feedback, change the provider or stop purchases. Why can’t the same thing occur in a government setting? Why can’t people act like customers of public services (healthcare, security, education etc). We are, after all paying taxes, which is similar to paying for products or services in the business environment. I guess governments can give multiple excuses like the services they provide are cheaper than usual or that they subsidise a lot things which enables us to live at low costs. But aren’t they doing this with our taxes? If we are not satisfied with the services, can’t we lobby for improvements or other providers? On the downside, if governments do act like businesses, if progressive taxes are implemented should people who pay more taxes be better served? However, I do think there are more benefits than problems with governments adopting a more business-like approach and becoming more accountable for their actions, the same way businesses are at least accountable to their customers and shareholder, if not the rest of society and the environment.

Posted via email from deviantsadvantage’s posterous

I was having lunch today at Kinniku in the Ari area in Bangkok and the service was absolutely horrendous. I waited for at least 1 hour before receiving my order. The worst part was that I had made my order slightly before the lunch crowd came in and another table which had made their order after me had received food before me.I got to thinking if mobile companies should redefine their business offering. Weird isn’t it? I started thinking about mobile companies when faced with this problem. Anyway, I was thinking if mobile companies can enable their users to order food through the web and pay for it too. This way, you can order lunch at your favorite restaurant and have it ready before you get there. Additionally, you can pay for your food in your monthly mobile bill.This is a win-win for everyone because the restaurant is more efficient at preparing meals and doesn’t lose money if the customer doesn’t turn up (because you still get charged for your order if you don’t turn up). Customers are happier with fast-served meals and mobile companies get to extend their services and ultimately build revenue.

Posted via email from deviantsadvantage’s posterous

Posterous is “da bomb” when it comes to online broadcasting (blogging, twittering etc). I’ve been testing it out with the past few posts and am simply struck by relative ease at which I can post a blog and twit at the same time. Additionally, it handles external content like pictures really easily.

Posted via email from deviantsadvantage’s posterous

the founders of isohunt have released a new file sharing platform which enhances the community component. check out here: http://hexagon.cc/

Posted via email from deviantsadvantage’s posterous

A friend of mine recently got into a tiff with another colleague about maintaining the image of a big corporation in the public. The whole issue is essentially about how the media company has to be more careful about how it portrays the corporation during their campaigns and even the most frivolous things matter. If this is not managed carefully, the media company stands to lose the corporation as a client. This leads to something more interesting. We are now more afraid of corporations than governments. We are afraid of the backlash that corporations might unleash simply because of the power they wield. As a result we get really petty in the work environment to manage these issues.

I was at Starbucks in Bangkok recently and noticed that motorcycle taxi riders are ordering complicated Starbucks drinks like “double macchiato caramel”, which is then delivered to customers, mostly in offices across the city. This is an interesting phenomenon where people with higher income levels in the 3rd World no longer want to pick up their own cups of coffee. I know this happens with maids for households chores and other menial labor, but this probably pushing the boundaries of 3rd World labor. The funny part is that when the drink is finally prepared and the barista calls out the complicated mixture by its name, the motorcycle taxi rider is unable to recognise whether that was the drink he ordered and simply stares blankly at the counter. He has to approach the barista to confirm his order everytime a drink is not collected by a customer from the counter.

I spoke on investing in early-stage social enterprises at the recent Triple Bottom Line Investing (TBLI) conference (29-30 May 2008). The talk starts off with elements from William Easterly’s new book - The White Man’s Burden. I would recommend it strongly to anyone intending to join donor agencies, foundations and international development agencies. I think it’s possibly the biggest mistake anyone can make in development - joining these traditional agencies.

Easterly contrasts the 2 archetypes typically found in the development sphere - Planners and Searcher. Planners represent most traditional development actors. These groups tend to have a very top-down approach to development; proposing mainly ineffective big plans that require a lot of resources.

Searchers, on the other hand, are ready to admit they’re clueless about the solution and are more interested in getting to know the needs of the bottom of the pyramid and devising solutions to meet these needs. The creation of microfinance is a clear example of an entrepreneur like Muhammad Yunus spending time with the poor and actually developing an innovative, sustainable and scalable solution. In essence, Searchers are social entrepreneurs.

In order for more innovative “searcher”-like solutions to be implemented, appropriate financing mechanisms have to be created. Some of the biggest problems with traditional development financing include:

1) donor agencies base their performance on the amount of money doled out as opposed to the impact created on the ground

2) social impact is difficult to measure and quantify; and cannot be universally applied nor can they be scaled

3) projects that receive grant funding shape themselves as grant recipients - they operate to receive grants and provide the necessary reporting to the donors; no thought is put into the long-term financial sustainability of the project; as a result, these projects become too grant-dependent, are unable to develop or stay afloat in markets

4) donor funding is in the wrong areas or maturity stages of the markets

5) lack of feedback and accountability - as a result, there’s no incentive to make the right solutions work

when in reality, the landscape should look like this:

1) donor agencies should collaboratively develop or come to a consensus on outcome indicators and relevant data to ease the process to measuring and benchmarking impact; impact should not be measured by the amount of money spent but by the quality of work it is spent on

2) donor funding should act as pre-investment instead of investments. it should be directed to most risky investments or underdeveloped markets

3) innovative social investments (loans, equity, jobs contracts etc) should be paired with maturing social projects; this will help these projects make the transition from grant-based projects to sustainable social enterprises

As a result, there is a crucial need to bridge the gap between pure grants financing and financing mechanisms designed for social enterprises.

The gist of my presentation can be found here:

| View | Upload your own

I haven’t written for sometime and I find my aptitude for it deteriorating. All through April and mid-May I was quite tied up with the preparations for our regional business planning workshop for young/ early-stage social entrepreneurs. Bringing together 19 young social entrepreneurs (ages ranging 23 - 33) in Kuala Lumpur (in conjunction with WCIT), Rahul, Simon, Sunit and I got to working with each of the entrepreneurs’ business plans.

We went through everything an entrepreneur needs to think about and plan for during venture implementation - vision, mission, business model, social impact assessment etc. Through my work, I find that there are usually 2 types of social entrepreneurs:

- socially-tipped

A socially-tipped entrepreneur has a very strong social mission but has little or no idea of his/ her business model. Typically, this type of entrepreneur ends up relying on grant support to run the venture. We all know purely grant-based ventures end being chronically undercapitalised and are unable to expand the coverage of their services or products. My passion lies in helping socially-tipped entrepreneurs build their business models which is in essence diversifying their income streams from grant funding. This could include nominal fees, in-kind support, micro-credit packages etc.

- business-strong

These type of entrepreneurs run commercial businesses with strong CSR programs (CSR from traditional perspective). Our interest is to help their ventures optimise the creation of social and/or environmental value without sacrificing the creation of economic value (profits). The goal here is to truly create sustainable/ blended value entities.

Why aren’t people taking drastic action in the face of an impending disaster? I’ve been deeply troubled by this question since climate change started gaining traction as a serious issue in society. I’ve always imagined people running helter-skelter trying to stop the worst from happening. Instead, most people are doing nothing about this issue. In the face of almost certain death, we continue in oblivion by driving around in our gas-guzzling “fuck-you mobiles” (SUVs/ cars, as described by Bill Maher), pushing Coca Cola down peoples throats and building a world based on financial gain instead of value creation.

Oddly enough, I was startled to find the answer to my question in an article in the Scientific American Mind entitled “The Powers and Perils of Intuition” by David G. Myers. Here’s an excerpt to the section that answered my question:

Why do we so often fear the wrong things? Why do so many smokers (whose habits shorten their lives, on average, by about five years) worry before flying (which shortens life on average by one day)? Why do we fear violent crime more than obesity and clogged arteries? Why do we fear tragic but isolated terrorist acts more than the future’s omnipresent weapon of mass destruction: global climate change? In a nutshell, why do we fret about remote possibilities while ignoring higher probabilities?

Psychological science has identified four factors that feed our risk intuitions:

We fear what our ancestral history has prepared us to fear.
With our old brain living in a new world, we are disposed to fear confinement and height, snakes and spiders, and humans outside our tribe.

We fear what we cannot control.
Behind the wheel of our car, but not in an airplane, we feel control.

We fear what is immediate.
Smoking’s lethality and the threats of rising seas and extreme weather are in the distant future. The airplane take-off in now.

We fear threats readily available in memory.
If a surface-to-air missile brings down a single airliner, the result - thanks to the availabililty of heuristics (rule of thumb) - will be traumatic for the airline industry. Given the difficulty of grasping the infinitesimal odds of its being (among 11 million annual airline flights) the plane that we are on, the probabilities will not persuade us. Intuitive fears will hijack the rational mind.

For these reasons, we fear too little those things that claim lives undramatically (smoking quietly kills 400,000 Americans annually) and too much those things that kill in spectacular bunches. By checking our intuitive fears against the facts, with mindfulness of the realities of how humans die, we can prepare for tomorrow’s biggest dangers.

Several months back, I wrote an article about the benefits of visualising your ideas - Design thinking for Development (it received the highest number of views!!!).

Today, companies like Wal-Mart, Microsoft and others are using the power of visualisation to communicate and digest complex ideas.

Continue reading this article from Fast Company>>>

A leader in the field of idea visualisation is X-plane.

I just gave a short talk on the future of business at the American Chamber of Commerce’s CSR Committee year-opening meeting here in Bangkok, Thailand. The session was pretty engaging and it stirred up some thoughts on how our economy/ business continues to evolve.

| View | Upload your own