Reviews and discussions of books and their lessons for working in the BoP

“All learning integrates thinking and doing. All learning is about how we interact in the world and the types of capacities that develop from our interactions.” - Presence, Peter Senge et al

One of the benefits of working in the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) has been the opportunity to take deep dives into experiences that were once totally foreign to me. Another benefit has been the long travel times between and across continents; plane flights, bus rides, and boat trips where I can immerse myself in books and articles covering a wide range of topics. [It’s a sad fact that in these information-at-the-speed-of-thought days I actually have to be unplugged and forced to sit down before I pick up a good book!] Over the past several years both those benefits have twirled around my head – like a pair of ballroom dancers continuously exchanging leading and following roles. I’ve never had a learning experience like my work in the BoP: this combination of thinking & doing and the knowledge that both have created.

This new section here at BRINQ is to discuss that thinking/doing interaction: interesting books and what implications and lessons they offer for someone working on-the-ground at this particular intersection of business, poverty, and innovation. Most of the time the discussion will be about books read recently, but sometimes it will be about books read long ago that new experiences in the BoP brought back to light. On the surface, not all of the books that will be discussed offer obvious connections to the BoP - and some of the books are old to the world but new to me - but these books and articles have demonstrated their relevance during several years of work with companies and communities in the BoP.

And please, if you have your own knowledge of the books discussed here, or if you have your own experiences working in the BoP, please join the discussion. The goal of this section is to generate dialogue about thinking and doing in the BoP, which would ultimately lead to new learning and action!

Book Reviews to date:

• Preserving the local soil - Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice - Mark J Plotkin - May, 2007

Old BRINQ reviews:

• Why Not? A guide for ingenuity - Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres - March 2005
• Capitalism at the Crossroads - Stuart L. Hart - March 2005
• The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid - CK Prahalad - February, 2005
• Poor People’s Knowledge - editors J. Michael Finger, Philip Schuler - February, 2005

“Every time a shaman dies, it is as if a library burned down.” - Mark J. Plotkin, PhD

The old caboclo woman stopped abruptly in her explanation of the plant in her hand and stared to the back of our group, at the tall, sun-browned, shirtless man who had just stepped into her garden.  “Ele é índio?” the old midwife asked excitedly, “ele entende muito de plantas, ervas, remédios?!” The newcomer had been just about to snap a photo of the scene but the force of old woman’s reaction startled him into almost dropping his camera. He turned to my girlfriend Amber and I with a confused look, “What did she just say?” 

I chuckled out loud and translated for him while Amber explained to the old woman that no, our friend Kenny was neither a “native” nor from the jungle, that he was originally from Hong Kong and - as an energy trader on Wall Street – Kenny’s particular knowledge of stocks and plants probably wasn’t quite what the old woman was hoping for. The midwife’s mistake was easy enough to understand though: a dark brown, muscular man with long raven-black hair, Kenny looked like a piece of history stepping out of the jungle. In fact, most of the people we had met during our weeklong tour of riverside communities had made the same mistake about Kenny’s heritage.  What surprised me instead about the old midwife’s reaction was that even though practically a medicine woman herself - born and raised in the Amazon - she still seemed desperate to pump an outsider for his knowledge of local plants and medicines.

The entrance to Cachoeira do Aruã [click to enlarge]

That incident took place in Cachoeira do Aruã, a small community by the Arapiuns river, west of Santarem, Brazil. Like most of the river communities in the Brazilian Amazon, Cachoeira’s population consists primarily of caboclo: the Brazilian term for a person of mixed indigenous and European descent.  I later learned that that no truly indigenous cultures are believed to still exist in the Brazilian Amazon. I also learned that as the indigenous populations had slowly disappeared or mixed with European settlers, much of the local knowledge had also disappeared, in particular the cultures’ understanding of local plants and medicines.  Outsiders brought in new knowledge and medicines and the local solutions faded back into the jungle: the knowledge to apply those solutions lost with the culture that had once developed them. All of that explains why the midwife had been so excited to see Kenny: he looked like a link to a culture and knowledge that had been lost.

A week after returning from the Amazon, I picked up a copy of ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin’s Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice, a book published in 1993 that chronicled Plotkin’s fifteen-year effort to discover and record local medicines in the Amazon. After my own short trip visiting communities there, Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice captivated me: the book is a beautifully written account of an outsider’s respectful quest to record an ancient and important local knowledge and culture. To have seen face-to-face what Plotkin had feared - the loss of local and diverse solutions in communities that needed them - gave me a lot to think about in terms of our own business forays into communities and cultures in the Base of the Pyramid. In particular, Plotkin’s story highlights a number of important lessons for people working with communities in the BoP.

Lesson 1: Practice humility

Dr. Richard E. Schultes, Plotkin’s old advisor, gave the following description about his former student:

Because he went there to learn from the Indians, [Mark] was able to collect plants, participate in ceremonies and rituals, and share other experiences as few outsiders have been able to do.  One of Mark’s outstanding qualities as field ethnobotanist is his conviction that among the Indians, he is the student and they are teacher.

Cornell’s Erik Simanis, learning Swahili in the Kibera [click to enlarge]

I find one of the hardest hats to remove while working with communities in the BoP is the hat of an expert. Entering a BoP community can be unsettling and it’s easy to cling to the image of being an expert or a teacher in order to feel more secure. On the flip side, BoP communities are used to outsiders coming in to tell them what to do, and many have learned to give the “best answers” to gain whatever reward outsiders might be offering (grants, loans, jobs, services, etc.). This upper-to-lower dynamic makes it extremely difficult to learn what actually goes on in a community, much less build a new business together.  To overcome this requires us to level the playing field and to engineer humility into our engagements, so that communities can understand that outsiders have strengths and weaknesses just like they do.  And as Plotkin demonstrates, one of the best ways to demonstrate humility is to actually go live with a community. There’s nothing like demonstrating how bad you are at a common local task to show people that you’re human.

As part of the Base of the Pyramid Protocol (BoP), my colleagues and I do homestays with families in the communities that we work with; the resulting trust, respect, and knowledge that blossoms from those homestays is nothing short of incredible.  Given that experience, it has always amazed me how rarely well-meaning outsiders conduct homestays, this despite the huge number of NGOs that already operate in those communities. Instead the message that many NGOs and businesses convey to communities seems to be this, “We’re here to transform you, not be transformed ourselves.” 

Lesson 2: Make it relevant

Teaching about plants in the Shamans and Apprentices program. ©ACT

On the other hand, even while practicing humility it’s important to demonstrate to the community that what you’re doing is relevant to them, that you have knowledge and strengths that can help them (just like they have knowledge and strengths to help you).   To gain the local chiefs’ approval to study with the communities’ shamans, Plotkin had to convince the chiefs that 1) he knew what he was doing, 2) he wasn’t there to exploit them (or to fool around with their women) and 3) his work would create value for the community.  As a result of Plotkin’s work, the Tirio communities of Suriname now have a handbook of their own medicinal plants in the Tirio language (the only other book in Tirio being the Bible).  Plotkin also set up the Shamans and Apprentices program, a program to support and encourage young people to study under the old shamans and carry on their traditions.  Both these acts helped preserve the shamanistic knowledge of the community, which created tremendous value for the community and for Plotkin’s own work as an ethnobotanist. Often it takes time to figure how to best make your work relevant to community, but if you base your work on on what they have and what you have, on what they need and what you need, then you’re much more likely to be relevant. Your chances of success are also much higher if you don’t lock onto a solution before actually spending significant time in a community.

Lesson 3: Open up

Taking part in the local life of a community is a great way to build trust and relationships; it’s also a great way to see things you never would have otherwise.  During his stays in Amazon communities, Plotkin set aside the idea of being a dispassionate observer and tried to participate in local activities and events as much as he could.  Sometimes this meant trying his hand at fishing (using local plant chemicals, bows, and arrows), sometimes this meant snorting the local intoxicant, sometimes this meant partaking in local healing rituals, and often this meant being the brunt of many jokes.  The relationships and knowledge Plotkin gained as a result of his open participation formed the foundation for many of his discoveries of new plants and medicines.  How much you participate as an outsider depends on how much you’re willing to do, but I know from my own experiences that the more that I participate with and open up to a particular community, the more the community opens itself up to me.

Lesson 4: Preserve the local soil

In the Amazon, thousands of years of accumulated knowledge of local medicines and plants has been lost. The opportunity to use that knowledge to create sustainable economies to conserve and grow the Amazon has disappeared - possibly forever - largely because the glitz of the Western alternative seemed so much brighter than the local solution. Plotkin documents this trend in the communities he visited: as Western missionaries and NGOs came in to teach local communities “better” ways to live, but ultimately made the communities dependent on a system that they had little leverage or strength in. Having traded in a deep expertise in their local knowledge to become novices in Western ones, is it any wonder that some communities feel like they can never catch up?

Plotkin reminds us that to preserve local traditions and solutions (and the Amazon itself), efforts have to be made to both conserve old methods and to make those methods relevant to the modern world. At the end of Tales, Plotkin describes a number of his activities to preserve and promote the local knowledge of shamans in the Amazon.  Although the initial business attempt that came out of Plotkin’s work has since foundered (Shaman Pharmaceuticals, which gave up on commercializing drugs based on Amazon plants due to the difficulty of meeting US FDA demands), his work continues via the Amazon Conservation Team, an organization focused on conservation through partnerships with communities in the Amazon. For companies looking to do business in BoP communities, Plotkin’s experience reminds us to be thoughtful before rushing to replace local solutions with outside ones.  After all, silver bullets rarely work like we expect them to and often kill off the sheep in lieu of the wolf. In contrast, a local solution might form the basis of a future innovation or competitive advantage, but that can only happen if local solutions are encouraged not just to survive, but to blossom and to grow.

Summary: a great read for the Amazon and the BoP

In addition to all the above, Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice is just a good read, with beautiful descriptions and historical anecdotes of the Amazon.  Plotkin is quick to point out when he made mistakes with communities, but you also see how quickly he tries to learn and make up for them.  And although the book is now over ten year’s old, his coverage of the history and challenges of the region makes Tales a required reading for anyone looking to work with BoP communities in the Amazon.  And for anyone who’d like to experience living in BoP communities through another person’s eyes - to feel all the tribulations, traumas, and triumphs such work entails – Mark Plotkin’s “Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice” is highly recommended.

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Additional Resources

• Mark J Plotkin, Phd - English Wikipedia entry
• Amazon Conservation Team - working in partnership with indigenous people in conserving biodiversity, health, and culture in tropical America.
• USAID - Hydropower Energizes Remote Village - Cachoeira do Aruã (literally, Waterfall of the Aruã) was the recipient of a USAID energy pilot project. I got to take a tour of their 50-KW energy facilities while I was there.
• Projeto Bagagem - (in Portuguese) - a community- and cultural-exchange-focused tourism project in Brazil, with whom I visited Cachoeira do Aruã and other communities along the Tapajós and Arapiuns rivers.
• Saude e Alegria - (in Portuguese) - a communtity health and happiness NGO based in Santarem, Brazil, also with whom I visited communities in the Amazon.

This article is part of the BRINQ BoP Books Discussions series. Follow the link to read about the series and find other books.

The other day, my foster brother Seth and I were speaking about being innovative. Seth is a lead test engineer on a certain eXcellent gaming console in Redmond, WA.

"I don’t think I have it in me," Seth commented, "I can almost always figure out how things work, like noise canceling headsets for example, but I don’t know how people come up with those ideas in the first place."

"Maybe that’s true," I responded, "but I bet that you could be trained."

I like to tell people that creating something innovative and new is like pulling on threads until it leads you to a sweater, or even better yet, it’s like gathering threads into your hands until you finally realize that you’re already holding a sweater. In non-knitting terms, innovation is an organic process, involving questions and observations, and a lot of looking at the world differently. And one of my favorite guides for looking at the world differently is Barry Nalebuff’s and Ian Ayres’ "Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small"

In twenty years and countless adventures in growing our business, our only progress and for that matter our only interesting breakthroughs have resulted from someone asking Why not? Nalebuff and Ayres have crafted an inspiring, imaginative, informative and best of all, fun treatise that will arouse the entrepreneur in all of us. You will fly through this book, and you will never look at a problem the same way again.

—Gary Hirshberg, President and CEO,Stonyfield Farm Yogurt, Inc.

(more…)

"Stuart Hart was there at the beginning. Years ago when the term ’sustainability’ had not yet reached business schools, Stuart Hart stood as a beacon in the umbrage. It is clear commerce is the engine of change, design the first signal of intention, and global capitalism is at the crossroads. Stuart Hart is there again; this time lighting up the intersection."
- William McDonough, Co-author of Cradle to Cradle

Three years ago, a group of MBA prospects visited the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. We were wined & dined and offered full rides and stipends, incentives to reject offers at higher ranked business schools and earn our MBAs at Kenan-Flagler instead. The admission staff knew they had to be convincing, so they brought out the big guns. We were introduced to Stu Hart.

Naturally, we decided Carolina was a fine place to be.

At BRINQ, both Sheri Willoughby and I attribute working with Stu Hart as defining moments in our careers. Sheri, a chemist and environmental specialist from Florida, and I, a computer scientist and technologist from California, had returned to school to answer the question "How can we make companies more environmentally friendly?" However to our great fortune, Stu Hart took us in hand and convinced us to go "beyond greening", that the real opportunity for sustainability was not in better ways to comply (reducing liability and cost) but in creating new strategic business opportunities (increasing revenues and markets): "What radical new business opportunities are available for a sustainable company?"

Hart writes in his acclaimed new book, Capitalism at the Crossroads:

By moving beyond greening, companies hope not only to address mounting social and environmental concerns, but also to build the foundation for innovation and growth in the coming decades. In so doing they would outperform their competitors in today’s businesses, but even more importantly, outrun them to tomorrow’s technologies and markets. In short, sustainable global enterprises would create competitively superior strategies that simultaneously move us more rapidly toward a sustainable world.

Rather than seeking incremental improvements to what already exists, moving beyond greening often means pursuing innovations that may make obsolete what currently constitutes the company’s core business—it is an inherently disruptive act.

(more…)

Recently we’ve received a number of requests for more information on the Base of the Pyramid. One of the best places to start is with the work by C.K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart. Prahalad and Hart were both featured prominently at December’s WRI "Eradicating Poverty through Profit" conference in San Francisco, which we along with 900 other representatives of businesses, NGOs, universities, and governments attended. Below is an excerpt from an interview with Prahalad about his new book "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid":

Your book’s subtitle reads “eradicating poverty through profits.” A rather sweeping promise, isn’t it?

Not at all. My book is about a new world economic order in which there is an invisible market constituency of 5 billion people. It is invisible to us because of the way we’ve been socialized to think. If you take the top developing countries—China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Turkey, Russia, South Africa, Thailand, the usual suspects—they represent 70 to 75 percent of the world’s poor population and about 90 percent of the GDP of developing countries. We tend to look at the GDP in U.S. dollar terms, which don’t give you any idea of the nature and intensity of commerce in those countries. You have to look at purchasing- for-parity dollars. If you look at those dollars, it’s about $14 trillion —and that sum is larger than that of Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom put together.

How can they afford to buy companies’ goods and services?

We always assume: If you have money, I can sell it to you. The more interesting question deals with creating the capacity to consume: How do I sell something to you—commercially, profitably—if you don’t have the money? A very American example of how to do it is the Singer sewing-machine company 150 years ago. Poor people who needed the machines didn’t have the $100 to pay for them, so Singer said, Why don’t you pay in installments of $5 a month? They sold a lot of sewing machines using that scheme. That’s exactly what Casas Bahia, a large retailer of consumer durables, is doing now in Brazil. If I live in one of the favelas—the shantytowns in São Paolo or Rio de Janeiro—I don’t have the $300 that’s required to buy a television. But I can pay $25 a month, and therefore if you trust me and give me credit, then I can pay you back. That means I am saving and consuming simultaneously, If you look at Casas Bahia, or Cemex in Mexico, or other companies I mention in the book, you see that they’re first creating this capacity to consume. So the first order of business for business is not to say there’s no market but, rather, to focus on how to create a market. Traditionally, however, the management focus of large multinationals has always been on creating more efficiency in existing markets.

Whatever the price—5 rupees or 10 rupees —I can imagine people in civil-society organizations seeing it as another instance of Western exploitation: “Here comes Coke again to dominate us.”

We continuously make choices for others, and it’s a very elitist attitude. Who are we to say that a kid shouldn’t have an ice cream or a Coke? Then there’s the other assumption: Poor people make dumb choices. Well, rich people make dumb choices, too. How many times do people buy PDAs that don’t work for them? So, then, my book also asks, Can we just eliminate all this elitism: managers who say, These people don’t matter for me; NGOs who say, These people are my constituency and I can make choices for them? Can we just agree that, if this is an opportunity to change the world, we must come together and not be on opposite sides of the fence? The only way to do that is to look at cases in which both sectors have successfully worked together

[Read the rest of the CK Prahalad interview at Wharton School Publishing]

Past “How to Change the World” articles: The Model T Trap - Capturing Future Value in the Base of the Pyramid Going Beyond Networking - Launching a Venture in the Base of the Pyramid

"How can we help poor people to earn more from their knowledge—rather than from their sweat and their muscle? This book is about promoting the innovation, knowledge, and creative skills of poor people in poor countries, and particularly about improving the earnings of poor people from such knowledge and skills."

The World Bank’s "Poor People’s Knowledge: Promoting Intellectual Property in Developing Countries" is a collection of essays by researchers and practitioners covering the subject of knowledge development and intellectual property in the Base of the Pyramid. The book (available in PDF) is an informative and thought-provoking read. Today we touch on Chapter 2 "Handmade in India" by Maureen Liebl and Tirthankar Roy.

Handmade in India: Traditional Craft Skills in a Changing World

India’s 9.6 million craftsmen contribute an estimated $3.3 billion to the Indian economy. Crafts also provide part-time income to seasonal agricultural workers and women, a means for workers to remain in their villages rather than move to overcrowded cities, and act as archive for India’s rich cultural heritage. Handmade in India discusses the struggle of traditional crafts making in the face of more mechanized, cheaper alternatives and intellectual property problems.

"Artisans in India face the same IP problems as in other developing countries: cheap knockoffs, extensive copying among artisans, artisans who pass along (and sometimes sell) designs belonging to a client, and buyers who have a sample designed and produced in India, then manufactured in bulk somewhere else."

"Problems with enforcing ownership are particularly complex given what the artisans themselves accept as norms of behavior. Copying among artisans is a long-established tradition. Artists acquire their skills by copying."

The authors note that successful craftsmen are market-accepting individuals, who understand that societies evolve and that [outside of a museum] no craft can or should survive without a viable market. As entrepreneurs, craftsmen must seek new markets for their skills, but face four major shortcomings in doing so:

• Lack of knowledge on how to increase quality, productivity, and technical innovation.
• A constrained worldview that keeps them unaware of and an unable to access the new market opportunities available to them.
• A lack of working capital and access to credit. Even if a craftsman receives a large order, they do not have the upfront capital to fund the work and materials.
• A total lack of civic, professional, and social service infrastructures.

In the end, effective solutions to promoting and protecting poor peoples’ knowledge in India will need to account for Indian culture, community & family structures, the Indian caste system, and even deeply held beliefs about individualism: "Aesthetic forms are often thought of as springing from a kind of universal, divinely inspired subconscious." The authors suggest two types of solutions:

• Adapting traditional skills to new products for changing markets.
• Repositioning skills and products for upscale markets that appreciate and are willing to pay premiums for handcrafted quality and character.

On the flip side of a problem is always an opportunity. Organizations that offer effective methods to deal with the problems and solutions described in Handmade in India have the potential of opening up huge market opportunities in the Base of the Pyramid. Just remember that the promotion of innovation must be deeply ingrained in culture, a lesson not lost on us here at BRINQ.