Infinite Vision: The Story of Aravind Eye Care

"Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the World's Greatest Business Case for Compassion" by Pavithra Mehta & Suchitra Shenoy

The mechanics of how Aravind works, are well documented by several business case studies, but they fall short on some fundamental questions like what created, and what continues to animate, the model. This is the crucial gap this book fills in.

The authors of the Aravind book start with an interesting inquiry: If Aravind is the extra-ordinary answer, what were Dr V's Questions? Discover they did, and how! The Indian Express columnist, Amulya Gopala Krishnan says, "A story about an organisational marvel, this book is somehow internally illuminated. It has a plot, poetry, and emotion - things you don't expect from a business title".

"To give sight for all" was Aravind's founder Dr V's vision! That's not a small goal even for world's governments, and Dr V was a retired person with no money, business plan, or safety net! According to the World Health Organisation's estimates, 39 million people in the world are blind, 80% of them needlessly so! But, when intuitive goodness is pitted against unthinkable odds, it stirs the imagination and awakens possibility. Spirituality was where Dr V found many answers! Through a continued process of aspiration, rejection, and surrender, Dr V was able to tap into an intelligence that went beyond the thinking mind. Aravind Eye Care System is actually named after Dr V's spiritual guru, the freedom-fighter-turned-mystic Sri Aurobindo.

It's not just this "spirit", but superb execution capabilities that made Aravind. That Aravind's assembly line systems and skill-based task delineation, ala McDonald's, maximise the Surgeon's productivity and deliver high quality service at low cost is probably well known, but how many know that it is the institutionalised quest for constant refinement that has perfected the model?

Sample this for an outcome of such perfection: UK National Health Service does 500,000 eye surgeries annually; Aravind alone does 300,000! That's not all... Aravind does it at less than 1% of Britain's costs! Because, Aravind model arose from a potent question "How much can we give for what we get?" vs. the more typical "How much can we get for what we give?" That question gave rise to a model defining insight, that there is a synergy between quality, cost, and the demand for services...

Combined with the non-negotiable service principle that there would be no difference in clinical outcomes between paid and free patients, and another insight, that the market price is set based on an average provider's cost and throughput, gave the strategic objective of phenomenal productivity, to give Aravind a decided edge in the marketplace.

Nurses are at the core of such productivity. They hand instruments to Surgeon in such a choreographed sequence, that the Surgeon's eyes don't even lift from the microscope! There is far more to the role of nurses than mere assembly-line efficiency; they are the scaffolding that holds the Aravind model in place and the most pervasive conveyors of its culture. The nurse recruitment process and the training system, described in the book, are pearls of wisdom in Human Resource Management.

Once the strategy is tested for its workability, the next step for any enterprise is scaling. "Start with a microcosm of what you're dreaming of; seeing it in motion will give the energy you and your team need" was Aravind's approach. Such insights pop-up through the book!

Taking on a goal that far exceeds your capacity has a powerful side effect. It primes you to find allies everywhere. At Aravind, the global mission led to counter-intuitive commitment to training its competition! That raises another important question "You can package and share what you do through workshops and training programs, but how do you systemetise and givee away what you are?" Read the book to find the answer :)

High volume is key to Aravind model, but eliminating curable blindness is not just about numbers, it's about reaching people in a human way.

With such deep insights into the evolution of a noble mission, the making of a strategy, the ring side view into execution details and the unique approaches to scaling of the world's greatest business case for compassion, I have no hesitation in commending the book as the Gita for social enterprises...

“How to Study with Mind Maps: The Concise Learning Method” by Toni Krasnic

Learning is a central human activity and has important implications for school, career, and life. It is the foundation for success in and enjoyment of life. But, in all of your years of attending school, did anyone ever teach you how to learn? Probably not. This book will teach you how!

Concise Learning is about turning studying into learning and about turning information into knowledge. This book will teach you how to make this significant transformation in your studies through a learning method that involves visual mapping, critical thinking, and problem solving. Don’t fret; this isn’t a book on learning theory. Rather, this book will provide you with a simple and intuitive, yet proven and powerful, method for learning and managing multiple sources of information. In other words, this book will serve you as a learning blueprint that you can apply immediately.

With so much to learn, you simply can’t absorb everything. Some information will be lost. What’s really important is that you have control over what information gets lost and what gets retained. Struggling students get bogged down in unfocused and unproductive reading, copying, and repetition, instead of focusing on key concepts and the pursuit of a complete picture, which really drives successful learning. Successful students apply an information filter early in the learning process because they know they can’t possibly absorb all of the information presented, nor do they have to. They select what is important to learn. They make a conscious decision to absorb only the key concepts, which in turn enables them to learn the course material better and faster and to be able to apply it to other areas of learning as well.

With Concise Learning Method (CLM), learning is achieved via a five-phase process (looking for puzzle pieces) that involves meaningfully organizing and connecting key concepts in a visual map (putting together the puzzle pieces), critically thinking, and asking key questions.

CLM allows you to readily consolidate information from multiple sources and look at it from multiple perspectives in a highly visual, interactive format. Further, it allows you to process the information as you encounter it rather than waiting for all of the “puzzle pieces” to fall into place. This free-form learning allows the brain to merge logic and creativity to enable maximum learning.

Visual maps are so powerful and work so well because they are based on memory principles that help you learn and retain new information. They are effective because they force you to be active, focus, concentrate, and think; they contain visual cues that strengthen memory; they provide connections and structure to organize information logically and meaningfully; and they provide a way to personalize information according to your interests and what makes sense to you.

The 5Ps - the five phases of learning - and the 4 steps within each of the 5Ps guide your thought processes, as you’re learning.

The 5 phases of CLM (illustrated from the perspective of a formal student, but are relevant for anyone) are:

1. Preview (preview the lecture material): Before class starts, preview the lecture material (textbook, lecture notes, etc.) to become familiar with the lecture topic and unfamiliar terms and concepts. This phase results in a high-level visual map (outline) that serves as the initial framework to organize and connect key concepts and make them relevant to your mind. The preview phase also prepares your mind for the information to be discussed in the lecture, resulting in increased interest, participation, and comprehension during the lecture.
2. Participate (participate actively in lectures): Active engagement in the lecture results in a revised key concepts framework (visual map) and further solidifies meaningful learning.
3. Process (process all lecture-related information into your visual map): Process the information from lecture, textbook, and other resources immediately or shortly after the lecture by organizing and connecting key concepts into a further refined and more detailed visual map. In this phase, you’re essentially processing all information in a very personal way so that it is meaningful to you. This helps transfer information from short-term memory to long-term memory.
4. Practice (practice by solving new problems): Don’t simply read through practice examples where the solution has been worked out for you. Also, don’t stick with repetitive practice examples. The key here is to apply what you’ve learned to situations you haven’t encountered before. Use your existing knowledge to tackle new problems of all sorts – concrete, abstract, factual, conceptual, and procedural. Approach practicing problems as though you were taking an exam by working examples you’ve never seen before. This phase gives you “hands on” experience, helps you review, and further solidifies what you’ve learned.
5. Produce (produce results and new ideas): As you critically think about new information, questions, and problems, your fresh perspective will result in a unique product of your understanding, concepts, experiences, ideas, and reasoning. Your mind will, in effect, produce new knowledge that is already well integrated with your existing knowledge.

Within each phase, the 4 following steps encourage active interaction and dialogue between the course materials, your visual map, and your thinking.

1. Identify key concepts: You decide what’s important and what you want to learn. You are not a passive recipient of information. Rather, you are an active agent in your learning and must determine what information you want to receive in order to learn best. Key concepts could be simple facts and ideas but most commonly represent a set of facts, ideas, attributes, or characteristics.
2. Meaningfully organize and connect key concepts using a visual map: You decide how you want to learn. You are not a passive recorder of information who simply memorizes key concepts. Rather, you construct your own meaning by organizing and connecting the key concepts in a meaningful framework (visual map). The visual map you compose reveals your understanding and deepens and extends your thinking. Notice that the information has now been accurately captured, reduced to key concepts, connected to other key concepts, and meaningfully organized.
3. Think critically: By organizing and connecting key concepts, you clear your thoughts and sharpen your understanding so you can think critically about what you’re learning. Critical thinking is a cognitive process that appears in several categories of the cognitive process dimension (see section 1.4) and involves reasoning things out on the basis of evidence and valid conclusions. To think critically means you understand and reconstruct what you hear and read into your own thinking and experience. The end result is a new creation, where someone else’s thinking now exists in your mind within your own framework.
4. Ask key questions: Critical thinking, in turn, allows you to develop and ask key questions that guide and propel your inquiry and problem solving throughout the 5Ps process. Key questions are questions that investigate information and experience, probe reasons and evidence, and examine interpretations and conclusions.

You know you’re on the right path when you’re actively observing and discovering, asking and answering questions, thinking, understanding and retaining what you’re learning, applying what you’ve learned, and, most importantly, feeling engaged and interested.

Little Bets by Peter Sims

University of Chicago economist David Galenson spent years studying groundbreaking creators, delving deeply into their personal histories and work methods. He divided innovators into two basic types, and called them conceptual and experimental. Conceptual innovators, such as Mozart, tend to pursue bold new ideas and often achieve their greatest breakthroughs early in life. On the other hand, experimental innovators use iterative, trial-and-error approaches to gradually build up to breakthroughs.

In 'Little Bets', Peter Sims strongly recommends the latter as the most practical route to success...

Fundamental to the little bets approach is that we:

1. Experiment: Learn by doing. Fail quickly to learn fast. Develop experiments and prototypes to gather insights, identify problems, and build up to creative ideas, like Beethoven did in order to discover new musical styles and forms.
2. Play: A playful, improvisational, and humorous atmosphere quiets our inhibitions when ideas are incubating or newly hatched, and prevents creative ideas from being snuffed out or prematurely judged.
3. Immerse: Take time to get out into the world to gather fresh ideas and insights, in order to understand deeper human motivations and desires, and absorb how things work from the ground up.
4. Define: Use insights gathered throughout the process to define specific problems and needs before solving them, just as the Google founders did when they realized that their library search algorithm could address a much larger problem.
5. Reorient: Be flexible in pursuit of larger goals and aspirations, making good use of small wins to make necessary pivots and chart the course to completion.
6. Iterate: Repeat, refine, and test frequently armed with better insights, information, and assumptions as time goes on, as Chris Rock (American Comedian) does to perfect his act.

The little bets approach is about using negativity to positive effect. If your plans fall apart, refine them; if you don’t know where best to begin, just begin somewhere. Every decision is a risk; take a chance and see what happens. Experimental innovators must be persistent and willing to accept failure and setbacks as they work toward their goals.

We grew up on 'Think first and act later' and 'Look before you leap'. Sims argues that it can be more rational to act first and think later, more efficient to fail and find out what doesn’t work. Because, ingenious ideas almost never spring into people’s minds fully formed; they emerge through a rigorous experimental discovery process. In fact, most successful entrepreneurs don’t begin with brilliant ideas; they discover them.

The entrepreneurial way of operating was also the subject of some fascinating research by Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia. In one of her studies, titled “What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial,” she argues that the approach enables us to focus on what we can afford to lose rather than make assumptions about how much we can expect to gain. The affordable loss principle! Successful experimental innovators tend to view failure as both inevitable and instrumental in pursuing their goals.

What stops us from being experimental? Great emphasis gets placed in our education system on teaching facts, such as historical information or scientific tables, then testing us in order to measure how much we’ve retained about that body of knowledge. Memorization and learning to follow established procedures are the key methods for success. Even when we are taught problem solving, such as solving math problems, the focus is generally either on using established methods or logical inference or deduction, both highly procedural in the way they require us to think. There is much less emphasis on developing our creative thinking abilities, our abilities to let our minds run imaginatively and to discover things on our own. We are given very little opportunity, for example, to perform our own, original experiments, and there is also little or no margin for failure or mistakes. We are graded primarily on getting answers right. In essence, we’re taught to be linear thinkers - to follow pre-established procedures and plans - in a nonlinear world. If only the world were predictable!

To be sure, experimental innovation should not entirely replace linear thinking in our regular work processes. Engaging in discovery and making little bets is a way to complement more linear, procedural thinking.

The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Unfamiliar with the Bed of Procrustes? Check out this wiki link

Aphorisms require us to change our reading habits and approach them in small doses; each one of them is a complete unit, a complete narrative dissociated from others

Here go some of those aphorisms that I liked...

1. For company, you often prefer those who find you interesting over those you find interesting
2. The best revenge on a liar is to convince him that you believe what he said
3. You remember emails you sent that were not answered better than emails that you did not answer
4. To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers
5. You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting
6. It is a good practice to always apologize, except when you have done something wrong
7. Rumors are only valuable when they are denied
8. Over the long term, you are more likely to fool yourself than others
9. There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same
10. I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity
11. If your anger decreases with time, you did injustice; if it increases, you suffered injustice
12. Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals
13. When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure
14. Hatred is much harder to fake than love. You hear of fake love; never of fake hate
15. Wisdom in the young is as unattractive as frivolity in the elderly
16. It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable
17. You can replace lies with truth; but myth is only displaced with a narrative
18. Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you
19. For most, success is the harmful passage from the camp of the hating to the camp of the hated
20. Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur
21. People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up
22. People usually apologize so they can do it again
23. The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary
24. Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing
25. A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation
26. It is much less dangerous to think like a man of action than to act like a man of thought
27. We unwittingly amplify commonalities with friends, dissimilarities with strangers, and contrasts with enemies
28. Corollary to Moore’s Law: every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half
29. What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried
30. The sucker’s trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse
31. If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry
32. If you lie to me, keep lying; don’t hurt me by suddenly telling the truth
33. You may outlive your strength, never your wisdom
34. They think that intelligence is about noticing things that are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)
35. A mathematician starts with a problem and creates a solution; a consultant starts by offering a “solution” and creates a problem
36. You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others
37. Some reticent people use silence to conceal their intelligence; but most do so to hide the lack of it
38. When someone starts a sentence with “simply,” you should expect to hear something very complicated

Every failure of what we call “wisdom” can be reduced to a Procrustean bed situation!

The Hidden Traps in Decision Making

The way the human brain works can sabotage the choices we make!

Hammond, Keeney and Raiffa - in their 1998 HBR piece 'The Hidden Traps in Decision Making' - list eight psychological traps that are likely to affect the way we make business decisions...

1. The Anchoring Trap leads us to give disproportionate weight to the first information we receive.
2. The Status-Quo Trap biases us toward maintaining the current situation, even when better alternatives exist.
3. The Sunk-Cost Trap inclines us to perpetuate the mistakes of the past.
4. The Confirming-Evidence Trap leads us to seek out information supporting an existing predilection and to discount opposing information.
5. The Framing Trap occurs when we mis-state a problem, undermining the entire decision-making process.
6. The Overconfidence Trap makes us overestimate the accuracy of our forecasts
7. The Prudence Trap leads us to be overcautious when we make estimates about uncertain events
8. The Recallability Trap leads us to give undue weight to recent, dramatic events

The best way to avoid all the traps is awareness. Forewarned is forearmed!

For more detailed solution themes, read the full article here.

'Poke the Box' by Seth Godin

The Official Book Description: We send our kids to school and obsess about their test scores, their behaviour and their ability to fit in. We post a help wanted ad and look for experience, famous colleges and a history of avoiding failure. We invest in companies based on how they did last quarter, not on what they’re going to do tomorrow. So why are we surprised when it all falls apart? Our economy is not static, but we act as if it is. Your position in the world is defined by what you instigate, how you provoke, and what you learn from the events you cause. In a world filled with change, that’s what matters — your ability to create and learn from change. Poke the Box is a manifesto about producing something that’s scarce, and thus valuable. It demands that you stop waiting for a road map and start drawing one instead. You know how to do this, you’ve done it before, but along the way, someone talked you out of it. We need your insight and your dreams and your contributions. Hurry.

What does it mean to “Poke the Box”? In Seth Godin's on words "Poke the Box is a manifesto and a permission slip. A manifesto in that it argues that the only real way for us to succeed today is to take initiative. It’s not given, it’s something we do. We provoke, create a ruckus, experiment, fail, repeat, learn, succeed. This notion that it is up to each person to innovate in some way flies in the face of the industrial age, but you know what, the industrial age is over. And it’s a permission slip because some people are waiting for one. If your boss or your co-worker or your spouse gives you a copy, they’re saying, “go.”"

The Gist of the Book: Life is a buzzer box. Poke it!

Some good lines from the Book:

• Human nature is to need a map. If you're brave enough to draw one, people will follow
• No one has influence, control, or confidence in his work until he understands how to initiate change and predict how the box will respond
• You don't have to be a Howard Schultz to be an initiator
• The spark I'm talking about is simple to describe, but easy to avoid
• Ever heard of 'instigation capital'? The desire to move forward. The ability and the guts to say yes
• Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance
• Avoiding failure (by not acting) is counterproductive
• Economics of poking: When the cost of poking the box is less than the cost of doing nothing, then you should poke
• The connected economy of ideas demands that we contribute initiative. Yet we resist, relentlessly exaggerating the cost of being wrong
• Poking successfully also requires tact. You're trying to change things, not have people recoil in anger or fear from your poking
• Tact in poking includes sharing the "why" of an idea and "persuading" people, so the idea gathers momentum and gets spread
• Excellence isn't about working harder to do what you're told. It's about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing
• What makes our work and our life interesting is discovery, surprise, and the risk of exploration
• Many times, the boundary is in one's head, not in the system
• If you had a chance to do a TED talk, what would it be about? What have you discovered, what do you know, what can you teach?
• Approach your work in a way that generates unique learning and interactions that are worth sharing
• Poking doesn't mean being right. It means action
• Try is the opposite of hiding
• If you don't finish, it doesn't really count as starting, and if you don't start, you're not poking
• You can't snooze your way to greatness. You can't optimise your way to quantum growth
• People with no credibility or resources rarely get the leverage they need to bring their ideas to the world. People with credibility & resources are so busy trying to hold onto them that they fail to bring their big ideas to the world
• Does your organisation embrace someone who made a difference, or search for the employee handbook for a rule that was violated?
• The relentless act of invention and innovation and initiative is the best marketing asset
• If you hide your spark, bury your ideas, keep your questions from the team, it's as if you had stolen a laptop and fenced it on eBay
• Science that comes up with results that surprise the investigator is probably valid, because the self-fulfilling bias hasn't shown up
• If you can't fail, your poke doesn't count!
• When was the last time you set out to be promiscuous in your failures?
• Some of us hesitate when we should be starting. We hold back, promise to do more research, wait for a better moment, seek a kinder audience..
• It's easy to fall so in love with the idea of starting, that we never actually start
• Forward motion is a defensible business asset
• There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth. Not going all the way, and not starting ~ Siddhartha Gautama

Epilogue: When can you start? Soon is not as good as now!

The Book Cover: The man in a hurry (see pic below) is an archetype, first discovered in the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt. He's you, the excited, optimistic experimenter who understands that risk is misunderstood and that forward motion is the key to success. The image is a trademark of The Domino Project, but you have their permission to use it non-commercially, to encourage your peers to GO...

Click for youtube video of Seth Godin on Poke The Box

Finally, click here for Poke the Box Workbook

Go. Now.

The F Word

The entire April 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review is devoted to “the F word”! Failure, that is. How to understand it, learn from it, and recover from it…

Most people don’t learn from success (we simply neglect to investigate success), and don’t know what to learn from failure and how… In that context, this collection of articles, each focusing on a different aspect of failure is a great read.

A.

In the lead article, 'Understanding Failure', Amy Edmondson argues that failure falls into three categories:

1. Preventable ones in predictable operations, which usually involve deviating from spec
2. Unavoidable ones in complex systems, which may arise from unique combinations of needs, people, and problems
3. Intelligent ones at the frontier, where “good” failures occur quickly and on a small scale, providing the most valuable information

Amy goes on to recommend five practices for the leaders to build a psychologically safe
environment that learns from failure

1. Frame the work accurately. Shared understanding of the type of failure that can occur in their context (the three categories mentioned above)
2. Embrace Messengers, who come forward with bad news, concerns, and questions. They need to be rewarded rather than shot
3. Acknowledge limits, by being open about what you don’t know, mistakes you’ve made, and what you can’t get done alone
4. Invite participation from people to detect and analyse failures and promote intelligent experiments
5. Set boundaries and hold people accountable. People feel safer when the leaders are clear as to what acts are blameworthy

Too often, pilots are conducted under optimal conditions rather than representative ones. Thus they can’t show what won’t work!

B.

In another article, 'Why Leaders Don't Learn From Success', Francesca Gino and Gary Pisano quip that "Success can make us believe that we are better decision makers than we are". Fundamental attribution errors! And, over-confidence bias!

They recommend that companies should implement systematic after-action reviews to understand all the factors that led to a win, and test their theories by conducting experiments even if "it ain't broke"...

C.

In the article titled 'How to Avoid Catastrophe', Catherine Tinsley and others recommend a focus on near misses, as near misses preceded every disaster they studied, and - you guessed it - ignored! Apparently, quite perversely, near misses are often viewed as a sign that systems are resilient and working well ;-)

These authors recommend seven strategies to recognise and learn from near misses:

1. Be on increased alert when time or cost pressures are high
2. Watch for deviations in operations from the norm
3. Uncover the root causes of the deviations
4. Make decision makers accountable for near misses
5. Envision worst-case scenarios
6. Be on the look-out for near-misses masquerading as successes
7. Reward individuals for exposing near misses

Go, get it... There are many more interesting articles.

"Only Time Will Tell" by Jeffrey Archer

"In Jeffrey Archer's masterful hands, you will be taken on a journey that you won't want to end, even after you've turned the last page of this unforgettable yarn..." says the Book's Back Cover.

That's so true. Minutes after reading the 388 pages on two two-hour flights, I was already hoping that the sequel would be written up quickly!

In a unique experiment, the story of the Cliftons and Barringtons - set between the first and the second world wars - has been told by six different characters from their own perspectives.

With his latest book, Jeffrey Archer does full justice to the phrases, "rapid page turner" and "unputdownable" once more, with a series of twists and suspense.

Here are some interesting lines from the Book:

Miss Monday, our choir mistress, warned me that men only wanted one thing, and once they'd got it, they quickly lost interest. I often wondered if Miss Monday spoke from experience.

My grandpa rarely offered an opinion on anything, but then he was deaf as a post so he might not have heard the question in the first place.

I was sent to Merrywood Elementary when I was six and I thought it was a complete waste of time. What was the point of school when I could learn all I needed to at the docks?

I could go for days without being found out, as long as I avoided coal barges and was standing by the school gate at four o'clock every afternoon, my mother would never be any the wiser.

On Sundays I was transported into another world, but I feared this state of delirium could not last forever.

This daily routine in the Clifton household never varied. When you've only got one outside privy, one sink and one towel, order becomes a necessity.

How different he was from Uncle Stan, who repeated the little he knew again and again, whereas Old Jack introduced Harry to new words, new experiences, even new worlds every week.

'No,' chuckled Old Jack, amused by how quickly Harry's inquisitive mind could switch from subject to subject.

During the next term, with the aid of the candle, he studied for hours that until then he hadn't realised existed.

"If you run away every time you come up against the Fishers of this world, you'll end up like me, one of life's also rans"

Sometimes it's an advantage to be disadvantaged.

"One thing is for certain, BGS aren't going to offer me a choral scholarship while I am like a horse with broken leg," said Harry. "Snap out of it," said Old Jack, "It's not that bad." "It's worse," said Harry, "If I was a horse, they'd shoot me and put me out of my misery."

Parents, Maisie, had learnt over the years, may be considered an unfortunate necessity by their offspring, but more often than not they are also an embarrassment.

Elizabeth retreated into the comparative safety of silence, as she had so often done recently.

"And be warned, if Mr Hugo has made up his mind, it will take more than Giles to shift him"

"The English are the biggest snobs on earth, and most of the time without reason. The lesser the talent, the bigger the snob, in my experience. It's the only way the so-called upper classes can hope to survive. Be warned, my boy, they don't care for upstarts like you who barge into their club without an invitation."

He cared nothing for worldly goods, and shared even the little he had with those less fortunate than himself. If he were to be canonized, he would surely be the patron saint of vagabonds.

As a child, he remembered asking his father why he always travelled third class, to which he had replied, "Because there isn't a fourth class."

No son could have asked for a better mentor or friend. When he looked back on his life, all his actions, judgements and decisions were nothing more than a pale imitation of his father's.

If you make a deal with a fool, don't be surprised when they act foolishly.

"I'm not in the habit of travelling third class," said Giles as the train pulled out of Temple Meads. "Well, you'd better get used to it while I'm paying," said Harry.

"You're rather good at this," said Harry. "I do have a built-in advantage," said Giles. "I am my father's son."

We are always the importunate suitor, and in the end we will be spurned.

He could have taken the easy way out and simply declined our invitation to the wedding, but Victoria Cross winners don't walk away.

Some people stand by you in your darkest hour, while others walk away; only a select few march towards you and become even closer friends.

It may have been inconsiderate of me not to respond to those who had only kindness in their hearts, but sometimes an abundance of sympathy can be more overwhelming than solitude.

By the time Harry had reached the front of the queue he'd been reminded of who had given him his boundless energy, uncritical enthusiasm and a spirit that didn't contemplate defeat. How would he ever be able to repay this remarkable woman for all the sacrifices she had made.

I find I don't learn a lot while I'm talking.

Harry followed in the captain's wake, aware that a dozen suspicious eyes were watching his every move.

"By the way, Mr Bradshaw," said Havens, "one of our tasks on this voyage will be to teach this young pup everything we know, so that when we return to Bristol in a month's time the crew of HMS Resolution will mistake him for an old sea dog."

He didn't even have a wash basin to be sick in, or a pot hole to be sick out of.

Jim Patterson's ghostly complexion made him look as if he'd spent most of his life below decks, and his paunch suggested he spent the rest of the time eating.

What impressed him most about the lad was that he never asked the same question twice.

After ten days at sea, the captain was almost hoping for a storm, not only to stop the endless questions but also to see if there was anything that could throw this young man off his stride.

"Mr Clifton, keep your eyes peeled and tell me the moment you spot anything."

Dressed in Richard's sports jacket and shirt, a little too large, the captain's Bermuda shorts, a little too long, and the doctor's shoes and socks, a little too tight, Harry couldn't wait to go ashore.

The World that Changes the World: How philanthropy, innovation, and entrepreneurship are transforming the social ecosystem

I reviewed this book for Alliance Magazine, and the piece is published in their March 2011 issue. Am reproducing it here, courtesy http://www.alliancemagazine.org

This book is for you if you are even remotely interested in seeing a more equitable world. If you ever wondered why there is still such widespread suffering in the world, despite trillions of development dollars spent annually for several decades, Cheng and Mohamed have some answers for you. It doesn't matter if you work for a social purpose organization, business enterprise, government or media, or if you are just a concerned citizen, once you've read this book you will appreciate the nuances of what could change our world for the better. The book couldn't have been more timely, as the UNDP has recently developed an Acceleration Framework to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

In a uniquely collaborative manner, Cheng and Mohamed have assembled a group of cutting-edge thinkers and practitioners in the social sector to write the different chapters of the book. The rich and diverse perspectives brought in by Jon Huggett on social enterprises, Sara Olsen on social intermediaries, Stephen Young on moral capitalism, Robert Chew on technology for society, and Kumi Naidoo on civil society, among several others, provide a holistic overview of the large and thriving community that would be equivalent in size to the world's fifth largest country.

More importantly, Cheng's exceptionally perceptive opening chapter stitches these diverse pieces together through an ecosystem framework. In his own words:

‘At the core of a social ecosystem are the social purpose entities that seek to positively impact their beneficiaries, and the capacity builders that facilitate the mission of these social purpose entities. Around them are the community (individuals and corporations), media, and government (including one of its distinctive roles as the regulator) who collectively provide the resources, support, and scrutiny to ensure that the core players function as intended.’

Once you read this opening chapter and visualize the ecosystem framework, all the disparate pieces in the table of contents appear to be part of the same puzzle!

All the chapters are insightful in themselves. Sample these. Talking about the culture of charities in one of the chapters, Gerard Ee opines: ‘The same compassion that drove the formation of Charities to help the poor and needy, can result in poor governance, low performance, poorly paid workers, and a narrow focus on the needs of the poor that leads to suboptimal outcomes.’ In another chapter, which lays down an agenda for the future, John Elkington recommends: ‘The Phoenix Economy can be more rapidly achieved with concerted actions around an Agenda that comprises three building blocks. A manifesto that drives necessary change in the public sector, a prospectus that shapes investor and business decision making and strategy, and a Syllabus that informs future business education.’

The role of, and need for, intermediaries such as grantmakers and other service providers (that seek to build the capacity of the social sector) may not always be well appreciated. The fact is that all ecosystems need intermediaries to facilitate the core activities and oil the wheels of the marketplace. The editors did full justice to this by including three chapters on the ‘capacity builders’.

On a different note, social media, naturally identified as a key trend in the book, could have been dealt with at greater length, given its game-changing potential. In the chapter on technology, Robert Chew does say ‘the key value of new media is that it is simple, instantaneous, and viral’. Elsewhere in the book, Chris Cusano says ‘a vibrant citizen sector will ensure that society distils its highest empathetic ethics into the real hard stuff of social change’. My argument is that social media have the power to improve the vibrancy of the citizen sector and therefore merit much more space.

After reading this valuable one-stop-resource on the social sector, what else could one ask from the editors? Maybe an action-oriented epilogue! My personal experience is that ecosystems work when there is an orchestrator. Without a powerful orchestrator, participants in such a complex ecosystem as the social sector will find it difficult to act in concert. The epilogue could have identified potential orchestrators from within the ecosystem, and described what it would take for them to play such a role.

All in all, when you are done with this book, I am sure you will have a ringside view of the fascinating social ecosystem: what it is, what it could be, and where it could be going. You may even discover some innovative ways in which you can shape that journey ...

Shiv Sivakumar is chief executive – agribusinesses of India's diversified conglomerate, ITC Ltd. He is the architect of ITC eChoupal, an innovative business model that raises the incomes of small farmers while delivering sustainable shareholder value. Email sivakumar.s@itc.in

The World that Changes the World: How philanthropy, innovation, and entrepreneurship are transforming the social ecosystem
Willie Cheng and Sharifah Mohamed (eds) Jossey Bass $29.95/€24/£19.99
ISBN 9780470827154

To order
www.worldthatchangestheworld.com