Help someone buy a cow

“You may be capable of great things, but life consists of small things.” - Den Ming-Dao

A few years and a lifetime ago, I co-authored a book on global leaders. If you squint and use a magnifying glass, you can even see my name on the cover.

Not that I’m bitter about the size of the typeface used for my name or anything.  I’m over it, really.

Seventy-eight CEOs in 30 countries were interviewed face-to-face for the book, including my very favorite, a compelling man named Muhammad Yunus. I loved writing up his story; he was a big thinker of the highest, and yet smallest, order. His story was amazing; his way of being in the world and his understanding of the needs of the world’s poorest people was inspiring, and more. Founder of the microcredit movement, he revolutionalized life for the poor of our world.

“Patti! Patti! Come here! Come here!” John yelled from our family room last week. Not a man to get overly excited, the urgency in his voice spelled doom; I ran, expecting to see blood or worse. “Look! Look!” he yelled, pointing to the television. “He won the Nobel Peace Prize! He won the Nobel Peace Prize!”

And there he was, the beautiful, simple face of Muhammad Yunus, plastered on every major TV network when the news of his Nobel prize broke.

John knew how moved I had been by his story when working on the book, so he and I sat and smiled and watched the news as the story of Yunus was told. So excited was I, you might have imagined that Muhammad and I were close friends, that we vacationed together, that we often went to each others’ homes for potluck dinners and to trade recipes. We don’t, but I’d like to.

Truth be told, I’m not a big believer in awards. The Fortune magazine “best places to work” list habitually includes organizations I know to be draconian in their approach. The MacArthur genius awards are given to people who are, well, Not Me, which is enough of a reason to pooh-pooh them. American Idol eliminated the beautiful and talented Chris Daughtry. Paris Hilton is famous for no apparent reason. Need I say more about the vagaries of awards?

But this one, this Nobel Peace Prize, I agree with completely. And so, in honor of Mr. Yunus, here is the chapter I wrote some six years ago about his quiet, small revolution. Well done, Mr Yunus, well done:

In a small village in Bangladesh, a woman who literally had nothing was able to buy a cow with a loan from the Grameen Bank. Within a year, she repaid the loan by selling the cow’s milk, and was able to buy a calf, too. Having a cow—much less two—was beyond her wildest dreams. At the end of the second year, she took a second loan to buy another cow, until suddenly, she was the proud owner of four head of cattle.

Her success encouraged her to do the impossible: she took yet another loan, this time to build a house. And not just any house, but a house with a tin roof, a physical representation of the solidity with which she could now live her life. Her next goal is to buy a cell phone.

Who’s the man who made this possible?

Muhammad Yunus, father of the microcredit movement, founder of Grameen Bank, and breaker of all the rules of traditional finance. He is driving social change one rupee—or one taka—at a time, inspired by his deep belief in the potential of all human beings, building communities of lenders who are mutually interdependent, enhancing their self esteem by ensuring that systems are in place to allow them to succeed, and applying those learnings in other cultures to build whole nations of doers. “I’m not a businessman,” says Yunus, “I’m just using business to achieve a social objective.”

Despite overwhelming odds, and begun in the poorest of nations, employees and recipients of loans from the Grameen Bank produce striking results, including a 98 percent repayment rate. In a world where having committed people and achieving results is vital to business success, we can learn from a country with a traditionally impoverished, unempowered population that has successfully—if somewhat nontraditionally—applied basic principles of empowerment, accountability, and teams.

Expect a lot

“We’re all capable of doing much more,” notes Yunus. It is institutions and concepts that limit us and keep us down. We’re almost like a bonsai tree, a tiny plant kept tiny because of the way we’re planted. If we had a better place, we would be tall and moving toward the sky. Institutional arrangements and concepts like collateral are real obstructions to the blooming of people, especially poor people.”

“We can remove poverty from the surface of the earth only if we can redesign our institutions, like banking institutions, our policies, and our concepts. Poverty isn’t created by the poor, nor sustained by them. If we’re looking for one single action that will enable the poor to overcome their poverty, I would focus on credit. Credit is a fundamental human right,” he says.

“All human beings are basically entrepreneurs,” says Yunus. “People want to solve problems, take on challenges, discover their talents. It’s just a matter of opening up the environment and giving them opportunity,” he notes. Yunus sees capability in even the poorest and most disenfranchised of people. Coming from one of the world’s poorest nations, he’s still an inveterate optimist who realizes that if this great success has occurred in Bangladesh, it can happen anywhere.

“Poverty,” says Yunus, “is simply a lack of options. Credit unlocks those doors and provides those options.” He’s tested his theory in the most difficult of environments, where paying back loans is essentially counterculture. “And in Bangladesh,” he says, “giving money to women is unheard of.” Even in a culture where the deck is stacked against him, Yunus’s innovative approach succeeds.

“We wanted to lend to the poorest first, which in many cases were the women. That’s why our borrowers are more than 94 percent women. When they succeed, their families benefit, the ‘wealth’ trickles down.”

Internalize and Socialize the Pressure

Grameen Bank takes the idea of a high-performance team seriously. They require their borrowers to organize themselves into groups of five. Instead of requiring collateral, the lenders guarantee one another’s loans. In effect, they become their own human collateral for one another. All are cut off if one of those five borrowers defaults. They meet every week to make loan payments and critique one another’s business plans to make sure that doesn’t happen.

It’s not Yunus or the bank managers who put pressure on the borrowers. Rather, and much more effectively, they’ve inserted that sense of accountability inside the heads of participants and in the spaces between people on these collateral teams. They self-motivate as a result, accounting for the phenomenal success of the program.

Success Breeds Success

“We have started believing the unbelievable, namely that the elimination of poverty is feasible. There is no reason whatsoever why anyone should remain poor on this planet,” says Yunus. He builds systems to make sure that happens sooner rather than later.

Grameen lenders repay their loans on a monthly basis, receiving incremental reinforcement that creates even more momentum and develops their self-confidence. “Success breeds success,” says Yunus. “We make sure that people can succeed, that they can repay their loan, that their group doesn’t suffer.”

The success of the Grameen Bank is being replicated in over 50 nations. How can Bangladesh, an extreme country of abject poverty, provide a viable model for the rest of the world? “Sometimes we try to take an idea across borders by making it like TV dinners,” acknowledges Yunus, “just open and serve, very mechanical. And you lose the spirit of the thing, because Grameen grew out of the necessity of Bangladesh, out of the place where we were working. We weren’t even thinking of replicating it elsewhere.

“But even as it grew from local necessity, we knew that it had global application because financial institutions the world over had created a caste of ‘untouchables’ that they deemed un-creditworthy. Our borrowers subscribe to The 16 Decisions of Grameen, tenets that we ask them to live by that are very specific to the Bangladeshi condition. If you’re doing this in the U.S. and just copy those tenets, people will laugh. That’s why each location must adapt those principles, like they’ve done in Chicago where they have something called the 15 Guiding Principles. Each culture has to find out what the ‘cow’ is in their context.”

But Yunus isn’t content with cows. His business plan to fight poverty includes much more than livestock. His GrameenPhone, begun in 1997, was launched to build a state-of-the-art cell-phone network in Bangladesh. “This,” says Yunus, “isn’t the first crazy thing we’ve done.” He wants the woman with the cow to have a “village phone” that she can purchase with a loan from the Grameen Bank, then sell service to fellow villagers and use the income to repay the loan. “I want every rickshaw driver in Dhaka to have a cell phone in his back seat so passengers can rent the phone while they’re riding with him to their next meeting. When you combine access to credit with access to information,” Yunus says, “you change the game for the rural poor.”

The Bengali word, “Grameen,” means “village,” a small unit of human life. In English, “gram” denotes a small unit of measurement. “When tiny, tiny things start happening a million times, it becomes a large thing. It lays down the foundation of a strong economic base,” says Yunus.

Since its beginnings, Grameen has given out nearly 16 million tiny loans. “These millions of small people,” says Yunus, “with their millions of small pursuits can add up to the biggest development wonder in the world.”

What are your 16 decisions?

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

When tiny, tiny things start happening a million times, it becomes a large thing. The biggest changes in the world are sometimes micro, tiny, small. What small loans (where “loan” is a metaphor for something else) could you make that would change your life, or the lives of others around you? Stop thinking of life as a Big Event, a musical number in a Broadway show. Instead, think of it as an ongoing sidewalk jam session, where each note counts and everyone can play. As Mother Teresa said, "We can do no great things, only small things with great love." Think small. Smaller. Smaller still.

Technorati Tags: Muhammad Yunus, Yunus, Nobel, Nobel Peace Prize, Grameen

Comments

[dan]

Inspiring...

Thank you, Patti. I do believe this has life applications even at the household level...

[Marilyn]

Patti, I should have known (somehow) that you would have a connection to this extraordinary man. :) I checked out the "16 decisions" link you have here before continuing on with your post...and immediately started wondering how I could adapt them for use in my workplace. Our school district's climate coordinator and I have been having conversations about the experiences of our non-white students and their 'micro problems'...and how many don't understand that when kids have these 'micro' things happen repeatedly and extensively, they add up to big frustrations and angers. Thank you for this. Are you sure you're not the Synchronicity Fairy? You so often feel like that kind of presence in my life. :)

[patti digh]

Marilyn -

I love my new title of "Synchronicity Fairy"!

The "16 Decisions" of Grameen are powerful - as are the translations of them into other cultural contexts. The microabrasions you're talking about are sometimes called "microinequities" and if you Google that term, you'll find more good info for use in your school....it's important work, and I'm glad you are involved in it.

[patti digh]

Dan - thanks for your note - I think it especially has implications at the level of daily life. Having lived most of my life as someone who felt that change needed to be Big (a colleague once told me that I deal with change like the French--nothing short of a Revolution would do), I'm coming clear on the fact that change is small, incremental...

[Joy]

Patti,

Thank you for another motivational post. I'm not surprised that you're connected to Mr. Yunus, as you both are doing your part to make this world a better place. May we all be inspired to do "many small things with great love" in our own little corners of the world . . .

[Mardougrrl]

More synchronicity...I also worked on a book on the Grameen Bank, back when I worked in publishing. It's just one of the most amazing organizations I've ever heard of, and I'm happy to live in a world where it exists.

Thank you, as always, for an amazing, inspiring post! I'm pondering my own 16 decisions right now...

[patti digh]

Joy - what a wondeful, kind note - many thanks!

[patti digh]

Mardougrrl - synchronicity indeed! I love that phrase, "happy to live in a world where it exists." Thanks for your note and kind words!

[Basia]

What a lovely man. His face has such kindness in it.