TelarIdeas

Laborfair.com goes FREE on independence day!

I am very excited as Laborfair.com goes FREE! It will open up the opportunities for all our community of service providers and consumers in the home service market. This measure will catalyze growth and open the spectrum of what is possible for Laborfair.com with creativity and passion. We are building the trusted, safe and free home service spot on the web for all of you out there with needs around your home and family and we are excited about making it happen! Join us!

Jose
http://laborfair.com


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Paul Graham: Benevolence as a success factor in start-ups

"We do not need to see to have a vision" - Caroline Casey

"We all have potential... It's all about facing the demons and taking the risks."
Caroline Casey - The Aisling Foundation

Courtesy of Global X.

Una gota de cobijo (A drop of shelter)

Hoy muchos padres y madres en Venezuela y Estados Unidos viven momentos de angustia y  miedo.   

Unos en su propia tierra, al sur, no saben si perderán la potestad sobre los hijos, la propiedad que les dá refugio, la vida en una bala o el sueldo que les alimenta el día en un arrebato.  Los habitantes de ésta, mi tierra natal Venezuela, viven a diario una vida angustiosa, sin descanso, que convierte sueños y ahorros por igual en sal entre los dedos.

Hoy mi familia y yo estamos tan lejos pero vivimos tan cerca aquella nuestra realidad.  En este nuevo lugar común y de brazos abiertos para tantos de nosotros extranjeros,  son muchos sin embargo quienes viven momentos difíciles.  Hoy, este estado asume lamentablemente un rol inquisidor.  Y quienes una vez dejaron tantas caras en lágrimas y tomaron el riesgo de cruzar sus fronteras en búsqueda de trabajo y un mejor futuro para sus hijos viven hoy presos de la angustia y el miedo.

Solo aspiro que estas palabras y estas melodías viertan una gota de cobijo en sus espíritus mientras pasa la tormenta.  Con afecto,

Play Melancolía

Play Nostalgia

Sobre esta música:

Ambas, Melancolía y Nostalgia, son composiciones del maestro Rodrigo Riera, compositor  venezolano de la guitarra (1923-1999).  Estas piezas son parte de su Tríptico Venezolano - Melancolía, Monotonía, Nostalgia (1968).

Gracias a mi amiga Margarita Quihuis por prestarme su guitarra.

(English)

Today many parents in Venezuela and the USA live moments of distress and fear.

Some, in their own country, don't know if they are about to loose to the State the paternity over their own children,  the property that gives them shelter, their life to a lost bullet or their day wage to the attack of the unexpected.  The citizens of that, my own country, Venezuela, live a life in distress day in day out,  a nonstop distress that transforms both their dreams and little savings equally into airy salt in their hands.

Today, my family and I are both so far away and so close.   In this new commonplace, friendly and welcoming to many of us foreigners, many are however living through tough times.  Today, the state is regretfully assuming an inquisitor role.  And those that once left wet their loving eyes and crossed the south borders with no support but their own hope for a better future are facing fear and distress.

I hope these words and melodies pour a drop of shelter in your spirits while the storm passes by.  With affection.

About the music (see podcast links above):

Both Melancolía and Nostalgia are compositions of Rodrigo Riera, Venezuelan composer for the classical guitar (1923-1999).  They are part of his Venezuelan triptych - Melancolía, Monotonía, Nostalgia (1968)

I want to thank my friend, Margarita Quihuis, for lending me her guitar.

Inspired by Muhammad Yunus

I recently watched Muhammad Yunus full of joy, sharing his story and advocating for his ideas during his Nobel Lecture of December 10, 2006, at the Oslo City Hall, Norway. I was deeply inspired and connected to his values and believe. I would like to contribute my 2 cents in promoting his lecture in this post.

Muhammad Yunus talked about poverty as the absence of human rights and the need to promote social businesses either as non-dividend and not-for-losses businesses or those owned by their customers, the financially poor, as it is the case for Grameen Bank. Muhammad Yunus also talked about the need for a new kind of social business marketplace, the need to fight terrorism in the most sustainable way by diverting the developed nations spending from war into the poverty fight. He also shared all the diversifying efforts the Grameen organization is taking to address the multidimensional needs of the poor. Out of the many creative and incredible stories, he shared the initiative of lending to the beggars of Bangladesh. The Grameen bank today lends to 85,000 beggars. Out of those, 5,000 of them decided to transform themselves from beggars to door-to-door salesmen with the help of Grameen. It is wonderful to see that there is a deep belief in enterprising rather than charity as a mechanism to bring forth a sustainable future.

It was revealing for me to learn of his beginning as a professor, emotionally connected to people, troubled by the contrasts between theory and the reality out of the door of his classroom. He started finding ways to protect the dignity of the women borrowing from lenders who abused of their financial vulnerability. As he saw results in the little he thought he did initially, he looked at the traditional banking system to solve the borrower condition. But this banking system did not respond limited by its traditional practices, its lack of trust of customers and the demand for collateral. Thus, he decided to take it in his hand, from his own pocket literally.

This story was vivid to me, raised in a town surrounded and living with poverty. A reality we became used to. As I matured, this reality transformed from being natural to intolerable to me. My fellow Venezuelans, many of them, yet today, live vulnerable to the daily abuses of the imperfect market and a state that is unaccountable and ill-powered to respond and bring dignity and prosperity. After many years, the reality of exclusion and now segregation is there regardless of the good service that media and propaganda brings to my country government. I am just a new kid around the block. I am in Yunus late 70s. And I may not reach high and deep as he has. But watching Muhammad Yunus was supportive to this early, struggling path as social entrepreneur.

As Yunus, I believe in every human being regardless of his or her social and economical condition. Every one. The financial condition, the lack of access to basic human rights or any prejudice we may expectedly live with does not take away our humanity, our dignity, our creativity, our ability to prosper when given the chance and the right conditions. I firmly agree that it is not about charity. It is about giving opportunities and accompanying and supporting each other in the process.

For many years, I have been an advocate and practitioner of innovation. One of the convictions that I have always communicated to the youth is: “The world is what we want it to be. We have the power to change it and build the future we dream. What we have now is what we human beings created for ourselves given the conceptions of the times. But this does not have to be the future. In fact, it will not be. This is just a step in the long, continuously-emerging and erratic experiment called humanity.” I gladly heard Yunus bring that message loud and clear to inspire and support the many of us making our away through social enterprising.

Honor to Muhammad Yunus and the many who around him and in many other microfinance institutions are building this wonderful new world of hope, dignity and prosperity for every one.

Lecture movie: http://nobelprize.org/cgi-bin/asxgen.asx?id=88&type=lecture&year=2006

Lecture text:  http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2006/yunus-lecture-en.html

About time, money and knowledge as entrepreneurs

Learning is a wonderful and a slowly, painful process when we entrepreneurs are in early stages with no sustainable means and desperate for results. We want to go faster than what our human nature can take with its limiting structures, habits, social responsabilities and preconceptions.  The speed of learning is of essence for us as entrepreneurs. 

In fact what I am coming to realize is that we entrepreneurs have no time for learning.  Yes, no time for learning with a solo approach when it comes to action.  We should look for people that already know what we need to learn and team up with them to make things happen, in no time: mentors, partners, team members, volunteers, etc.

It is also of essence to recognize what strategies for financing our time and learning are the best with our given circumstances.  A "mother" entrepreneur who wants to keep her family needs a financing strategy different from a single, student entrepreneur leaving college.  This may look a trivial understanding but it is not.  (If anybody knows of such studies, please share it with this post.)

As I always like to look at things, there is a paradox in every story.  This one is no exception.  Early financing in "inadequate" degree can hamper the future of an initiative as the need is the mother of invention and financing may end up reinforcing the nonworking approaches and rather being the mother of costly and inappropriate solutions.  In fact, I would rephrase this famous statement by saying that the need is the mother of learning acceleration and as a consequence we invent.  Could somebody know of the right times and the adequate levels of financing?  probably after having done that and being there.

As my former advisor at MIT once told me, you just hope that you will do it  in time not to face an irreversible consequence you did not balance appropriately.   At this period of early-stage struggles, I am just hoping I will be able to keep my attention fronts in "dynamic" balance. 

This just sounded like a hymn to my Aha moment, my frustrations and my stubborn perseverance.  Moving along.

The meaning of a kiss

Harrasment? Fear? Mistrust? Political populism? Well, the meaning has become so complex with all the distortions and prejudices created by our political affairs, social disconnectedness, and their consequential mistrust and fears, that a kiss is not a kiss anymore.  Where did we leave compassion? love? solidarity? gratefulness? human empathy?

Not only the human complexities of these two events grabbed my attention, but the way I learnt about them.   Enjoy the power of these conversational voices , unitedirelander and geriatric1927, expressing their frustration and struggle to make sense of a kiss,     a kiss.

Geriatric1927:

United Irelander:
http://unitedirelander.blogspot.com/2006/07/vicar-steps-down-for-cheek-kiss.html

Open letter to the people of Lebanon and Israel in both sides of the conflict

 

First, I would like to express my sorrow for what you are going through. You both feel hurt. I am sorry for your families in pain. My condolences and thoughts are with you.

I have been engaged reading the stories, looking at the heart-breaking images, reading the discussions in online fora, news media and blogs. Some people justify war in the name of honor, faith or national pride and interests. I respect their position. However, in my core, I cannot justify war.

I believe that life is our utmost precious right and our source of joy. The life of a Lebanese or an Israeli girl could be the life of my children. For me, every girl counts. Every life is sacred. I cannot justify the stabbing of any single life.

In the previous times of history, signed by the lack of understanding and means of communications, many were the myths, many the misunderstandings, many the misconceptions, many the fears of the unknown. War was a human reaction to secure the life of the closest ones.

Today, July 2006, in the era of knowledge, information and communication, our human culture still drags those old paradigms to the management of conflict. In many circumstances we have not been equipped with the ability to dialogue, the understanding that nature demands a giving to gain, that our social nature is a conversation continuum of trade-off and negotiation. Today, dialogue is our ultimate tool for the survival and advancement of life.

On the other hand, our natural social and cultural evolution also drags a history of psychological and emotional wounds.  In the process of learning, we have made many mistakes. We have. And we could have not expected otherwise.  For such is our nature. But this also implies, that as a human race, forgiving is of utmost importance to move on as society.  The contrary is just jail for our existance and a vicious cycle of hatred and death passed to our children.  Could we embrace learning, failure and forgiving as society?

To the hearts and minds of the Lebanese and Israeli, to the hearts and minds of every human being on this single and only earth, I beg you: Let us stop war with each other.

Let us embrace dialogue, learning and forgiving. Let us stop this suffering and embrace the joy of understanding. Let us leave war behind as a means of negotiation. Let us embrace each other in dialogue, learning and trading-off for the sake of every human life and the future of our children.

Peace be in you.

Thoughts on trust, models and the future of markets

Stuart Gannes from RDVP pointed to "an interesting discussion taking place at the site WorldChanging.com over the pros and cons of the global distribution of artesan products. Check out http://www.worldchanging.com/ and be sure to read the comments.  The discussion surfaced a few thoughts I will share below:

1. The art of Trust.
A trusted brand is key for these kind of enterprises. There is a lot semantics involved in the home pages of the different alternative to Worldstock.com linking values, commerce and communities. Quite an art.

2. What is local?
It is very interesting how internet is redefining the boundaries of what used to be a local market. Internet is creating a global market aggregation and coordination machine connecting the local microproducers to the wealth of the first world. This is inevitable and it is understandable that the first experimenting with it are the nonprofits. Nonprofits is a popular way to bring these new models that still present high risks to forprofit minds.

3. Cross-subsidizing it!
One of the most popular business models happening in various levels is the cross-subsidizing from an overpriced product to a underpriced product, from an overpriced service to an underpriced service, from a forprofit to a parent nonprofit, from rich government to poor government, and in this case from first world market to developing world markets.

4. The inevitable present, the inevitable future.
The comments about the global shipping of products present a number of reasonable sustainability questions. It is funny that in any systemic functional analysis, the transportation functions are always the first candidates to trim and eliminate from the system to increase its value. They add the least value in the chain. As in any evolutionary process, the presence of these transport/shipping functions and so their inefficiencies in the world commercial system are inevitable for some time. But I believe they will eventually disappear in a large degree.

I foresee a future of tangibles going through the same process the paper mail is going through with the email. In my view of the future, I see art-craftman and women creating and shipping digital documents to local 3D printers of different media who would print parts, products, textiles, ceramics, etc for their local buyers. It is already happening.

Cheers,
Jose

For people For profit For many reasons...

The following is my comment to the post by Erik Sundelof 's "Is a for-profit social venture impossible?" at the Reuters Digital Vision program blog

I think there may be many reasons why we are better off being a for-profit as an alternative to a nonprofit in the pursuit of wide and deep social impact. In my building of TAVOS, I realized through the business planning of the social enterprise that there were two ways to cover the high costs of a Latin American-scale deployment: either dedicate my life and one of the others to fundraising and not work directly with the people I want to serve or look for income-generation strategies to make every community unit of the initiative sustainable. I decided for the latter. Some of my reasons were:

1. I rather devote myself to care of the people I want to serve and let the market dynamics push my organization to listen, than devoting my life to fundraising to end up detached from the end beneficiaries.

2. The communities I am trying to serve are highly entrepreneurial. 50-60% of the economy in Latin America is informal. That means that Francisco in Catia, a low-income suburban neighborhood in Caracas, wakes up every morning thinking how he will make it to bring food to the table the next day. Francisco and 100 million other Latin Americans are better served by bringing opportunities they could use to tap into their spirit than by bringing charity that will leave them highly vulnerable if the funding gets dry.

3. A for-profit will make the social impact sustainable and scalable if we are serving well the needs of the target population. If we are failing, the market will tell.

4. Embedded in my last comment, the for-profit approach forces better learnings of the market and customers than the nonprofit approach.

I do agree that there is a challenge in leading and executing with integrity a hybrid social/business-mission venture. But I think that it holds true for any enterprise today. There is also an interesting discussion about for-profits with organizational and governance structures that "lock" their social mission, for example: a parent nonprofit or member association. But that is a whole new discussion.

Cheers,
jose