During the past days, a very unfortunate and cruel flu has kept me in bed, leaving me very week and holding me back to participate in this exchange of ideas proposed by Ashoka. Paradoxically, the fever’s chills and the desire but impossibility of my participation in this discussion made me remember a 2002 delightful morning when walking on a northern Peruvian beach, I saw a splendid group of birds flying two meters above the see. A beautiful image that I followed with absolute attention for those five minutes when life is forever and everything is understood.
Those seagulls were crossing the skies in a triangular shape, totally effortless. How powerful aerodynamics is, I thought. And I - who at the time was trying to convince a group of investors to change their investment priorities - found a right strategy. In the real world there are ideas based on common sense, which are established in society and its organizations, offering the biggest resistance to any change. If you want to overcome that resistance, you have to first organize a new group of ideas.
Secondly, you have to express those ideas in a simple manner. Thirdly, you have to share the data that proves those ideas right. And finally, you need to demonstrate that your practice works. The ability to defeat that resistance to change is what allows you to know if there’s a new powerful paradigm ready to be established in society. A new paradigm has (inside the idea’s world) the same effect as birds’ aerodynamic effect while flying, it flows. Hence, a well supported idea – opening its way on the local, national or global common sense- generates the required conditions to knock down a previously built old structure.
Business at the Bottom of the Pyramid
On his book “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”, Professor C. K. Prahalad expresses in a simple way and with well supported data, a couple of very powerful ideas like the type of idea I described above:
Does the access of the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) to products and services contribute to eradicate poverty? The clients at the BOP will be the great market in the next decades.
C. K. Prahalad confirms other realities which despite their obviousness still surprise MBAs and NGOs:
Are poor people intelligent? Poor people buy? Do they save? Do they have debt and repay it? Can poor people progress?
During many years, I’ve seen lots of people replying no to the aforementioned questions. People from the business and social sectors who in rejecting what’s obvious, have turned down a possibility for development for millions of human beings. People that even get mortified when they hear that poor people are no longer poor; or those who don’t go to a small grocery market because it’s not within their comfort zone. For all this reasons, Prahalad’s efforts make me happy, as also have the Peruvian Hernando de Soto and Bangladeshi Muhammad Yunus who from different approaches and concentrations have flown and nowadays are effortless flowing with their new paradigms through out the world.
What’s next?
I said that when a new paradigm is established in society’s common sense and its organizations, the new conditions are to tear down the prior paradigm’s status quo. Hence, the ideas supported in the “Fortune of the Pyramid” bring that possibility to the table. Thanks to Prahalad’s book, the private and social sectors are quickly changing their vision and understanding about poor communities. Now, it comes the hard and revolutionary task of finding consistency between the new idea, the business sector activities, and people who envision a more fair society.
Through out all my experience in promoting small enterprise development in Peru, I’ve witnessed how implementing good intended business in the BOP could fail several times. Of course, I’ve also been a witness and accomplice of some successful experiences. This discussion’s format does not allow me to reflect on to those experiences but I’d like to close with two thoughts. First, the main problem about BOP to be tackled is the supply not the demand. This means, that the problem isn’t the poor, on the contrary, the problem are the rich –with accumulated capital, knowledge, speech freedom- from the business, social, or public sectors. We are those who do not understand the market dynamics in the BOP. We own supply but are not capable to make it accessible to very anxious buyers.
Secondly, the opportunity created by Prahalad’s new paradigm will generate an intense labor war – a labor market turmoil of professionals from the business and social sectors. The consolidation of this paradigm will bring down the value of MBAs and NGOs professionals shaped in the prior paradigm. In the next years, the new kings for market consultancies, reengineering projects, strategic planning for social sector, business academy and social management, will be those scarce specimens that just yesterday nobody listened to. Those people don’t know yet that their value in the market has now considerably increased. Their time has arrived. Alleluia!
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