I’m sure somewhere, there’s a theory that, those who ride together, work well together. Or so holds true here.
We 8cr-ers have a bicycle gang. It’s a group of us that rides together to and from company gatherings and homes and apartments. Dylan, Todd (our shipper) and I often traverse the Milwaukee streets in our pack of three on our ride home.
There’s a list of reasons supporting why bicycling to work, well, works — nice to the environment, heart-friendly, and easy on the budget. It’s the beginning of taking up bicycling to work that can be a bit daunting. For various reasons.
If you’re looking for advice on how to start, try Rory McMullan’s Biking to Work guide. It’s an 85-page introduction to the type of bicycle to choose, helpful accessories, and talking points for getting a bike rack at your office.
Good luck!

I wrote last Friday about microcredit and a book entitled A Billion Bootstraps. When I got home that night a funny thing happened. I turned on the television, flipped it to channel 10, and there was microcredit pioneer and Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus on NOW’s “Enterprising Ideas” series. I didn’t know of the controversy in the microfinance community over what some would call “predatory microlenders”, but it’s there. The focus of the controversy is on Compartamos, a lender in Mexico. Started as a non-profit, it turned to investors to help it grow and became a commercial bank. They now have a larger reach into poor communities, but have been drawing criticism from Yunus and others for setting interest rates as high as 100% on small loans. There is a big disagreement here. From the transcript:

[Carlos] DANEL: If we think that capital markets are the devil, we’re never going to solve poverty
[Maria] HINOJOSA: The entrepreneurs behind Compartamos will tell you that it’s the lure of profits that will motivate people to lend to the poor.
DANEL: We have to stop looking at this as a zero-sum game and look at how we can bridge business and social objectives together in a successful way.
HINOJOSA: Simply put, the business objective is to make money. But how much profit is too much? That’s the question being asked by the company’s high profile critics, including Muhammed Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winner who pioneered the idea of modern microcredit thirty years ago.
YUNUS: When you are maximizing your profit-you are not looking at whether the poor people are getting out of poverty. You are always looking at your bottom line, how much money we are making out of this business with the poor people

It seems to me that the big difference is in who owns the bank. Maria Hinojosa sums it up.

Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen bank is also a for-profit business. But there’s a big difference. Any profits there go directly back to the borrowers, who are also owners of the company. Not so at Compartamos.
[...]
Recently, microlending as an investment idea has gained a lot of momentum. A small but growing number of international banks and investment firms are realizing that microcredit can also be good business. Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, TIAA-CREF all have backed multi-million dollar microcredit deals…

If done right, these banks could positively affect millions of lives. If you’re interested in this topic, you can learn more about it, or watch Friday’s program online, here. Other resources would be Yunus’ own book, and for an economist’s view on ending poverty, take a look at Jeffrey Sachs’ aptly named and extremely popular book from 2005, The End of Poverty . Sachs also has another title being published by Penguin early next year called Common Wealth that looks like it should be fascinating.

I believe very strongly in personal responsibility and hard work, but have never really understood it when people say that someone else should “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps”. I mean really, if someone were to accomplish that feat literally, they’d pull their own feet out from under themselves and fall right on their backside, so even as a metaphor it seems absurd. I know it’s just a figure of speech, but its very utterance seems to deny any existence of a social contract. Even if one does deny the inherent existence of such a contract in society, and there are plenty who do, is it not incumbent upon a democratic government to provide some material support to its most disadvantaged citizens when the private sector fails to do so? Does it not help move the business of the country forward, or at least keep it stable, when it does so? FDR thought so, and though he was considered by many at the time as a “traitor to his class”, his New Deal policies are seen by many others as the savior of American capitalism and society, tempering the sometimes harsh realities of the market with social safety nets.
The Indian government set up its own kind of new deal for their most disadvantaged citizens when they wrote their constitution back in 1950. The Dalit community, often referred to as the “untouchables”, make up 16% of the Indian population, and after centuries of living at the bottom of a rigid caste system, the 1950 constitution offered many of them the prospect of a better life. As reported in Wednesday’s WSJ, there is some controversy surrounding these policies today. Yaroslav Trofimov writes:

Under India’s constitution, Dalits are entitled to [certain] benefits, including 15% of all federal government jobs and admissions in government-funded universities. This provides the country’s most downtrodden with a way to escape their traditional occupations such as emptying village latrines, burying cow carcasses, and tanning animal hides.
But there is a catch: Any Dalit abandoning Hinduism for Christianity or Islam loses these privileges, and can be fired from jobs gained under the quota. The rules are enforced by vigilant local officials who keep a close eye on villager’s comings and goings.
[...]
Such thorough enforcement means that secret lives have to be lived throughout India’s society. “If they ever find out I’m a Christian, I will lose my position, no question about it” says a Dalit school teacher who behaves as a Hindu when he teaches in a state school near Medipally but decorates his Hyberabad apartment with pictures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

Now what to do? The private sector isn’t yet meeting all the needs of the disadvantaged in this situation, and the government has put restrictions on their programs to do so. This is when charities often enter the picture, but as Phil Smith and Eric Thurman note in A Billion Bootstraps, even “experienced philanthropists from Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates have complained that giving money away is often more difficult than making it in the first place.” The authors call the U.S. non-profit sector a “$900 billion black hole” because there are few reliable statistics about it and it can be very difficult to know exactly what is being done with the money you contribute. This is not to suggest we shouldn’t donate to charity, but Smith and Thurman’s book offers both a humanitarian and entrepreneurial alternative by documenting the world of microfinance. Muhammad Yunus, who wrote the forward for this book and has written his own book on the topic, won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his pioneering work in the field of microcredit. Realizing that the largest contributor to poverty is not lack of skill or ambition, but access to capital, those in the vanguard of this “barefoot banking” movement began making small loans to individuals mired in poverty with no access to traditional loans. One such example from the book:

In Tamil Nadu, the southern-most state in India, Shanti, a 28-year-old mother of two young sons, weaves delicate silk saris to sell in the neighborhood. Born into the extreme poverty rampant in this region, Shanti’s weaving skills were hard won, and she has worked diligently since childhood just to survive. Though renowned for the quality of her saris, Shanti was earning only $2.60 per day, barely enough to allow her to care for her children. Desperate for the capital required to expand her business, she became indebted to a local loan shark who charged outrageous interest rates. Later, she learned about microcredit and took a loan for $60 that she invested in her business. Her income has since increased to more than $6 a day, and she is now free from crippling debt. Today, Shanti is able to focus on growing her business and creating a better life for her family.

This is globalization on a human scale. If we can foster friendship and goodwill through this kind of entrepreneurship and cooperation, I think we may start to gain back some of the admiration and standing we’ve lost in the world over the last few years. And though I’m still not sure about the bootstraps analogy, A Billion Bootstraps has given me an even greater appreciation for what hard work and perseverance can accomplish with just a little support.

Tom Peters refueled a little inner office discussion between the sales staff here at 8CR with a blog post over at TomPeters!, when mentioning The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It wasn’t until recent discussions, and Mr Peters’ blog post that I looked past the personal value of the book, and thought of The Little Prince as a very valuable business tool. People look to a variety of business books for the answers of becoming better in their field, yet forget some of the basic principles that help in accomplishing these tasks. Revisiting this classic fable made me look into similar books that address a bit more of the human dilemma. Here are a few books worth flipping through (None of these books are really classified as business books, but contain invaluable insights that could improve the way we do business, and how people can progress in their chosen professions):
If you get a chance, go back and revisit Jack’s posts on Chasing Daylight.
If anyone is a big fan of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, I’m Proud of You: Life Lessons from my friend Fred Rogers by Tim Madigan has just been released in paperback.
A good friend, who coincidentally gave me my first copy of The Little Prince, handed me a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s book Peace is Every Step about ten years ago. She said that if it didn’t lower my blood pressure I should seek professional help. I was very excited to see his latest book The Art of Power sitting on top of a pile of books in the office. Here is a little blurb from the back cover:

“Our society is founded on a very limited definition of power, namely wealth, professional success, fame, physical strength, military might, and political control. My friends, I suggest there is another kind of power, a greater power: the power to be happy right in the present moment…….”

Wouldn’t the environments we spend time in be more enjoyable with a stronger presence of the human value in them? I would like to think so.

We here at 8cr have some pretty simple rules on promoting books and ideas. Promote only the books & ideas we truly believe in, and promote them with the expertise we’ve developed over the last 20+ years. Inherent in doing that is approaching and introducing ourselves to new communities in an honest and forthright way.
As we’ve learned over the past few weeks, not everyone shares this vision of how to promote their company. I’m speaking, of course, of John Mackey. The CEO of Whole Foods has been posting to yahoo! message boards under the pseudonym Rahodeb for the last 8 years promoting his own company and trashing its opponent, Wild Oats. The discovery of this comes at an especially bad time for the company, which is facing an antitrust suit from the FTC because of their planned acquisition of (who’d have guessed) Wild Oats!
It has been written about pretty widely in the blogosphere already, but yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article (subscription required) by David Kesmodel and Jonathan Eig is the best I’ve read. It really dives into the history of the man and his character, along with that of the company he built, that has been lacking elsewhere. So, from the Journal…

“I’m going to destroy you,” the co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market Inc. shouted at Perry Odak, CEO of Wild Oats Markets Inc., the first time the two men met six years ago at a retailing conference in Manhattan, according to Mr. Odak.

Mackey claims he didn’t use that harsh a language, but doesn’t really dispute the substance of the story. The quote below speaks to his sometimes contradictory nature.

Mr. Mackey fit in nicely among the health-food industry’s scrappy entrepreneurs. He was a six-time college dropout, curly haired and casually dressed. He spoke passionately about food (the natural kind), politics (the libertarian kind) and capitalism (the aggressive kind). Colleagues who knew him as a young man say he was — and remains today, at 53 — a man of opposing characteristics: forthright and yet distant, compassionate and yet cutthroat, idealistic and yet capable of compromise.

And how is this very ugly situation playing out? So far, not very well.

On Tuesday, Mr. Mackey apologized and the Whole Foods board announced it will launch an internal investigation. The Securities and Exchange Commission is examining the chief executive’s posts to see if they violated the law. Mr. Mackey’s online alter ego came to light in a court filing by the Federal Trade Commission, which filed a lawsuit last month seeking to block Whole Foods’s planned purchase of Wild Oats on antitrust grounds.

A Whole Foods recently opened in Milwaukee, which caused me some concern for the natural foods co-op I used to work for. When I asked an old friend in their marketing department how they were reacting to it, she was unfazed. She tells me that they feel a Whole Foods in town will educate more consumers than it takes away from them, and that it will eventually create a larger overall market here. I think that may be true, and if so, I think it’s remarkable.
I’ve always had a great amount of respect for the foresight Mr. Mackey has shown in building his natural foods empire. I appreciate the ways in which his company has established its credibility and reached out to the community to educate them about healthier foods. I do worry that this episode will damage some of that credibility.
Alan Murray released a book in May of this year entitled Revolt in the Boardroom about the recent wave of CEO firings and resignations. It includes stories of big hitters like Carly Fiorini and Michael Eisner, along with CEOs of companies such as Merck, Pfizer, Home Depot, & Fannie Mae. If things keep going the way they’re going over at Whole Foods, Mr. Murray may have to get started on a revised edition that includes Mackey.
Postscript. The stories about himself aren’t the only ones in which he comes off a bit abrasively this month (at least to me). By far my favorite article so far this month was Charles Fishman’s piece on bottled water for Fast Company. Mackey was interviewed for the piece. The articles pretty long, so make sure you have some down time before starting it.