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03/17/2008: "Helping "the Bottom of the Pyramid" May Be Beyond the Shark Mind's Capability"

There’s a defining characteristic of the Shark Worldview that seems to defy all attempts to introduce it to the learning curve.

That’s the habit Shark worldview users have of latching onto “the one right answer” and ignoring other possibilities and/or evidence that not a single approach or tool or formula will work well for everyone.

None of us who read C.K. Prahalad’s globally popular (mostly among businesspeople and other devotees of the idea that capitalism is the needed economic elixir for all that ails the planet) book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, were surprised at his claim that he knew how to eradicate poverty on Earth by the year 2020.

Prahalad is a “professor of strategy” at the University of Michigan business school. (Business schools are hatcheries of the made-to-order Shark worldview users that corporate business demands.) Prahalad and some of his graduate students hit on the idea of looking at the four billion people who live on less than $2 a day as a market to be developed instead of as poor to be pitied.

They then fanned out (mostly the graduate students) through the Third World looking for off-the-beaten-path entrepreneurs who had already anticipated their big idea—that good can be done by marketing something to the poor that they find useful and making a profit.

The UofM researchers came up with some promising examples, mostly in India. They wrote up their findings in so-called “case studies” that Dr. Prahalad made much of in his book. And business professors around the world, recognizing a glamorous idea when they saw one, suddenly had their students studying how businesses, especially modestly sized ones, could tap into what is reputed to be a largely virginal $5 trillion dollar worldwide market of poor people.

Immediately, there was a backlash. Almost anyone who had first-hand experience with trying to eliminate poverty pooh-poohed Prahalad’s optimism that the “bottom of the pyramid” is ready to be transformed into a caldron of entrepreneurship that will eliminate poverty in short order. Oases of excellence would soon be churning out new goods and services for the extremely poor, and from this unaccustomed capitalistic seedbed, a transformative wave of immense catch-up dimensions would move out through the masses, improving their lives. At least, this was pretty much Prahalad’s promise.

But experts like former World Bank executive, Paul Collier, now head of Oxford University’s Centre for the Study of African Economies, said not a chance. At least, not for huge numbers of hapless, trapped, desperately poor people.

Collier wrote his own book (published in the spring, 2007). Called “The Bottom Billion”, his work argued that civil war, bad governance, corruption and over-dependence on extracting and exporting natural resources has about a billion of the world’s poor in an unrelenting death grip entrapping them in an absolute decline in living standards.

Because of the obvious flaws stemming from Prahalad’s B-school-nurtured Shark Worldview bias toward finding the one right answer and prescribing it for universal use, I gave the book very little thought time after its reading and the appearance of a host of negative reviews in academic and NGO circles.

So it was with surprise the other day that a colleague called my attention to a lengthy piece on the Web site of the Filipino news service, abs-cbnNEWS.com, that indicated the Prahalad’s ideas have taken serious root in some Third World communities and are bearing some fruit.

Just the other day, a group of business experts and scientists from Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines met in Southeast Asia to discuss how to expand the idea of “iBOP”—innovation for the base of the pyramid.”

But as I read through the article, my suspicions grew that the naysayers of Prahalad’s predictions have been proven largely correct. Mostly what seems to be happening is more of the same old, same old: foundations and a scattering of governments are funding projects like the Filipino-invented “ram pump.” Made from door hinges, it can force water a couple of hundred meters upwards without fuel. Villagers can help make them. But this really doesn’t qualify as a pro-poor invention developed for profit by a promising up-from-being-poor entrepreneur.

Collier says something much more complex, much dicey, more daring will be needed to extract the billion at the bottom in the 50 failing states he has identified. The people at the top are going to have to go into these societies, take them over, clean them up, put new laws and leaders in place, create global trade policies that will aid these new “baby” economies and develop a wholly new international outlook backed by new charters.

Pulling that off is the kind of task we DolphinThink advocates foresee as needed the thinking skills of the Deep See-Change Dolphin. For certain, and Iraq being exhibit No. 1 of our doubting, it is not a task at which the Shark Worldview users who have been celebrating the Gospel of iBOP could be expected to succeed.

Too much to change to envision and integrate, too much one-best-answer “ideology” to jettison, too much power to be shifted and redistributed. Wisely.—Dudley

To read the article referenced above, go here:
Science for the poor