“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it,” says Simon Sinek in his very popular TEDx talk. And he’s right. People buy thy WHY. The thing is… this is a big problem in development work! People buy the WHY – which means they are fueling good intentions, not necessarily good impacts. […]
In business school you are surrounded by people who believe in the power of markets. There are people in my class who are passionate about freeing markets, about scaling enterprises, and about generating profits. Yet some of those SAME people are advocates of giving things away in development work. I have had countless discussions with […]
“But that wouldn’t really happen in real life,” said one of the students in my economics class as our professor was reviewing game theory and the economics of auctions. “People wouldn’t act in that way, and it wouldn’t work like that.” Our professor turned around and smiled and looked at us all like he’d just […]
I don’t usually link to PEPY’s monthly newsletter in my blog, but the song from the PEPY Tours video in here won’t get out of my head, so I thought I’d infect you with it too. (Click on the image to see the newsletter) Yep, that song is a Khmer rap song. Yep, it’s pretty […]
Both “participatory development” and “design thinking” theories advocate for project planning to start with the needs of the end-user. It’s interesting to me that both concepts illustrate pretty much the same intuitive process, yet the naming of both makes them seem less broadly applicable. I guess maybe that’s because “Successful impact-for-the-end-user-focused-planning” is a much less […]
Clearly, business school is getting the better part of my time and my blog is being neglected. I have though had many posts written in my head….. my fingers just haven’t gotten to typing them! The last real post I wrote was about “social” enterprise and if the “social” is really needed and there were a […]
None of this is new, I don’t think. I couldn’t stand to listen to my own voice for that long, so I actually haven’t heard this all…. but this is an audio interview I did this past summer about PEPY and the lessons I have learned through our work. If you want to know more […]