East Eats West

The opposite of banking

Picture: Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Prof. Muhammad Yunus.

With the Euro tethering with collapse, UBS and JPMorgan banks producing massive trading losses and shareholder voting against high bonuses in banking, one wonders how to fix all this. Nobel peace prize laureate Prof. Muhammad Yunus proposed a simple solution at the first Social Business Conference in Zurich: do everything opposite what banks do. Here is what he proposed.

When Prof. Yunus started 35 years ago with his micro-credit idea he had one important drawback : he didn’t know anything about banking. But this helped him creating a micro-lending bank that today has 8.6m borrowers in small villages in Bangladesh and lends out USD 1.5bn. He did this in stark contrast to how normal banks do business: no collaterals, no papers, no lawyers and no male clients. The success he achieved, he puts it down to a few principles. First and foremost, use entrepreneurship to help people. Second, business has to be profitable but the profit should not not only be monopolized by the shareholders but shared by  everyone. And thirdly that Grameen Bank only lends to the poor, not to the rich as the normal banks do. Clients of Grameen bank first and foremost have to have a bank account and pay in small sums every month. The funds for lending are therefore created by the clients and not by outside investors. Grameen Bank is actually the borrower, not the lender.

Another rule for Grameen clients is that they have to send their children to school. 100% of all the bank’s clients’ children go to school. However, the problem then was to find a job as most students would come from very poor backgrounds and wouldn’t have the money to pay the mandatory bribe in Bangladesh to get a job. The solution to that problem according to Prof. Yunus was instead of looking everywhere else for a role model, every student should use his/her mom as the role model. The students should actually themselves be employers, and not just aspire to be an employee. In fact, according to Prof. Yunus, everyone is an entrepreneur, everyone.

For Prof. Yunus, a business should be there to solve problems, not to create them. So far he has started more than 50 businesses like selling affordable solar panels to villagers in Bangladesh so that they can have light in the evening. Though initially skeptical, the people are slowly beginning to buy into the idea.

In order to counter criticism that micro-credit only works in third world countries but not in the developed world, he started micro-credit in New York in 2008. Today Grameen Bank operates three NGOs in New York with a repayment rate of 99,8% and average starting loans of USD 1’500.

Prof. Yunus stressed that social businesses do not pay dividends. However, in contrast to charities the money is comes back and can be used again. He thinks that the fundamental flaw is mankind’s urge to make money but nothing else. For him making money is a means, not an aim. Whereas for-profit business is usually selfish, making other people happy is not. So making money in order to help other people is the aim of social business. Again and again Prof. Yunus stressed that poverty is not created by poor people but by the system. He likened the poor to Bonsai trees. They have proper seeds but are restrained from growing up because of the small pots they are nurtured in. Prof. Yunus emphasized that social businesses should solve real problems. And if they do that themselves, the government does not have to do this and therefore subsidies are would not be required. In that sense Prof. Yunus has found a way to make the world a freer place, quite close actually to the core liberal ideas of the Western world.

Good old journalism

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How studying Buddhism for 25 years in Tibet made someone wealthy

Buddha might be an unlikely management guru. However, Geshe Michael Roach of the “The Diamond Cutter” book fame exactly thinks that. Geshe Michael is an American who studied Buddhism in Tibet and eventually became a “Geshe”, a Tibetan Buddhist academic degree for monks. After studying for 25 years he had to proof his understanding of the ancient Buddhist principles by working in a business. He did so very successfully and wrote a book about it (The Diamond Cutter). Nowadays he travels the world and teaches “karmic management” to people from Moscow to Zurich. I attended one of his first lectures in Zurich and was impressed by his simple explanation of the Buddhist idea of karma and how it can be applied in business and life in general. 

Geshe Michael’s story was simple. Life is about planting seeds, again and again. Those seeds will grow into a tree and die again. Therefore one has to continuously plant seeds. Seeds are thoughts and actions. He told us the story of an architect of Chinese origin who wanted to find a life partner. She wanted to know from Geshe Michael if she would find her husband in a club or on the internet. After contemplating for a while he told her that she would find her future husband in the elderly home. That startled the woman as she was in her mid thirties. Geshe Michael explained to her, that in order to find companionship she had to be a good companion to someone who is lonely. So she went to the elderly home every other week until one day, in a yoga class, she bumped into her future husband. It was love at first sight. Six months later Geshe Michael married them. After the marriage he asked them how the woman from the elderly home was doing and she told him, that she was too busy with her wedding plans to visit her again. Geshe Michael told her, that she continuously has to plant seeds of companionship, otherwise her marriage will not last.

Geshe Michael also explained, how the same Karmic principle can be used for a successful business. At the end the recipe is as simple as foreign to us: give others what you want and you will be given in return. Or isn’t it that unfamiliar?

Learn more about his teachings here: http://www.diamondcutterinstitute.com  

Burn-out business

Sometimes the tenants of Buddhism pop up in unexpected circumstances, most likely unknown to the persons involved. Here is a little story I was recently told.

A businesswoman with a successful career decided one day to stop working and dedicate her life fully to her two children. She wanted to be the perfect mom. She gave her best and labored hard every day, showering her children with love and care. Until one fine day, when she couldn’t ignore the fact anymore, that her unruly and wild children drove her crazy. She sat at home, lacking motivation, asking herself why she was doing all that. The answer hit her in the face: she didn’t care anymore. It was all the same to her. She had a burn-out.

Shortly after she admitted herself to a facility specialized in burn-outs and started with therapy. Slowly she recovered and started wondering, what she should do now. She knew that setting high goals would lead her directly back into the facility again. She wouldn’t want to go into her old job again. So she decided to do whatever she wanted to do, without purpose. At the same time she wondered how her experience could help other people. One thing led to another and she nowadays talks to people about ‘burn-outs’ and depressions, giving courses at big banks. Her problem became her business, her new meaning in life.

She discovered the core tenant of Buddhism: Mushotoku; doing something without aim, for no gain, without desire. Just doing. She learned that giving without wanting something in return made her whole again.

What works in friendship works in business, surprised?

How do you know if someone is your friend?  There might be many definitions but I am sure you agree with me that a person is only a friend if she or he helps you out if the going gets tough. A friend is someone who stands at your side, backing you up. This is what a good friend does. A friend helps you move apartments, listens to your problems or encourages you in life. And he or she does it without asking something in return. Right? I assume most people would agree with those statements. So friendship works because you give and help without asking something in return.

Interestingly, people also believe that in business exactly the opposite is true. It is about competition. One doesn’t help each other. One goes against the competitor. It is about Darwinism or survival of the fittest. It is about you or me, not you and me. So the universal principle of helping each other apparently doesn’t apply in business, for some strange reasons. What if success in business can be achieved by helping your competitor? This is the very core idea of Geshe Michael Roach, the American Tibetan Buddhist master who teaches about Buddhism and business. He strongly believes that helping your competitor to be successful will make yourself successful. A very outlandish idea, but maybe he is just stating the obvious?

The internet changes our thinking!

Have you ever thought of how the internet might be changing your thinking or how you process information? In the most recent 'Du', a Swiss cultural publication, this was exactly the topic and the findings are surprising. According to the author Nicolas Carr, using the internet makes us constant information seekers or scanners. We do not read a whole article anymore. On the contrary, we scan books and magazine articles like we scan websites. Our eyes quickly zigzag the article and our brain tries to filter interesting words or pieces of information. The result is that many people have stopped reading whole books or articles. They only cross-read them in order to scan for interesting information. At the same time we have become better and better at multi-tasking. While we are talking to our parents on Skype we answer emails and check out our favorite blogs. We have become experts in processing lots of data. It is all about speed. We have become novelty-junkies who can quickly discard non-interesting information (a bit like surfing the TV channels). Nicholas Carr thinks that this quick-scanning and multi-tasking behavior helps in processing lots of information and signals but it hinders us from being creative. We can't concentrate long-enough anymore as we have become novelty-junkies. One could say that we have forgotten to sit back and ruminate things.

Useless tea

Picture: Tea sampling at my friend Menglin's absolutely lovely tea shop Shui Tang in Zurich. 

I recently went for a presentation by my dear friend Menglin Chou who runs the tea shop Shui Tang in Zurich. During her presentation she pointed out that tea is revered in her home-country Taiwan for its uselessness. Tea is useless but exactly because it is useless, it becomes interesting. According to Chinese philosophy useless things make life worthwhile. A beautiful thought!

What if you win the 100m lottery?

A while ago a news-agency wanted to do an interview with me about what to do with a 100m lottery win. I never got round to do the interview but it made me think. As many studies of former lottery-winners have shown, a lottery-win is more of a curse than a blessing. Economists call a lottery-win a windfall-profit, something one gets without actually doing much for it. The problem with windfall profits are, at least in protestant Zurich, that they are frowned upon. Protestants strongly believe in hard work as a service to God. And only if one works hard one deserves reward, aka money. So getting money for nothing is suspicious to say the least. Another issue with a lottery win is that the winners hardly ever have any clue how to handle the sudden wealth. They are financially illiterate, are prone to bad advice and over-generous with giveaways. So maybe one should look at a lottery-win more as a heavenly test than an undeserved blessing. It requires hard work to deal with it. A winner has to learn about finance, become savvy about banks and stay clear of bad advice. Not an easy task in the world of greed! 

 

When napkins become tissues

We humans believe in common sense, in decent behavior and mutual respect. But culture can get in the way. As a guest in an Indian household one typically gets served by the host who does not eat until the guest has finished, quite in contrast to Switzerland where everyone eats together. In India one also eats with the right hand and napkins are unheard of as there is a sink in every dining room (for washing the hands). As an European I tend to miss the napkins, particularly when eating curries! To an Indian host it comes naturally that the guest stays with him. It is also understood that as a guest one gets driven around and entertained without being asked. In Switzerland as a good host one asks the guest what he wants first before making plans. And as in many other countries, the Swiss with our sense of punctuality are often surprised by the generous time-keeping of Asians and Latin Americans. In Switzerland it is also common to plan for dinners weeks ahead whereas in India as well as Malaysia showing up on any day is a pleasant surprise and planning ahead would be insulting. 

Does an iPad make your brain unfocused?

In a recent article in the International Herald Tribune ("Too much information? For a wired life, a rewired brain.") people were portrayed to spend their whole day multi-tasking, using iPhone, PCs  and iPads. The article concludes that heavy multi-tasking is so distracting that people are not in the here and now anymore. They become more stressed and have trouble shutting out irrelevant information. Apparently as multi-taskers become more sensitive to information, they even become addicted to it: every new sms, e-mail, tweet or RSS feed is eagerly devoured, and quickly forgotten. However, being human means paying attention to each other, to care, not to multi-task and tick of to-do-lists. Therefore think twice before buying your new iPad (or choose a Zafu for meditation instead)!