Muhammad Yunus : A artist of organizational management

 

“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature,

 but by our institutions, great is our sin.”  

 Charles Darwin

 

The model used by nobel peace prize recipient Muhammad Yunus to remove the misery of the poor and  undo our sin is in complete contrast to the conventional models of microfinance.

He is the visionary who launched a research project which culminated into the Grameen Bank of today. He envisioned a credit delivery system to provide banking services to the rural population.

 

What is Grameen Bank ?

A Grameen Bank is a microfinance institution which provides loans to the impoverished without requiring collateral.

The talk by this eminent nobel laureate is memorable to say the least. In his talk he shares his experiences and sheds light on the purpose of Grameen Bank(video below)

 

A session worth remembering..
After watching the video titled " Creating a World without Poverty", I expected a lecture focused on social entrepreneurship.

To my surprise , we were first given a Navrang puzzle and Professor Mandi invited us to reassemble the cubical block such that no colour was repeated on a particular face of the cube.
Volunteers tried but were unable to assemble it...( unrealistic goal).

Eventually,Professor Mandi  assembled the nine colors to form the block following an organized approach. The time taken was one third of the expected time(attained an unrealistic goal).

Professor described the task in the following manner:
 27 elements are organized to form 9 rods which combine to form 3 plates
The three plates come together to form a single block .

My learning from this exercise was that the number of elements (symbolic of individuals)may vary from 27 to 27 million. But a clearly defined purpose will result in a harmonious organization where there would be no clash of colors.

This organization of 27 elements depicts the real world organizations where a manager works like an artist. The artist does permutations and combinations repeatedly till the purpose of the organization(which in the art of Muhammad Yunus was making poor people stand up for themselves) is achieved.

A similar harmony is observed in the magic created by A.R.Rehman who combines millions of elements into a beautiful composition.

To conclude the session we were asked to observe the contrast in the purpose,structure,target audience of Grameen bank vis a vis conventional banks. These can be summarized as below :

	PARAMETER	GRAMEEN BANK	CONVENTIONAL BANKS
	Purpose	Making poor rich	Making rich richer
	Collateral	Not needed	Needed
	Shareholders	Poor	Rich
	Target Customer	Rural , illiterate, poor woman	Urban, literate ,middle class and rich