“7 Inspiring Entrepreneurial Lessons I learnt from Professor Yunus.”

Coutsey : www.scu.edu

There are a few books which impact you on so many levels and from so many angles. ‘ Banker To The Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty‘ by Prof. Muhammad Yunus is one of them for me. The book is about the story of Grameen-Bank and how it came about, how it expanded and how it changed the life of millions of people. The book is just unputdownable.(Grameen-Bank and Prof.Yunus got the Noble Peace Prize in 2006.) I read around 200 pages in just first sitting.(it has 277 pages.)Through this book I witnessed the very soul of entrepreneurship and have gleaned some lessons for you:

(1) Believe in the creative spirit of yourself and others around you. When Prof.Yunus started the Grameen Bank his basic premise was the power of creativity of the borrowers of micro-loans. Without believing in the creative spirit of the poor borrowers, there is no way micro lending would have succeeded. Even if you are just self employed, if you believe in the creativity of your model and the people who use it, quickly your model will be adopted far and wide. That is also what happened with open source technology.

(2)An entrepreneur has to see through social conditioning. Entrepreneurship has one major thing in common with philosophy of science. That thing is to come up with counter intuitive but true working models. If science is about physical technology then entrepreneurship is about social technology. You can call yourself an entrepreneur if you keep hitting your baseline by applying the true and tested formula. But you aren’t one if that’s all what you are doing. Somewhere down the line you have to craft a new business model, big or small, but it should be new. Something that can be adopted, extended or modified to make other businesses productive too. That is precisely what Prof.Yunus did with the micro lending. More fashionably speaking, that is what Google did with its search and what Microsoft did decades ago with Personal Computers. Till now people are modifying and applying those business model to their own projects.You have to tear through the social conditioning of what a good business model looks like and show the world something new.

(3) Your cause becomes greater than you are. If you confine your entrepreneurial mission just to yourself then it won’t be of much worth. Your cause should , ultimately, become greater than yourself. An example is given in one of the incidents of Prof.Yunus’s life. In the Unites Nations he was praised profusely and it was said that the success of Grameen-Bank rests solely on the talent of Prof.Yunus. Now, how do you think Prof.Yunus would react to it? Normally people would be very happy to hear it. But he was quite miffed by it. He was against the idea that the Grameen-Bank’s success is solely because of him. His argument was that the success of Grameen-Bank is due to its system, due to its social technology and the entrepreneurship of the poor people who participate in the program. He was essentially saying that the Grameen movement is bigger than he is. No meaningful impact can be created by confining the business just to yourself. It is true that in the initial stage the business is the founder himself. But , ultimately the business has to graduate to be bigger than just one personality.

(4) You learn the ropes as you progress.Professor Yunus knew nothing about the fishery business, or about its technicalities. But he took up the fishery business of Bangladesh and transformed it into a resounding success.That is the core of entrepreneurship. If you have nothing to learn as you go then you are not testing your boundaries. And entrepreneurship is all about testing your boundaries and expanding it.There is a limit to how much training you can acquire outside the system. To truly learn something you have to get your hands dirty, you have to actually go out and do it. And if you are an entrepreneur, your hands are dirty all the time. You are learning something new all the time.

(5)You teach as you go along. Teaching as you move along is the reciprocal of learning as you go. If you are learning something then somebody is teaching you as well. And that teacher can be a single person, a community, or the internet. To complete the cycle you should teach what you learn. Without this the whole model of entrepreneurship breaks down. You cannot expect to receive for long if you don’t give it back. Plus this two way flow of knowledge makes an ecosystem teeming with life which grows entrepreneurship exponentially, and hence benefiting you profoundly as well. Prof.Yunus taught everything he learned to thousands of people, and they applied his concepts in a variety of circumstances with success.

(6) Eagerness of business to put technology at the service of the consumers. The goal and the dream must come from inside your soul. But the end product of that dream should always include happy consumers. By that I do not mean that you should blindly follow market–doing that will make your work soulless and burn you out. You should always identify your passions and build a product or service around it which will serve the consumers in a unique way. (That uniqueness can come in terms of novel product or just the sheer high quality of an already known product.) Prof Yunus was deeply compassionate about poor people from the very beginning. Then he combined his knowledge of economics and his entrepreneurship ability with his compassion of the poor to build Grameen-Bank and micro loan schemes. The first problem is to really know what your passions is, most of the time you don’t even know that you don’t know your true calling(it is called ignorance of second degree).

(7) Before we actually translate something into reality we must be able to dream about it. Whatever path you take, you should have an inspiring goal in front of you. That goal will keep you motivated at times of difficulty. The goal of Grameen-Bank and Prof.Yunus was to free poor people from the vicious cycle of poverty.And they remain true to its core. Likewise the goal of Microsoft was the put a Personal Computer in every desk. You should also have some over arching goal to aim at. And you should dream its success. That dream will keep you alive when the chips are down.

And now a bonus lesson:

Think on your feet. Grameen-Bank workers and Prof Yunus were on the ground most of the time, thinking on their feet(with the aid of drawing boards sometimes).Yes, have you heard about thinking on your back or thinking on your butt? No, right?Think on your feet means be active, be mobile and exercise regularly.And let your subconscious mind think while you are exercising, or jogging, swimming, or taking a shower. You will be surprised at the power of your subconscious mind to come up with brilliant ideas when you are in a semi-relaxed state(and not fire fighting all the time). 

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Tags: Bank, Banker to the Poor, Business, Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize, Poverty