Sasha Dichter

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  • Mohsin Hamid’s stories of Pakistan

    In the past 24 hours I finished reading two books by Mohsin Hamid: Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I’m not unearthing anything new here – Moth Smoke was a New York Times Notable Book and The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a bestseller and a Booker Prize Finalist. Nevertheless, let me encourage anyone who appreciates good writing to read these two books. Hamid hits you in the face with the difference between being able to write and being a writer; he is a master of prose, pacing, setting and character.

    The books also resonated because I was in Pakistan just two months ago, so the first-hand account of life in Karachi and Lahore was of particular interest. As Americans we have almost no personal exposure to Pakistan, and while I’m sure there are countless political histories available, one could do worse than begin with Hamid, if for no other reason than to remind oneself of the obvious: that Pakistan is a country of 180 million people each of whom has his own story.

    I am a novice in my own understanding of Pakistan, having visited there once and having only a cursory knowledge of its history, culture and politics. But the contrast between my experience in Pakistan (confirming that most places, and most people, in the world are more the same than different) and the questions I got both before and after my trip (“how WAS Pakistan??!!”) reinforced my sense that we Americans we have, on the most part, an unbelievably limited exposure to and understanding of this country of 180 million people (and the exposure we get is often in CNN News briefings and statements by Presidential candidates about “the war on terror.”)

    The cover of the Economist’s January issue blithely called Pakistan “The World’s Most Dangerous Place” (a Pakistani colleague of mine at Acumen Fund has that cover, hand grenade and all, ironically displayed at his desk). I find that hard to believe, but even if it were true, shouldn’t part of the answer be investing in local solutions that create economic opportunity and help fight poverty (and not just more bombs)? One-fourth of Pakistan’s 180 million people are poor. Food and energy prices are rising (Pakistan recently shifted clocks forward an hour in an effort to save energy, and Acumen Fund Fellow Jawad Aslam’s take on this is not to be missed) and, with rising prices, tension is also rising, especially in the cities. Meanwhile, under the Bush administration alone, the U.S. government has provided more than $2 billion worth of funding to Pakistan, with up to a third of it unaccounted for.

    There’s a lot to bite off here, which is intimidating. So why not start with Hamid’s accounts, to pique your interest, and go from there?

  • Slydial: Please leave a message after the beep

    A new service has been launched called Slydial, which lets you place a phone call that goes directly to a persons’ voicemail, without the phone ever ringing. The service addresses the silent wish of every teenager who, for the past three decades, has whispered to herself, “I hope no one is there and I can just leave a message.”

    The Slydial website describes when you might use their service:

    Create the illusion of communication
    You maxed out your emergency credit card the first week of school. Your parents are looking for some answers. A text message isn’t going to cut it but a voicemail would mean that you tried calling them.

    Wow. Pretty bold to come out and state that your value proposition is to create the illusion of communication.

    The number of tools we have to communicate is multiplying. If I want to let someone know what’s on my mind, I now have to decide between a phone call, an email, an SMS message, posting on my blog, updating my Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn or Plaxo Pulse profile. And if I were 20 years younger I could add to that list things like Twitter, video messages, vMix, Bebo, and of course Slydial.

    All of this is very exciting, but it also requires a new kind of filtering and understanding of which messages are appropriate for which media. There is also the risk that, as the media multiply, less time and effort goes into composing messages that create a real connection and understanding between people. We end up with lots more information, but a lot less meaning, and we lower the bar on what’s good enough in communications with the excuse that email (or SMS or whatever else) is supposed to be sanitized and devoid of emotion and real connection.

    The medium is not itself the problem. But when I find myself emailing someone who sits 6 feet away from me in the office to ask a question, I do wonder if things have gone too far. At least I’m not Slydialing them…yet.

  • Your Money or Your Health?

    I’m sick today. Being sick in the middle of the summer is a double whammy. Eighty-five degrees and sunny with a sore throat should be an oxymoron.

    Yesterday I completed an alumni survey sent out by my esteemed business school. It was more or less standard fare: what have you been doing professionally, what kind of responsibilities do you have at your job, how much money do you make, how happy are you? I wonder if the compilation of these results are more for collective voyeurism and one-upmanship (“I’m wealthier than my peers”) than because they give the administration the opportunity to reflect on the curriculum.

    Two questions stood out for me. One asked me to rank what is most important to me, from most to least, choosing between things like my health, the well-being of my children, my income, my net worth, time to do stuff outside of work, my involvement in my community, etc. Are they serious? My health and my children’s well-being are in a category by themselves, aren’t they? Are there actually people out there who put those things at the bottom of the list? I’m curious to know.

    The second surprising question asked what skills most help me in my professional life. The surprise was that the list included both the obvious skills for a business school to care about (analytical thinking, leadership ability) and some surprises (ability to listen, empathy). I suspect that my rank-ordering will be in the “long tail” relative to my peers (I put those “soft skills” high on the list). My question is: if all the alumni came back and said what they really needed most was empathy and listening skills, would that result in an about-face in the business school curriculum? If not, why is HBS asking?

  • What would Maimonides think of Kiva?

    (First blog Milestone reached: a blog post inspired by a reader’s comment. The next milestone will be when the same thing happens and I don’t know the reader personally).

    A blog reader of mine brought up Kiva in response to yesterday’s post, which I thought was interesting – both because I didn’t mention Kiva and because it was on my mind too. So what would Maimonides think of Kiva?

    In Maimonides’ discussion of charity, he says that you should not put money into the tzedakah box unless you know that the person responsible for the box is faithful, wise and trustworthy. If not, you’re not sure if the donation will help improve a person’s life.

    This sense of distrust has become more common in recent decades, especially in international charity. There’s a sense, fair or not, that little has been accomplished with the $2.3 trillion the West has spent on foreign aid in the last 5 decades, since much of the world is still very poor. William Easterly in his book The White Man’s Burden has been one of the most vocal critics in this camp, explaining the many failings of international charity and international aid. On the other end of the spectrum, Jeff Sachs argues in The End of Poverty that we could end global poverty by increasing global giving.

    (There’s a book’s worth of discussion that this opens up, which I’ll avoid for now and just point out that the US GDP last year was just under $14 trillion, so if my math is right the total spending on foreign aid by the West over 50 years is equivalent to two months’ worth of the U.S. GDP. Two months worth of output for .25 billion people vs. 600 months’ worth for ~3 billion people? So maybe it’s not that much after all…)

    While Easterly’s focus is more on international NGOs (e.g. the World Bank), someone like my friend who raised the question about Kiva can’t be blamed for thinking, “Why would my $25 make a difference, and how can I know it’s being spent wisely?” To me this is just a step removed from the legitimate fear that the tzedakah collector is unfaithful or dishonest. The worry is that your money goes into the box with the intent of helping someone, but that someone isn’t helped as a result.

    To me this helps explain why most giving in the United States is local and through religious organizations: it is much easier to feel confident that your donation will make a difference when you personally know the person asking you to give, are giving as part of an established community, and have first-hand exposure to the problems your donation is meant to address.

    So what would Maimonides make of Kiva? There are lots of organizations doing international work that are incredibly effective and trustworthy stewards of people’s charity (yes, I think that Acumen Fund is one of them). The brilliance of Kiva is that it has found a way to create that personal connection and the sense of empowerment on the part of the donor, allaying the fear (conscious or not) that the $25 donation will be lost in a sea of larger donations, or will never reach its intended recipient. Kiva has used the Internet to get rid of the tzedakah box altogether, allowing the giver to “give directly to the poor without being asked” (Level 5 in terms of honorability, for those keeping score).

    My own hope is that this is increasing the number of people giving and increasing people’s comfort with and habit of giving – especially by people in their 20s and 30s –and that this will lay the foundation for more generosity, education, and awareness of the problems of international poverty and the innovative solutions now available to address these challenges.

  • Chicken in the Chicken Soup

    (for those of you new to the blog, check out my first post here)

    Yesterday I was on the lookout for some Chicken soup to take home for dinner – to care for some sick family members. I went to Friedman’s Delicatessen, highly recommended by a co-worker of mine, and asked if they had chicken soup in addition to matzoh ball soup. The guy behind the counter said yes but that the soup had no chicken. I told him I’d come back. At $11.95 a quart, no chicken didn’t make any sense to me, even if it does taste homemade.

    I went a few shops down to Hale and Hearty Soup, which I generally like, and tried their chicken soup. It was good, but not traditional enough and, in this case, not what I was looking for. So I went back to Friedman’s and a guy who was clearly the manager and owner said, “I’m glad you’re back. We can put chicken in the soup. We didn’t used to because we were kosher and the kosher chicken is expensive. But now we can.” The chicken went in the quart of soup, and I bought a couple of half sour pickles as well.

    I have no idea what the real story is about the chicken. But I do know that this interaction single-handedly changed my impression of Friedman’s. I became a customer, a happy one at that (the soup was delicious), and I’m going to recommend Friedman’s to other people. The owner went above and beyond to make me feel valued, and he had enough good manners and good business sense to win me over. I’m pretty sure there was nothing special about me, it was about giving a customer what they asked for, within reason. I think anyone who deals with customers – myself included in my job at Acumen Fund – has something to learn from this. The owner made a great impression, one that stuck with me, and now if anyone asks me I’m recommending that soup, which was delicious.

    And the next time I probably won’t even care about the chicken.

  • Blog launch

    Six months ago I wouldn’t have considered starting my own blog. Having since written a few blog posts for the Acumen Fund blog (a few of which were cross-posted at NextBillion.net) and seen a real response, and now that I actually have an RSS reader that I check every day, I’m of a different mind. My feeling right now is that blogs are likely to be the new center of gravity for fresh, authoritative, and interesting content on the web. And they have significant potential to take a bite out of journalism, publishing, and plain ‘ol web sites. For example, I’ve been putting off getting a new credit card, since my card expires next month. I wanted to research online. Type “credit cards” into Google and you get a lot of industry sites without a lot of objectivity or depth. A blog search got me some seemingly objective answers in about 5 minutes.

    My saving grace is that I’m quite confident that no one, for now, is reading this blog. At the same time I know that everything published online is essentially permanent – so I should try to get off on the right foot. For now I’m expecting this blog will be reflections on the nonprofit world, philanthropy, global interconnectedness, fairness, making change, and general reflections on marketing, sales and communication. I’m in no small part inspired by Seth Godin – both personally and by his blog – and while I hesitate to reference a blogospheric icon as an inspiration, what I love most about Seth’s blog is that he seems to see the whole world through a unifying lens of marketing, creating valuable customer relationships, and making positive change. I’m beginning to see that same level of unification and interconnectedness in a lot of areas, so I figured I’d take a stab at blogging about it. My hope is that blogging about these things will help me to sharpen my thinking, will improve my writing, and will force me to turn observations into (could it be?) insights. At the same time I’m fascinated to see if people will start reading, commenting, and furthering the conversations I hope to start, and maybe someday forming a tribe that cares about these ideas. I’m assuming that the focus of my blog, its themes and direction, will emerge over time, and I’m not going to work too hard to confine myself to a specific set of topics for now.

    So, here I go…wish me luck.