More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 10, 2018 - March 8, 2022
It’s foolish to neglect metrics where they’re available – but to think that only what’s measurable is meaningful is pure sophistry.
In the face of these problems, supporters proposed further technological fixes. If telecenter operators lacked skills, they would design online communities to share best practices. If rural patients wanted to see real physicians, video teleconferencing was the answer. If there were barriers of language and literacy, they called for more user-friendly content tailored for local needs, translated into local languages and shot as videos that didn’t require reading. And on and on.
For the next six months, I barely saw Gandhi. Most weeks, he stayed in the villages. He worked alongside Green Foundation staff and got to know farmers in the area. Every once in a while, he’d pop into the office, and we’d talk about what he had been up to and what he could do next. One week, he told me, “I think I now understand Green Foundation’s agriculture programs, so I’m moving on to capturing their advice on video.”
The Three Habits of Highly Effective Technology Use
Rule 1 – Identify or build human forces that are aligned with your goals.
Though Gandhi has absorbed a lot of agricultural knowledge over the years, he is by no means an expert. Nor are most of us on the board or among Digital Green’s senior leadership. Our strengths are in nonprofit management, technology, and international development.
I’ve found that three qualities make a good partner: good intention, discernment, and self-control, or what I’ve come to think of as heart, mind, and will.
it’s increasingly clear that stabilizing or reversing climate change will require mass intrinsic growth. As individuals, we need the intention to leave a sustainable world for our descendants, the discernment to recognize the urgency of the situation, and the self-control to curb consumption. Our corporations need intention, discernment, and self-control to place long-term value above short-term profit. And our political leaders need the same intention and discernment, as well as the self-control to resist special interests and careerism.
As a result, meaningful expenditures on education or capacity building are often seen as unsustainable, because they incur high costs and require someone to keep paying for them year after year. (Here again is C. K. Prahalad, who, as you may remember, groaned that “charity might feel good, but it rarely solves the problem in a scalable and sustainable fashion.”)
Ashesi also provides a hint toward large-scale impact. University president Awuah argues that if today’s African college graduates – just 5 percent of every age group – could be persuaded to work toward Africa’s future, the continent would be transformed in twenty years when that 5 percent would inevitably assume leadership.
taking a nation from a dollar-a-day income to $11,670 a year per capita, the US poverty level for a single-person household, would require about four decades at a sustained breakneck growth rate of 10 percent a year.56 In comparison, it only takes twenty years to raise a new generation. Speed is relative. China and the East Asian tigers pulled themselves up in a matter of decades, thanks in great part to widespread investments in high-quality universal education.
In the years before she quit, Agyare wanted to ensure a secure livelihood. She had positive intention for her future self. She had a solid base of knowledge and the discernment to land good jobs. She had the self-control to see her goals through. In a nutshell, she had enough heart, mind, and will to secure personal well-being and success.
First, none of the transitions were about earning more money. They were about family, autonomy, recognition, intellectual reward, and social impact. Money was still important – few took on work without pay, and many of them could afford to change jobs because they had a fluffy financial cushion. But the desire for wealth was satiated at some point, and other desires took over.
No one in the US government, the World Bank, or the Gates Foundation is asking, “How do we encourage people through transformational internal epiphanies?” Partly, the problem is that today’s metric-focused technocrats all but laugh at what seem like soft intangibles. Partly, the problem is that policy is disconnected from fields that consider these changes of heart. Partly, it’s that the fields that once used to think about deep questions like this have stopped asking them.
The alternative is to ask, What makes a person intrinsically motivated for the larger social good? What makes a Patrick Awuah or a Regina Agyare? Today’s number-crunching disciplines have no answer to such questions. But developmental psychology does. Psychologists going back to Sigmund Freud have sought to explain human maturation as a staged process of personality,
Less understood is Maslow’s claim that people are “multimotivated” and that behavior is “multidetermined.” People have multiple needs at once, even if one might dominate. At any time, each of a person’s needs might be satisfied to different degrees: “It is as if the average citizen is satisfied perhaps 85 percent in physiological needs, 70 percent in safety needs, 50 percent in love needs, 40 percent in self-esteem needs, and 10 percent in self-actualization needs.”23 And any single behavior might be motivated by multiple needs. We work hard at our jobs because pay and benefits satisfy
...more
So Maslow’s hierarchy is actually two hierarchies. One – about the influence of external conditions on behavior – explains why most of us would prefer to go three days without self-actualizing work than three days without water. That’s the hierarchy of needs as it’s popularly understood. The other hierarchy – about intrinsic motivation – explains what allows some people to sacrifice lower needs for the sake of higher ones. A hunger striker puts self-transcendent goals ahead of survival needs. That shows a kind of maturity, an ability to suppress or ignore more urgent needs in the service of a
...more
Few think about causing long-term changes in society through growth in individual character.43
Intrinsic growth stresses internal maturation over external change. It accepts that real progress is slow and gradual. And it links progress to the flourishing of certain universal values – not only of personal freedoms, but of personal goodness. A framework of human development provides a counter to the Tech Commandments. Real progress isn’t strictly about satisfying our every present desire. It’s about our desires themselves evolving.
Narasimha is part of a national shift in India. He represents a new stratum of Indian society that is rapidly climbing out of poverty. It’s driven in part by the country’s growing wealth and in part by a wave of mass intrinsic growth. Although Narasimha grew up in a poor rural family, the combination of basic education, self-motivation, and economic opportunity puts him in a new category. He’s somewhere between the vast population of the extreme poor who haven’t yet seen much change and the historical upper classes.
• Much of the variation in human values between societies boils down to two broad dimensions: a first dimension of “traditional vs. secular-rational values” and a second dimension of “survival vs. self-expression values.”
“As individual safety and autonomy reduce egocentrism, they increase homocentrism” – the concern for all humankind that Maslow saw in self-actualizing and self-transcendent people.24
The real secret, evident all around me in my Bangalore office, was India’s decades-long cultivation of its brightest engineers through institutions such as the IITs.
Where can we locate the true origins of the large-scale change that started with the Indian technology sector? Though it was undoubtedly enabled by foreign direct investment, high-caliber engineering education and internationally experienced managers were absolute preconditions. A single change in law wasn’t enough. We can see this because we know that foreign
The rise of the creative class is an international phenomenon led by developed-world cities. Florida estimated that in the United States the creative class grew from 3 million to 38 million people between 1900 and 2000, or from 10 percent to 30 percent of the working population.
Among the creative class, self-actualization is a prominent theme. Florida wrote, “Creative workers do not merely move up the scale in Abraham Maslow’s classic hierarchy of needs. Most are not very worried about meeting the basic needs of subsistence; they’re already on the upper rungs of the ladder, where intrinsic rewards such as esteem and self-actualization are sought.”
So which comes first – individual intrinsic growth, or societal intrinsic development?37 The likely answer is that they cause each other. Individual growth tends to lead to national growth and vice versa. Socioeconomic growth and Maslovian development, like many strongly correlated social phenomena, are mutually reinforcing, at least up to a certain point of wealth. As people become richer, they aspire toward something more than mere survival. And as more people aspire to something beyond survival, society makes itself richer.
If the creative class represents mass self-actualization, then it’s tantalizing to imagine mass self-transcendence leading to a compassionate class. Imagine a country whose own needs are thoroughly met and whose dominant aspirations are world peace and prosperity.
No packaged intervention can make a society genuinely musical without something more – something dramatically more, like the single-minded devotion of capable leaders, public support and generous sponsors, a network of committed musicians and administrators, a horde of music-loving children nurtured one by one, a society rallying with encouragement – and all of it spanning generations.
This final chapter offers ideas for fostering intrinsic growth in others.
Over a span of thirty years, Pradan has developed a set of tactics for how it engages with villages. By going through them, we can understand the elements of good mentorship. I use Pradan as an example because I happen to know it well, and because it is remarkably good at what it does. But there are many other organizations, often unsung and underfunded, whose primary model is mentorship, whether they call it that or not. Shining a light on the components of good mentorship will make organizations engaged in it more visible and help other organizations become more effective.
