Building a Business that does good

Three things happened to day which are bringing into sharp relief something I've believed for sometime (it shapes how I am with people) but have yet to "realize" it corporately so to speak. In the business world, generally you work with whomever you can, so long as it is profitable first, and enjoyable second - and the first can eliminate the second (we need the business).

We at GLS dezign are different, and there are in fact more and more businesses like us. When you are in an unpredictable universe, where things could go bad at any time, when times are tough, there is a tendency to prioritize $'s above all else. However, what more and more people are realizing, what the enlightened approach to business is, is to truly be yourself, to do good, and to work with people like you. We are attracted to each other, we are brought together often by fortunate "chance," but the more our self-statements and our marketing statements reflect this solid, grounded presence, this being good at what we do, and committed to doing good, the more we will attract these kinds of clients and partners.

So the three things that got me thinking about this:

First I had an email from a potential client telling me I had failed in my first impression, because of getting the time and place wrong for our meeting. This is quite common in business culture, to judge people, sometimes quite dispassionately, on their first impressions. I'm a businessman, but I've never done this: rather I look beneath the surface in everyone. I have also found to my dismay that the people in best control of their first impressions often made terrible business partners, and very difficult clients, because of how ruthless and unethical they were. I am no longer interested in working with such people.

Second, was an email invitation to take a course on social marketing. If you're ready to be snowed by someone, desperate and looking for answers and perhaps have already been burnt by slick, empty marketing that cost you money without delivering anything, then, you might be ready to take the plunge with this lady. However, she horribly over-promises the way so many "success" vendors do, and so, despite the glitz of her promises I'm really not interested in learning from her.

Third, a small charity I know running an orphanage and school in Ghana, recently put out the message I've pasted below. It's about getting consumers to slightly change their habits in order to direct small %'s of the sponsor's revenues to the designated charity. While this has the possibility of being able to create a revenue stream for your charity, it involves either changing how you search (therefore your effectiveness) as well as shopping online at this place rather than that place. From a marketing point of view this could work well for a charity with a well-established brand and 1,000's or 1,000,000's of "friends" a small percentage of whom might be willing to through the trouble to register and shop at this particular location. But personally, I prefer the granular one person, one business at a time approach we are using, working with people who share our values, in order to grow both our business and foundation. I will however check out Goodsearch and Goodshop, as she is a very small charity like us, and perhaps this can work at our level as well.

To close, there was in the Ottawa Citizen this morning two stories of interest that provide an interesting context to this reflection:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/health/rude+worker+poisons+whole+office+study+finds/1910315/story.html
is a story about research into the effect of negative behaviour in the workplace. While the focus is on coworkers, obviously negative behaviour from clients or partners can have the same effect, the more people that are exposed to it.

But to finish off we have Steve Wosniak who had the following and more to say about his philosophy of being in business:

One of the pioneers of Silicon Valley and the creator of the world's first mass-market personal computer has some simple words of wisdom for today's struggling startups:

"Believe in your product." Adds Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Inc.: "Don't ask yourself, 'Will this be successful or will this make money?' Ask, 'Is this what I want to do?' "Ask yourself, 'Are you absolutely sure that this is what you want to do to make a big mark in the world?' "

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Wozniak+words+wisdom/1910821/story.html

On that note, for business people of similar strip, let's forge our way with confidence and yet wisdom as we find the people like us with whom we want to work, and, find our way to making that mark in the world we have in mind!! :)

your brother Dan

********************
What if FosteringHopeInternational earned a donation every time you searched the Internet? Or how about if a percentage of every purchase you made online went to support our cause? Well, now it can!

GoodSearch.com is a new Yahoo-powered search engine that donates half its advertising revenue, about a penny per search, to the charities its users designate. Use it just as you would any search engine, get quality search results from Yahoo, and watch the donations add up!

GoodShop.com is a new online shopping mall which donates up to 37 percent of each purchase to your favorite cause! Hundreds of great stores including Amazon, Target, Gap, Best Buy, ebay, Macy's and Barnes & Noble have teamed up with GoodShop and every time you place an order, you’ll be supporting your favorite cause.

Just go to www.goodsearch.com and be sure to enter FosteringHopeInternational as the charity you want to support. And, be sure to spread the word!

Collecting used not abused Athletic Shoes and all sizes of soccer cleats to establish selfsufficent sustainable farms for individual families in Ghana.

Elaine Brown, Director
FosteringHopeInternational.com
GoodSearch - Web search, coupons, discounts & deals for charity!
Source: www.goodsearch.com
GoodSearch - Search the web to support your charity. Also, find online coupons, coupon codes, deals, discounts and promo codes at GoodShop.

Ghana 3: It is heating up!!

this is the 3rd in a series of my republished accounts of my trips in Ghana from January- February of this year, as a warm-up for my Ethiopian trip this September . . . more on that later!

For a cold-adapted guy like me, something more ominous than storm clouds is on the horizon, in fact it is already here. Each day is hotter than the last, and although these gains in heat and humidity are small, the fact that I've got a month of the same to look forward to is looming over me now! I'm now implementing the opening of windows in the evening once it is cooler, and then the closing of them again in the day once it starts to warm up. Every little bit helps, but the trend is undeniable. Fortunately my new clothes will be ready tomorrow evening as I'm sure I will sweat my way through at least one outfit a day, and I only have 3 or 4 light cottony outfits. V will have close to a continuous stream of laundry from me as S's washing machine broke down quite a while ago and V is its replacement. I sure do get nicely ironed clothes back from her!

Speaking of V, she is now learning her numbers from me: practising writing them as well as their visual recognition. Her English is also improving rapidly. We are able to communicate well enough that I now know that she likes the boy in Eremon who keeps calling her, that he is working, and that she's known him for about five years. He's a nice boy, smaller than her, but that's what she likes. I teased her about wanting to be the boss in her family, as this is a very patriarchal culture where the men still traditionally call all the shots. She liked the tease.

With the boys, I am the respected, loved and feared Uncle who supports their learning: so far I have helped K memorize his times tables, showed P how to ace exams, and helped R develop his soccer skills), and of course, at the drop of a hat they are being tickled or thumped, sometimes for no reason at all. S is now onside for the rough-housing, understanding the benefits for the boys in the development of their masculinity. P and S will also be taking some instruction in meditation and breathwork from me, as P had put together a meditation practice for himself based on what he found on the internet, but had been dissuaded by S because of the biased psychological and christian perspectives she had been fed. Fortunately she has a PhD in psychology and religion staying with her with a lot of experience in meditation who's all to familiar with the tendency of religious christians and religiously-biased psychologists to pathologize and demonize stuff they don't understand.

S and I have been working together a lot on her ideas for an NGO and what I'm finding in internet research, as well as going deeper into the spiritual direction, counselling side of what I do. She's encouraging me to think about setting up a counselling practice in Ghana; I'm encouraging her to think about a solar energy business since there is a UN NGO called AREED that supports the development of entrepreneurs in the renewable energy field, and my friend T's Dad has developed a really nice solar energy package viewable at wwww.solarfire.com. F has been away working this week, but when he's around we tend to focus a lot on guy stuff like watching soccer games and discussing bible translation, religion, and the country and its issues. At meal times, I've been telling them all about Holland, China and India rather than sitting listening to P and K extol the merits of one of their video games. Most evenings, S and I go out for a long walk in the cooler evening air, and I've had a couple of Skype computer to computer phone calls with T and A from Holland and L from Ottawa.

S and I met yesterday with a parishioner from St. John's (my church - Elgin and Somerset St. in Ottawa) and received some much appreciated support for our key perceptions and ideas, as well as some helpful networking contacts and general advice. He's acting head of the CIDA branch of the Canadian Embassy in Ghana, and a former international development professional, so he's being very helpful to us in many ways. Tomorrow we will meet with S's cousin, who's a senior bureaucrat in Ghana's Agriculture department. "Bit by bit the river grows, till all at once it overflows" is a line from an old song that comes to mind.

So I continue on living a day at a time, enjoying the walk, the company (both earthly and heavenly) and the scenery, if not the climate.

heating up in Ghana, but not sweating it too too much

5 weeks in Ghana January – February 2009 1st Journal post

Technorati Tags: Ghana,foo foo,traffic,etiquette

Anticipating a trip to Ethiopia, and perhaps Taiwan and Ghana beginning mid-September, I thought I’d repost my experiences, experiences which to date had only been sent out by email and a couple of previous blogs to a long list of friends, colleagues & acquaintances. Now these experiences are being offered here on Blogger & Facebook.

The following was my first "impressions" piece about being in Ghana:

Well, hello India, it's nice to back! So much of what I see and experience here is straight out of my experience of India. Being as I absolutely fell in love with India, you can guess where this is going then! :)

So some of the flora and fauna is pretty familiar, as is the architecture, climate, roads, etc. Some important differences are however that there are many more cars and trucks than motorbikes, whereas in India, exactly the reverse is true. In Accra you don't see many bikes, motorized or not, whereas in India there is an overwhelming number of them. In Holland, there are certainly a lot more bikes than cars and trucks, but not on the scale or proportion of India. Anyhow, here traffic often crawls; drivers are often polite, with a few very aggressive drivers adding spice to the over-all mixture.

People are more allergic to accidents here in Ghana than perhaps anywhere else I've been. It's very interesting what policy can do to public behaviour. For example, in Syria, drawing the attention of the police to yourself always results in misfortune, and so people keep their noses very clean. One time, out in the country, a drug dealer had a farm, and had fortified it, had armed men, etc., Two police officers were shot at when they went out to make some arrests. A helicopter gunship flattened the place killing everyone. So a harsh police system cuts down on visible crime, unless it is, in the case of Syria, crime carried out by the ruling family.

Here in Ghana, the policy towards car accidents is that both parties in the accident have to go through the rigamarole of re-taking their driver examinations. Thus people are even more motivated than usual to avoid car accidents and to settle them privately if they have one. Thus aggressive drivers get away with it, because nobody wants the trouble of being penalized for getting in an accident with one of them.

When it comes to crime, such as burglary or fraud, anyone unfortunate enough to get caught in the act would be very happy to see the police, because they can count on getting a major beating from the affected people, their family, neighbours and friends. Fabian told a story of a man who went around taking pictures of people in his village in Northern Ghana, collecting deposits, and then never coming back to deliver the goods. Unfortunately for him he forgot he'd defrauded this village and some time later came back through. They demanded their money back, which of course he didn't have so they took their satisfaction out on personally beating him, that is each one that had been defrauded got their satisfaction.

Fabian took me for a drive yesterday including through the very crowded central market area. We were in a vehicle without air conditioning so I had my window all the way down despite the crowds packed against the car. One woman said (in her language) "Look at that white guy, he's not afraid of anything!" Evidently white people driven through the market in cars are a bit timid and keep their windows closed and doors locked. I will be going down there later on foot (at Fabian's suggestion) as I'm still looking to pick up local traditional clothing. Of course one needs to be careful of becoming a "mark" or "target", as almost happened already last evening, but my experiences in India and China have helped me recognize the dynamics of these situations as they unfold.

I took Prescott to a small local garage store in search of batteries, but I was concerned he would not get the type right, so turned off the vehicle and went in after him. There was a group of 4 guys lounging to one side and sure enough one of them had situated himself near the vehicle when I was coming back out. He tried to make eye contact at which point I pointedly averted my eyes and walked past him, disappointing him in the process because he could not engage me. I just got in the car with Prescott and left. Body language and use of the eyes is pretty key.

Stella has also suggeted I take public transport up to Wa way up in Northern Ghana, and from there I can stay with a teacher relative of hers and by motorbike travel to the villages of Eremond. We shall see - it looks like it could be a 700km trip!:) http://www.mapsofworld.com/ghana/ghana-political-map.html

In whatever manner, and however I'm guided, the adventure continues. I've been meeting people with training and backgrounds who could contribute big-time to a sustainable agriculture, water conservation project, so it should in fact be a very interesting next few weeks! :)

For what it's worth, I've been given a passing grade by the relatives they had over yesterday for dinner. Evidently I'm not doing too bad at basic cultural niceties like eating Foo Foo with my right hand and keeping my left hand out of circulation. Foo Foo is beaten yams (a large root with white flesh) pounded for more than an hour by Stella's domestic (in a wooden bowl with 6 foot long pestle or pounding stick resulting in a sticky doughy mass served as steamed mounds that you serve in a bowl of soup and meat. The etiquette is to rip or scoop pieces off of the mound, dip them into the soup and scoop the mixture into your mouth with your fingers! Quite appetizing. Oh, and so far, I have yet to hit really hot food! :)

Anyhow, nuff for now!