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Streamline Training & Documentation
Streamline Training & Documentation
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Building Disaster-Resistant Housing in Developing Countries
The Build Change organization has established a successful process for building disaster-resistant housing in developing countries. It's an approach that involves working closely with local people to ensure that
the housing fits local preferences
the people understand the value of protecting themselves by investing in housing that meets building codes
As described at the Build Change website. there are five steps in the process:
Start by learning why some houses collapsed in an earthquake (or sustained serious damage in some other natural disaster), while others did not. This involves carrying out forensic engineering studies.
Design disaster-resistant houses that are culturally appropriate, i.e., that fit what local people actually want. The Build Change process lets homeowners choose their own layout and materials and manage their own construction (with technical assistance from Build Change advisers). Build Change offers a range of solutions catering for different income levels, family sizes, cultural prefernces and climatic conditions.
Strengthen the skills of local masons, carpenters, and homeowners by providing training in how to build disaster-resistant housing. Build local capacity by hiring and working with local engineers, architects, builders, universities, and governments and by training students in technical high schools.
Stimulate local demand. Help rural homeowners see the advantage in investing some of their limited resources in building safer houses. "Make it affordable, easy to implement, and leverage the window of opportunity that exists right after an earthquake disaster."
It is also necessary for local government officials to have an easy way of enforcing building codes. "Create simple building codes, training seminars, and inspection systems that work in rural areas with little infrastructure, budget, time and personnel."
Measure the change. Look at the prevalence of disaster-resistant houses among new houses being built. "Seeing homeowners building safe houses with their own resources — not simply living in houses built for them — is the true test of sustainable, long-term change."
You can read a couple of case examples of how Build Change implements its process here. Tachnical guidelines are here.
The same sort of thinking that lay behind the training offered by the now-defunct MiMe's Cafe that I discussed in an earlier post, inspired creation of KOTO Hanoi in 1996.
Jimmy Pham, an Australian of Vietnamese descent, wanted to help street children in Hanoi develop career and life skills that would equip them for stable employment and decent adult lives. His philosophy was "Know One Teach One" (KOTO):
The greatest accomplishment for the person who has helped you, is to see you stand on your own two feet and then in turn help someone else that reminds you of yourself, because if you Know One, then you should Teach One.”
KOTO's two-year training program encompasses instruction and coaching in hospitality industry skills, life skills, and English as a second language. The hospitality curriculum has been adopted from that offered by Box Hill Institute, an Australian vocational school.
The life skills program includes instruction on health issues (e.g., reproduction) and first aid; sports, social, cultural, and creative activities; and community service.
The short (4:20) 2005 BBC video below, introduces you to a KOTO graduate and lets you see some of what the training looks like in person.
For a fuller account of KOTO's history and training program, you can watch this 17:46 video from 2007.
Vivid blog entries by Steve Jackson, an Englishman who worked as a VSO volunteer at KOTO between 2005 and 2007, are here.
Mongolia is one of the areas of the world experiencing serious desertification.1 It is also a country with a low per capita income — $1,680 in 2008.2 The Mongolian Women Farmers' Association, founded in 1999 by a native agronomist and farmer named Byatshandaa Jargal, is working to help improve this ecological and economic situation.
As detailed in a December 2007 report (pdf) published by The Asia Foundation, which has provided MWFA with some funding, the MWFA's mission is to provide training, especially to female single parents, in how to raise organic vegetables and poultry. MWFA is also involved in planting trees and maintaining orchards.
It is important to understand that growing vegetables is not something Mongolians have traditionally had experience with because the traditional — nomadic — diet is comprised mainly of meat, dairy products, and flour.
By adding vegetables (e.g., potatoes, cabbage, cucumbers, and carrots), mothers markedly enhance the quality of the family diet. In adition, income from selling surplus produce helps pay family expenses such as school fees, fees for medical services, and investment in household assets (e.g., cars, furniture, wells, mobile phones, TVs, computers).
MWFA has three training centers: in Bayankhoshuu (a Ger area in the western part of Ulaanbaatar, which is MWFA's base), Bayanzurkh (a Ger area in the eastern part of Ulaanbaatar), and Bayankhonger (the capital of Bayanhongor province in Mongolia's south; the training center is southwest of the city).
All told, the training centers train about 500-600 households a year and also provide follow-up advice. Trainees receive seed packets to get them started and, in some cases, a plot of land in a community farm. Otherwise, they do their farming in the land around their home (a ger or a house).
On October 7, Dorjgotov Ariungerel posted a report about Byatshandaa Jargal's work in which he explains how Byatshandaa's training efforts have had increasing impact as trained individuals in their turn train others.
Byatshandaa has written textbooks in Mongolian on vegetable farming and animal husbandry and also teaches vegetable gardening on TV.
The Asia Foundation's 2008 evaluation of MWFA's work was generally laudatory, though it did note a need to provide complementary training on household finances, business, selling, and marketing.
You can read Dominic Hannigan's account of his visit last year to a MWFA ger farm here. Hannigan is a Senator in the Irish Parliament. Another brief 2008 note by Gregory Cowan about the MWFA farm in Bayankhoshuu is here.
__________ 1 Brief background information on desertification in Mongolia is provided here by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.
2 See World Bank (pdf). Mongolia ranks 151 on the World Bank's listing of per capita incomes for 210 countries.
As noted in an earlier post, when households have increased access to microcredit, one of the impacts can be less use of insurance because microloans make it easier to obtain informal credit in the event of a financial shock.
Last month, Knowledge@Wharton offered an overview of steadily expanding efforts to market microinsurance effectively to poor people in developing countries. As the article explains, micro insurance comprises
risk-sharing products characterized by low premiums and coverage limits [and it] generally covers everything from life and health care to weather, property, agriculture, livestock and catastrophe.
For example, in a pilot program in Bangladesh, a partnership of six NGOs and a local insurance company is offering a product that combines life insurance with some hospitalization coverage. The basic idea is to provide a formal safety net for people who have income, even if small, to protect.
The article discusses the issues participants in micro insurance market need to address, such as making sure the perils covered by property and casualty insurance are relevant for a particular locality. Another key issue is developing a solid partnership among the parties involved — typically, NGOs, micro finance institutions, insurance companies, regulators, and community groups. Last but not least is the issue of educating both the target population and the micro insurance providers.
Now-retired professor Geert Hofstede of the Netherlands is renowned for his development of a five-dimensional model of culture at the national level. His model is based on research he conducted while employed at IBM (the first four dimensions) and on subsequent research done by Chinese scholars (the fifth dimension).
It is important to note that Hofstede's data are averages across individuals within a particular country. He readily acknowledges that any given individual may depart significantly from the averages for his/her country.
Hofstede's five dimensions are:
Power Distance Index (PDI) — "... the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally."
Individualism (IDV) vs. Collectivism — "... the degree to which individuals are integrated into groups. On the individualist side we find societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after him/herself and his/her immediate family. On the collectivist side, we find societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts and grandparents) which continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty."
Masculinity (MAS) vs. Femininity — "refers to the distribution of roles between the genders ... The IBM studies revealed that ... men's values from one country to another contain a dimension from very assertive and competitive and maximally different from women's values on the one side, to modest and caring and similar to women's values on the other. The assertive pole has been called 'masculine' and the modest, caring pole 'feminine'. The women in feminine countries have the same modest, caring values as the men; in the masculine countries they are somewhat assertive and competitive, but not as much as the men, so that these countries show a gap between men's values and women's values."
Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) — "deals with a society's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity ... It indicates to what extent a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. ... Uncertainty avoiding cultures try to minimize the possibility of such situations by strict laws and rules, safety and security measures, and on the philosophical and religious level by a belief in absolute Truth ... The opposite type, uncertainty accepting cultures, are more tolerant of opinions different from what they are used to; they try to have as few rules as possible, and on the philosophical and religious level they are relativist and allow many currents to flow side by side."
Long-Term Orientation (LTO) versus Short-Term Orientation — "Values associated with Long Term Orientation are thrift and perseverance; values associated with Short Term Orientation are respect for tradition, fulfilling social obligations, and protecting one's 'face'."
If you visit www.geert-hofstede.com, you can review graphs of how various countries stack up on Hofstede's dimensions, some assessed using the four-dimensional model, others using the five-dimensional model.
The graph directly below shows the overall average levels, on a scale of 0-100, for the five-dimensional model. Then, as examples of the national readings, I've reproduced the graphs for China and the USA, two countries increasingly involved in bilateral dealings, both commercial and governmental.
The Efficacy of Microcredit in Promoting Business Growth and Alleviating Poverty
In severalpreviousposts I've discussed microcredit. These posts have all looked at programs that combine provision of credit with training in managing a small business and the revenue it generates. The key issue is how much impact these programs have on business size and on the standard of living of the people and communities involved.
Now some further research on the efficacy of microcredit in alleviating poverty and promoting business growth has come to my attention, thanks to The Economist, which published a one-page article on the subject in their July 18 issue. Two studies are described:
An investigation of the impact of access to microfinance in Hyderabad, India. The study compared low-income neighborhoods that were added to a bank's microfinance market area with low-income neighborhoods that were left out of the market area. Assignment of neighborhoods to the treatment and control groups was random.1
An investigation of the impact of access to microfinance in the Philippine provinces of Rizal and Cavite and in the Manila area. As in the Indian study, this Philippine study used randomizing to address the problem of self-selection, i.e., the problem that the most entrepreneurial individuals are the ones most likely to take advantage of microcredit, and providers of microcredit favor markets where such individuals are concentrated.
In the Philippine case, it was individual credit applicants who were assigned randomly to the treatment and control groups. Those in the treatment group received loans, while those in the control group did not. All of the applicants in question were of marginal creditworthiness, so bank loan officers, not privy to the nature of the experiment, accepted (with a few exceptions) their computer system's decree as to whether or not a particular applicant should be approved, even though the decision was, in fact, random.2
Neither of the two microcredit programs was bundled with client training.
The Hyderabad study's findings, based on a survey done 15 to 18 months after the launch of the program, suggest that
microcredit does have important effects on business outcomes and the composition of household expenditure. Moreover, these effects differ for different households, in a way consistent with the fact that a household wishing to start a new business must pay a fixed cost to do so. Existing business owners appear to use microcredit to expand their businesses: durables spending (i.e., investment) and business profits increase. Among households who did not own a business when the program began, those households with low predicted propensity to start a business do not increase durables spending, but do increase nondurable (e.g., food) consumption, consistent with using microcredit to pay down more expensive debt or borrow against future income. Those households with high predicted propensity to start a business, on the other hand, reduce nondurable spending, and in particular appear to cut back on "temptation goods," such as alcohol, tobacco, lottery tickets and snacks eaten outside the home, presumably in order to finance an even bigger initial investment than could be paid for with just the loan.3
The authors of the study note that it is
somewhat hard to assess the long run impact of the program. For example, it is possible that in the longer run those people who are currently cutting back consumption to enable greater investment will become significantly richer and increase their consumption. On the other hand, the segment of the population that increased its consumption when it got the loan without starting a business may eventually become poorer because it is borrowing against the future, though it is also possible that they are just enjoying the "income effect" of having paid down their debt to the money-lender (in which case they are richer now and perhaps will continue to be richer in the future).
Also
microcredit ... appears to have no discernible effect on [children's] education, health, or women's empowerment [decision-making concerning household spending, investment, savings, and education]. Of course, after a longer time, when the investment impacts (may) have translated into higher total expenditure for more households, it is possible that impacts on education, health, or women's empowerment would emerge. However, at least in the short term (within 15-18 months), microcredit does not appear to be a recipe for changing education, health or women's decision-making. Microcredit therefore may not be the "miracle" that is sometimes claimed on its behalf, but it does allow households to borrow, invest, and create and expand businesses.
The Philippine study also used surveys to assess microcredit impacts. The surveys were conducted 11 to 22 months following an applicant's entrance into the experiment, and yielded these findings:
Individuals assigned to the treatment group did borrow more than those in the control group.
The marginally creditworthy microentrepreneurs who received credit shrank their businesses relative to the control group. The researchers suggest that this was a result of deciding to lay off employees who were not very productive. "[T]reated microentrepreneurs used credit to re-optimize business investment in a way that produced smaller, lower-cost, and more profitable businesses."
A rise in business profit does not translate into income and consumption changes. E.g., there were no significant effects on two key measures of consumption: food quality, and the likelihood of not visiting a doctor due to financial constraints. This could be due to the combination of increased business profits and decreased outside employment (with an increase in school attendance and perhaps related expenditures), thus leading to no change in total household income or consumption.
The treatment group reported increased access to informal credit to absorb shocks. This informal credit reduced the incentive to acquire formal and informal insurance.
There was some evidence that expanding access to capital (credit in this case) increases profits for male, but not for female, microentrepreneurs. Males seem to use the increased profits to send children to school; there is a concomitant decrease in household members employed outside the family business.
There was no evidence that increased access to credit improves subjective well-being — optimism, calmness, lack of worry, life satisfaction, work satisfaction, lack of undue job stress, decision making power, and socio-economic status. To the contrary, there was some evidence of a small decrease.
In sum:
"... increased access to microcredit leads to less investment in the targeted business, to substitution away from labor and into education, and to substitution away from insurance (both explicit/formal, and implicit/informal) even as overall access to risk-sharing mechanisms increases. Thus although microcredit does have important — and potentially salutary — economic effects in our setting, the effects are not those advertised by the "microfinance movement." Rather the effects seem to work through interactions between credit access and risk-sharing mechanisms [e.g., access to loans from family members] ... . At least in a second-generation setting [in which microcredit is provided by profit/sustainability-seeking institutions], microcredit seems to work broadly through risk management and investment at the household level, rather than directly through the targeted businesses. [emphasis added]
Also:
... treatment effects [e.g., on business profits] are stronger for groups that are not typically targeted by microcredit initiatives: male, and relatively high-income, borrowers... The overall picture of our results also questions the wisdom of targeting microentrepreneurs to the exclusion of consumers/wage earners. ... [O]ur findings highlight that money is fungible. Entrepreneurs do not necessarily invest loan proceeds in their businesses. Limiting microcredit access to entrepreneurs may forgo opportunities to improve human capital and risk-sharing for non-microentrepreneurs.
The Philippine researchers' concluding note is that "household financial arrangements in developing countries are complex ... [so] it is important to measure impacts on a broad set of behaviors, opportunity sets, and outcomes. Business outcomes are not a sufficient statistic for household welfare, nor even necessarily the locus of the biggest impacts of changing access to financial services."
3 "Among those who did not already own a business a year ago, the following characteristics predict the decision to become an entrepreneur: whether the wife of the household head is literate [a proxy for willingness to defer consumption], whether the wife of the household head works for a wage [which will reduce the return to opening a business], the number of prime-aged women in the household [also a proxy for willingness to defer consumption], and the amount of land owned by the household [a proxy for initial wealth]."
For over thirty-five years, BRAC, an NGO founded by Fazle Hasan Abed, has been pursuing a gradually expanding mission of alleviating poverty, first in Bangladesh and, more recently in other Asian countries (e.g., Afghanistan) and Africa (e.g., Tanzania). (Originally, "BRAC" was an acronym for "Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee," but now the name BRAC stands on its own.)
The video below is Abed's own summary (in January 2008) of BRAC's history and mission. Note the importance he attaches to developing programs that can be effectively scaled up.
In the video below, produced by the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation, you can get an idea of BRAC's approach to alleviating poverty, which involves an array of programs — notably, in microfinance, education, health, disaster management, environmental protection, social development, human rights, and legal services — aimed at promoting long-term development in a systematic fashion.
A shorter article about BRAC was published in the May/June 2009 issue of Saudi Aramco World.1
__________ 1 As a sidenote, I'd mention that the virtual walking tours of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain; the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul; and the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem offered at the Saudi Aramco World website are not to be missed. I am grateful to my friend Diana Wolfe Larkin for calling these virtual tours to my attention.
In her paper, Karwowski examines the issue of whether the presence of Islamic banking in Malaysia contributes to macroeconomic stability in the country.
Karwowski's paper is quite technical, but it is possible to report her main conclusion in layman's language:
Contrary to the claims of Islamic scholars, Islamic banks channeling funds from companies to households play a destabilizing role in the economy as a whole. Credit granted to the household sector is used for housing purchases and therefore inflates this asset market, increasing the system's economic fragility and encouraging speculation.
In other words, a pattern of overinvestment in housing (and consumer durables such as cars) tends to create bubbles that eventually collapse, leading to reduced and even negative economic growth — just as in an economy like that of the US, in which the presence of Islamic banking is negligible.
Karwowski argues that the similarity she found between sources and uses of funds at Islamic banks and those at conventional banks, are due to the fact that the two types of banks operate in a single economic environment dominated by the conventional banks. This constrains the ability of Islamic banks to adopt idiosyncratic practices while still attracting customers.
Jacqueline Novogratz's Ideas for Alleviating Global Poverty
You can get an overview of Jacqueline Novogratz's views concerning alleviating poverty in developing countries by reading a short article about her work that appears in the May 23 issue of The Economist.
Novogratz is the CEO of Acumen Fund, which she founded in 2001. As the website explains,
Acumen Fund is a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty. We seek to prove that small amounts of philanthropic capital, combined with large doses of business acumen, can build thriving enterprises that serve vast numbers of the poor. Our investments focus on delivering affordable, critical goods and services — like health, water, housing and energy — through innovative, market-oriented approaches.
To hear directly from Novogratz, you can watch the video below, which is the talk she gave at the conclusion of the 2008 Aspen Ideas Festival.
In the video, Novogratz addresses at a general level lessons learned and to do's for those seeking to assist with alleviating global poverty. For more detail about such matters as Acumen's investment principles and performance metrics, you can browse through the Acumen website.
In sum, the Acumen approach is to
use philanthropic capital to make disciplined investments — loans or equity, not grants — that yield both financial and social returns. Any financial returns we receive are recycled into new investments.
The Shortage of Critical Thinking Skills Among Chinese MBA Students
Back in 2007, when Marc Andreessen was still writing his blog (it seems to have gone on permanent hiatus in August of last year), I mentioned that Andreessen recommends that "high potential people who want to excel throughout their careers and make a significant impact on their fields and the world" bypass the liberal arts in college in favor of a "substantive" concentration in a field such as engineering.
This is not a view I share, so I was naturally interested in a counter-perspective offered by Randy Pollock, a consultant based in China who taught MBA students there for two years. In a newspaper column published earlier this month, Pollock laments the shortage of critical and creative thinking skills he encountered among the students. For instance, the difference between a summary of a fact situation, and an analysis of same, was hard for his students to grasp and had to be repeatedly re-explained.
In his peroration, Pollock argues that
Ultimately for China, becoming a major world innovator — and by extension, a robust economic power — is not just about setting up partnerships with top Western universities or roping off elites and telling them to think creatively. It's about establishing an intellectually rich learning environment for young minds. It's about harnessing the same inventive energy of the street markets and small-time entrepreneurs and putting it in the schools.
The Chinese don't need expensive free-agent scientists. They need a new farm system — and about 10 million liberal arts professors.
For reference, a summary of basic critical thinking skills can be found here.
To get a detailed idea of what vendors who outsource production to China have to know, you can do worse than reading David Dayton's Silk Road International Blog.
Dayton is the owner and manager of Silk Road International, "an international procurement and project management company that helps clients find the right factories in Asia and coordinates and supervises production, logistics and quality control." He has been based in Asia for over fifteen years.
The particular posts that drew me in have to do with quality control and negotiation with Chinese suppliers.
The most recent post opens with some cautions concerning personal safety in factory cities beset by rising unemployment, and then goes on to provide level-headed advice concerning how to maintain quality control standards in the face of a culture of bribes and all-too-human excuse-mongering.
Excellent (aside from the typos) posts on negotiation date back to last year. In May, Dayton compiled a list of ten negotiation tips for striking deals with suppliers and getting those deals fulfilled. To give you the flavor of Dayton's style, here's tip #4:
Anger is a good as saying you’re gone. Because competition is so fierce in China, and because there are so many other options out there, angry emails, arguments and blow ups, unless carefully managed, tell the factory that you’ve moved on (why else would you burn personal bridges?).
A few months later, in September, Dayton provides insight on how to interpret and respond to such factory statements as "We did our best" and "This is good enough for the Japanese." He sums up his views on how to handle these and other negotiating tactics from the Chinese side of the discussion by noting:
As I’m constantly reminding my project managers, negotiations isn’t about what you want as much as it’s about understanding where the other party is coming from and what they can actually do for you. Understanding what options are realistic for your supplier is a valuable starting point in discussing how you’ll get what you expect (or at least what you can accept).
Dayton then sends you on to an article he wrote in 2007 that has thirty-one further pearls of wisdom about how to negotiate with Chinese suppliers.
To mark my 1000th post, a note about Sadako Sasaki, the girl from Hiroshima whose effort to cure herself of radiation-related leukemia by folding one thousand origami cranes became an inspiration around the world, including in the Peace Park in Seattle, where the statue below was installed in 1990.
Nursery constructed by Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry & Fisheries staff in Baucau, Timor-Leste. Source:Hawai'i Forestry Extension (pdf)
The College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources (CTAHR) of the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa has a forestry extension service, one of whose activities — the Agroforestry Program of the Timor-Leste Agricultural Rehabilitation, Economic Growth, and Natural Resources Management Project — has assisted development of forestry resources in the country previously referred to as East Timor.
The project included training for staff of the Timor-Leste Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries and for groups of farmers. At the CTAHR website, you can access several presentations made by J. B. Friday, an extension forester, during the 2004 Agroforestry Nursery Training Series, which was delivered in Dili (the capital of Timor-Leste), Baucau (the second largest city), and Venilale (near Baucau).
The presentations (with scripts in English and Tetun, the Timor-Leste national language) "show examples of good nursery practices used throughout the Pacific Islands, with suggestions as to how they might be used in East Timor." There were four lessons:
The Target Tree Seedling — introduces the concepts of species selection, pots and containers, healthy seedlings with good root development, quality seed, timing of outplanting, and field evaluation of the seedlings produced by the nursery so that improvements can be made year-by-year.
Planting Stock and Containers — how different size seedlings should be grown for different projects.
Building Forestry Nurseries — how to construct shade for nurseries, why raised beds are beneficial, what other nursery structures are useful, and where to locate the nursery.
Seed Technology — why it is important to collect good seed, how to collect and store seed.
Other topics covered in the workshops included:
species selection
examples of healthy and poor-quality seedlings
soil and potting materials
seed extraction and cleaning
calendars and planning planting dates and growing seasons
You can get an overview of current conditions in Timor-Leste at a webpage maintained by the World Bank. The forestry webpage of the Timor-Leste Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry & Fisheries is here.
Yesterday's edition of Bill Moyers Journal included one of the most arresting features I have ever seen on TV. In the segment in question, Moyers presented lengthy excerpts from "Playing for Change: Peace Through Music," a film produced by Mark Johnson, a sound producer/engineer and film director.
As explained at the Bill Moyers Journal website:
"Playing for Change" "brings together musicians from around the world — blues singers in a waterlogged New Orleans, chamber groups in Moscow, a South African choir — to collaborate on songs familiar and new, in the effort to foster a new, greater understanding of our commonality.
Johnson traveled around the globe and recorded tracks for such classics as "Stand By Me" and Bob Marley's "One World" — creating a new mix in which essentially the performers are all performing together — worlds apart. Often recording with just battery-powered equipment, Johnson found musicians on street corners or in small clubs and they would in turn gather their friends and colleagues — in all, they recorded over 100 musicians from Tibet to Zimbabwe.
You can watch the "Stand By Me" portion of the film in the video below. A transcript of Moyers' interview with Johnson is here.
All of the "Stand By Me" performers are wonderful. I found myself especially taken with "Grandpa Elliot" Small, a New Orleans street musician.
Cross-Cultural Relations Between US Marines and Arabs
The July issue of the Proceedings of the US Naval Institute contains an interesting report of research Thomas Affourtit, a retired US Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel, carried out to learn about differences between the motivational profiles of the average US Marine selected for duty in the Middle East and the average Arab male.
The Proceedings article is available online only to members of the Naval Institute, but you can read an earlier version of Affourtit's article here (pdf).
Affourtit used the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule (EPPS) as his assessment tool. The EPPS, first published in 1959, measures the strength in an individual person of 15 needs or motives:
Achievement (ACH) — A need to accomplish tasks well.
Dominance (DOM) — A need to be a leader and influence others.
Deference (DEF) — A need to conform to customs and defer to others.
Endurance (END) — A need to follow through on tasks and complete assignments.
Orderliness (ORD) — A need to plan well and be organized.
Autonomy (AUT) — A need to be free of responsibilities and obligations.
Change (CHG) — A need to change activities to maintain interest. (Note that all online listings I found give a wrong definition for this item.)
Exhibition (EXH) — A need to be the center of attention in a group.
Affiliation (AFF) — A need to form strong friendships and attachments.
Intraception (INT) — A need to analyze behaviors and feelings of others.
Aggression (AGG) — A need to express one's opinion and be critical of others.
Succorance (SUC) — A need to receive support and attention from others.
Abasement (ABA) — A need to accept blame for problems and confess errors to others.
Nurturance (NUR) — A need to be of assistance to others.
Heterosexuality (HET) — A need to be associated with and attractive to members of the opposite sex.
Affourtit's surveys of Marine advisers and Arab college men in Jordan yielded the results summarized in the chart below.
Affourtit's key findings are summarized below. It is important to bear in mind that all of the summary statements are expressed in terms of averages, meaning that one should make no automatic assumptions about any individual based on these group findings.
Marines are more achievement-oriented than Arabs.
Marines are more intent on assuming leadership roles than Arabs. Conversely, Arabs are more deferential and willing to take orders. In terms of need for autonomy, Marines are at the US male norm (represented by the horizontal red line at the 50th percentile level), while Arabs are several percentiles lower.
Arabs score well above Marines on endurance.
Arabs have a stronger need for orderliness than Marines.
Arabs and Marines score similarly on need for change, and in fact are above the US male norm for this characteristic.
Marines have a markedly higher need to be the center of attention than Arabs.
Arabs are more inclined to be gregarious and generally friendly than are Marines.
Arabs and Marines are similar in their levels of intraception, i.e., need for understanding differences between themselves and others (and are at about the norm for US males).
Both Arabs and Marines score high in aggression.
Arabs score higher than Marines on need for succorance, abasement, and nurturance.
There is an extreme difference between Marines and Arabs on the need for expression of heterosexual interest, with Marines well above the US male norm, and Arabs quite low.
The summary of Affoutit's findings given above leaves out his interpretative commentary, which is highly recommended in order to more fully appreciate what can be learned from his research.
As a follow-on to the post from day before yesterday that mentions Greg Mortenson's work building schools in remote mountain areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, below is video which gives an idea of what the schools look like and how affirmatively they promote education of girls. Dhok Luna is near Jellum, south of Islamabad. The school for girls in grades 1-5 opened in the Fall of 2006 as a replacement for a school that was destroyed in the devastating earthquake of October 2005.
For further explanation of the philosophy Greg Mortenson and his Central Asia Institute (CAI) bring to assisting education of young people in underendowed regions, you can read the history of the Central Asia Institute. A key point:
The tribal communities of northern Pakistan taught Mortenson a critical lesson in our first five years of existence: Sustainable and successful development can only occur when projects are entirely initiated, implemented and managed by local communities. It is also important to listen and learn from the local communities served, rather than impose external evaluations or judgment of what is best from an outsider's perspective. The philosophy to empower the local people through their own initiative is at the heart of all CAI programs.
Given this philosophy, it is not surprising that there has been something of a shift in how CAI uses its resources:
We now put more resources into sustainable initiatives, to improve the quality of education, support teacher training, and help motivated students to achieve their education goals with higher education. We are reducing the number of new schools built and funds put into mere brick and mortar to build buildings.
You can listen to a May 2007 interview with Greg Mortenson here.
Model of the Vedic Temple and Planetarium Mayapur, India
"March 21 and September 21 are known as the Spring Equinox and the Autumn Equinox respectively. They are singularly important days in the year since the Sun rises exactly opposite the East everywhere on Earth and sets exactly in the West. Also, everywhere on Earth experiences 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night, thus the equinoxes are days of perfect balance and harmony.
"The alignment of the Temple to the four directions means that its relationship with the Sun will be strengthened on these two days each year, with the Sunrise occurring directly through the East Gate, falling at the feet of Sri Sri Radha Madhava sanctum sanctorum."
In an earlier post, I wrote about case-writing training provided to forestry managers in Bhutan. The video below, produced by the non-profit organization, TVE Asia Pacific, shows another type of training Bhutan has recently adopted, namely distance learning for the country's teachers.
As you may have noticed, Bhutan has been showing up fairly frequently in the news recently. In line with this rising profile, Bhutan will be featured in this summer's Smithsonian Folklife Festival. You can read background information on Bhutan, and access the festival program, here.
In a paper (pdf) published in the Proceedings of the 2003 Association for Business Communication Annual Convention, Asha Kaul, a professor now at the Foundation for Liberal and Management Education in India, reported on interview-based research concerning tactics employees use to exert upward influence in a certain type of organizational setting, namely one characterized by:
Transparency of policies, roles, attitude to work, and relationships with superiors and subordinates.
Flexibility with respect to such matters as deadlines, goals, policies, and dealing with personal issues.
An open door policy, meaning, more specifically, receptivity to subordinates' ideas.
Free-flowing communication/informal talk, meaning greater use of informal chats in person and by phone than of formal meetings and email.
Kaul cites as the main finding of her study the conclusion that "there is more flexibility in terms of usage of tactics when the communication process is informal."
For me, what was most interesting was the set of upward influence tactics Kaul found people using at the global company where she conducted her 23 interviews:
Reason and logic
Upward appeal
Imitation of the superior's communication and behavioral patterns.
Aggression, i.e., the "need to take a stand, push [one's] way forward, and convince the other by forcing [one's] views and opinions."
"... an interviewee recounts that the appropriate person to take a decision in moments of crisis is the employee 'on the spot'. ... In this situation, unwillingness of the superior to listen or unfamiliarity with the situation, for instance, can result in time loss and cancellation of deals. Such instances necessitate that the subordinates merely 'tell' the superior of moves being taken for producing desired results 'because our presence is in a do or die situation'."
Reasoned aggression, defined as "forceful expressions or statements, pushing forward of ideas relentlessly, unmindful of the convictions of the other party."
"... this study revealed that there was a clubbing together of reason/logic and aggression. From the findings it emerges that usage of either reason or aggression is not enough. Conjoining the two tactics produces optimum results in persuasion."
Nonchalance, a "tactic in which the agent makes an attempt to sway the target by indicating lack of interest or involvement in the subject under discussion. ... This take it or leave it tactic was seen to follow the reasoned aggression tactic."
As described by one interviewee: "If the boss is not willing to listen or get convinced by reason, aggression or a combination of the two, I move on to a very effective way of convincing him ... Show total lack of interest in the issue ... show disinterest in the team proceedings ... the [superior] then asks me the reason for it and in an informal chat I tell him."
It is the last two tactics — reasoned aggression and nonchalance — that are relatively uncommon in discussions of upward influence, though certainly not unheard of among people with decent influence skills. Kaul's description of their use brings a welcome additional degree of realism to her report on how people at a dynamic organization get others to see things their way and to act accordingly.
