Cracking the last-mile distribution challenge

You can’t manage what you don’t know.

While we’d probably all subscribe to that maxim, it’s one that rings especially true for organizations seeking to serve the more than four billion low-income people living at the base of the pyramid (BoP).

BoP markets have long been heralded for their potential to drive economic growth and social impact on a massive scale by providing millions of poor households with affordable access to essential goods and services such as safe water, clean energy and improved sanitation.

The fact that we’ve barely scratched the surface of that potential points to the essential problem: these markets are notoriously hard to reach, with geographic isolation and limited access to information leaving BoP customers disconnected from any business value chain.

This dislocation is the crux of the so-called last-mile distribution challenge and, if we’re going to crack it, then finding ways to reliably connect with end customers, and capture and make use of their insights, is surely a vital part of the equation.

That’s because — in largely informal economies, where word of mouth is king — the end customer is so much more than that. They’re also potentially your sales force, your design team and your corporate strategy department — your best source of market intelligence on what works and what doesn’t out there in the real world.

A collaboration between EY, Acumen (the world’s leading impact investor) and Frontier Markets (one of its investees) stands as proof of the difference that can be achieved when impact entrepreneurs invest time and energy in establishing robust feedback loops with customers, as well as the dealer networks that form an essential part of so many BoP value chains.

Insights and lessons learned from that collaboration (including from the odd failure as well as successes) are the subject of a new report I had the pleasure of writing – Are your customers in the loop? – which aims to accelerate the growth and impact of the social enterprise sector at large by translating the experiences of that single project into practical and generally applicable guidance that any BoP business can follow.

It not only shows that it’s possible to mine a rich seam of valuable customer data, if you are prepared to experiment with technology, and create the kind of incentives and experiences that make customers want to engage with you; it also illustrates how that insight can be used to drive all manner of strategic and operational improvements that can help BoP businesses to increase their resilience, productivity and capacity for sustainable growth.

The importance of such efforts shouldn’t be underestimated.

Impact entrepreneurs and their businesses are crucial to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, making sure that many more millions of people are able to share in the benefits of economic growth. Fusing the social mission of a nonprofit with the market-driven approach of business, they are critical engines for powering inclusive growth, human dignity and potential.

They are at the epicentre of an altogether different narrative about inequality and business’ role in tackling it, by providing affordable access to the essential goods and services — energy, education, health care, housing, water and sanitation, and agricultural inputs — that give people the agency to change their lives.

Often succeeding in spite of massive constraints, few are more significant than the challenge of last-mile distribution. If we can find reliable ways through and around that challenge, then there is no telling what more these innovators might achieve.

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On the search for identity in a VUCA* world

As I’ve written before, perhaps the greatest joy of my current role is the exposure I get to the fabulous work of some truly inspirational impact entrepreneurs. These people are at the forefront of accelerating progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals, innovating new business models specifically conceived to extend affordable access to essential goods and services (e.g. off-grid energy, clean water, improved sanitation) to households living at the base of the pyramid.

Many of those that EY works with are investees of Acumen, one of the world’s leading impact investors, who are also seeking to cultivate a wider community of change-makers through their +Acumen platform. Having signed up to +Acumen, I get the occasional thought-provoking email from them, and the one I received this morning really stopped me in my tracks.

Citing the following from Amin Maalouf’s writings on identity, it’s striking how relevant these words – written almost 20 years ago – feel today:

[In] the age of globalization and of the ever-accelerating intermingling of elements in which we are all caught up, a new concept of identity is needed, and needed urgently. We cannot be satisfied with forcing billions of bewildered human beings to choose between excessive assertion of their identity and the loss of their identity altogether, between fundamentalism and disintegration. But that is the logical consequence of the prevailing attitude on the subject.

If our contemporaries are not encouraged to accept their multiple affiliations and allegiances; if they cannot reconcile their needs for identity with an open and unprejudiced tolerance of other cultures; if they feel as if they need to choose between the denial of self and the denial of the other – then we shall be bringing into being legions of the lost and hordes of bloodthirsty madmen.

For it is the way we look at other people that imprisons them within their own narrowest allegiances. And it is also the way we look at them that may set them free.

What do you think?

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* VUCA = Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous

On our desperate need to teach civics

Getting my caveats in first, I don’t mean for the body of this post to imply that people who voted for Brexit are stupid. Although admittedly fewer in number than Remainers in my acquaintance, I know enough very reasonable and well-reasoning Brexiters not to stoop to that level.

And yet…

For every rational and reasonable Brexiter in my circle of friends – with whom it’s possible to have a sensible discussion – there is at least one other who can be relied upon, like clockwork, to breathe life into the “ignorant Brexiter” caricature by regurgitating Daily Fail-fuelled bile at the very whiff of anything that tickles their “Remoaner” gag reflex.

One guy in particular – my antagonist in this particular exchange and a dozen others like it – appears to come straight out of central casting:

CAPS LOCK on for SHOUTY REPLY? Check!

Inability to master basic spelling and grammar? Check!

Complete reliance on straw men as the basis of argument? Check!

Refusal to engage substantively, deliberately not answering direct questions and/or replying to challenges and counterargument with yet more straw men? Check!

In his mind, and the minds of others like him, there’s only one course of action for “whining liberals” (his epithet of choice for people such as I): to shut the hell up! For him, it’s as if democracy existed for one day and one day only – the day of the referendum – then promptly vanished like a fart in the wind.

It’s exactly this that disturbs me more than anything that Brexit may hold in store for us, and the thought that lends me the title of this post – the quite staggering lack of knowledge about what it means to live in a democracy.

His is a world in which a well-functioning democracy is entirely compatible with judges being branded “enemies of the people” for having the temerity to assert the primacy of Parliament (Erm… isn’t UK parliamentary sovereignty what you said you wanted? Have you ever looked up “separation of powers”?).

It’s a world in which a well-functioning democracy is entirely compatible with ownership of the press by a handful of oligarchs (Erm… have you seen who owns that paper you read? Is it possible their reporting might be, I don’t know, ever-so-slightly biased? Have you ever tried sourcing “news” from multiple sources to get a more balanced view?).

It’s a world in which a well-functioning democracy is entirely compatible with the indefinite suspension of freedom of speech (at least as far as Brexit is concerned).

How much longer must this sort of thing go on before the realisation dawns that no democracy can function effectively, so long as a sizeable number of its subjects remain wilfully ignorant of the rights, duties and responsibilities it entails?

A slightly edited version of the particular exchange that sparked this post – what set yer man off, what he wrote, and what I said in reply to try and set the record straight – is laid out below. At the time of writing this, I haven’t received any further reply and, while the idealist in me would like to think I might actually have broken through this time, my inner realist won’t be placing any bets on it.

---

Dan Gray:
Retweeted Stephen Harper (@stephenaharper)

Celebrate Brexit day by cancelling your Netflix subscription and attempting to build a VHS player using instructions on the side of a bus.

Brexit bloke:
OR GET OVER IT   AND LABOUR DIDN’T WIN SHAL WE HAVE ANOTHER  GENERAL   ELECTION   I DIDN’T WIN THE LOTTERY   SHALL I DEMAND A REDRAW [sic.]

Dan Gray:
At what point have I ever even implied that I demand another election or referendum? Time to retire that pathetic straw man argument. For the umpteenth time, this time in really short sentences:

1. Brexit is happening.
2. I accept this democratic decision.
3. But I don’t have to like it.
4. And I’m free to continue to express my dissent.
5. This is called freedom of speech.
6. Which is also part of democracy.
7. Don’t like it? Boo hoo!

If you insist on living in a country without such rights, and where every citizen is forced to agree with the powers-that-be, I hear North Korea’s nice.

 

Discovering new-found respect for philanthropy

I’ve always had a bit of a downer on corporate philanthropy, having tended to equate it with first generation sustainability strategy and practice – a model based on ‘giving something back’ that often pays little or no heed to what the corporation takes in the first place. In so doing, I’ve always felt, it tends to perpetuate the framing of sustainability as a discrete agenda, separate from core business.

Reflecting further on the latest Acumen Debate hosted by EY earlier this month, however, I’m thinking it’s maybe time to revise that view.

The spur for this reflection is a thought-provoking comment made by Sam Parker, director of the Shell Foundation, in speaking against the motion that, “This house believes that impact investors don’t need to compromise between financial and social returns.”

He was following on from – and directly responding to – the argument made in favour of the motion by Diana Noble of CDC, the British government’s development finance institution. Her experience, she said, proved there was no compromise. CDC has achieved an average 6% return on investments in its portfolio of ‘base of the pyramid’ (BoP) enterprises over the last 20 years; and on her regular visits to Africa and South East Asia, she could not go anywhere without seeing the benefit of businesses, “that simply wouldn’t exist without CDC.”

The essential thrust of Parker’s retort was that’s grand, but how did those businesses get to a place where they became an investible proposition for the likes of CDC? “Somebody somewhere had to do the heavy lifting,” he said. “Somebody somewhere paid for that.”

And you know what? I think he’s right.

If you think about it in terms of something like Ichak Adizes’ famous corporate life-cycle model, impact investors like CDC might only really enter the fray once an enterprise has reached ‘adolescence’ and the risk of ‘infant mortality’ has passed.

Work backwards through the ‘go-go’, ‘infancy’ and ‘courtship’ stages – where ultimately the business idea is but the proverbial twinkle in the parent’s eye – and, chances are, you’re going to be looking at investors with a very different profile.

Go back one step, and you might be looking at investors prepared to work at breakeven; go back two and they’re maybe willing to put up with a 50% loss; go right back to the outset, and you’re probably looking at pure philanthropy – the, “early-stage patient grant,” as Parker put it, without which, “there would be nothing to invest in.”

For me, that logic felt hard to refute and, whereas the show of hands at the end of the event appeared to show several of the audience metaphorically crossing the floor from the ‘opposed’ to ‘in favour’ camps, much to my surprise, I found myself moving in the opposite direction.

Happy Now?

This sums up how I feel, pretty much to the letter. Sad. So sad.

Katyboo1's Weblog

It is day four in the Big Brexit house.

I had hoped after Friday’s absolute catastrophe of a day that the country might somehow magically rally over the weekend. I mean, when you plunge your country into possible ruin on the promise of a golden future that will allow it to rise like a phoenix from the flames, you have a plan, right?

As it turns out, you don’t. The only person that seems to have any plan at all, and be acting on it rather than just spouting meaningless Churchillian rhetoric is Nicola Sturgeon, and I can’t even vote for her.

I was distraught and angry on Friday. I had hoped to feel better by today. Instead I am running on barely controlled rage and getting more enraged by the moment.

Here are a few things I am furious about:

Firstly, leave voters telling me to calm down. I’m sorry…

View original post 1,627 more words

A more beautiful question

For a while now, I’ve been searching for what author and journalist Warren Berger calls ‘a more beautiful question’ – the kind of question that, with elegant simplicity, can encapsulate a wealth of ideas, concepts and possibilities; that can help to shift the way we perceive or think about something; and that has the capacity to spark breakthrough ideas.

While that kind of preamble almost inevitably sets me up to fail, I think I may finally have fashioned one worth sharing, and it goes like this:

What if business reoriented itself as society’s greatest problem solver?

I use the word “fashioned” advisedly, of course. I don’t claim any originality, save perhaps for the particular combination of words. The ideas and concepts that underpin it are many, varied and long-established – the self-same ones that have preoccupied me (and many others) for years now.

While people may choose different labels to describe the conceptual space here – be it sustainability, creating shared value, purpose-led business, inclusive capitalism or whatever – they are fundamentally united by a common set of assumptions:

1. That, whatever your views on the role of business, and the capitalist system more generally, in creating many of the problems and inequities we see today, it’s also essential to solving them (as evidenced, for example, by the inclusion of business as a key partner in achieving the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals);
2. That business, and again capitalism more generally, is perfectly capable of this kind of ‘reboot’ (indeed, as powerfully argued by some smart folks at McKinsey, creating and scaling solutions to human problems may always have been at the heart of how and why capitalism works);
3. That the fates of business and society are interdependent and it’s in the best interests of both that business steps up to assume this role as a partner of choice in solving social problems (whisper it quietly, but business-based approaches are frequently more effective than government or charitable aid in reducing inequality).

What this all boils down to – what we arguably lost during the cult of maximizing shareholder value, and what we are now slowly rediscovering – is the understanding that the long-term prosperity of business and society go hand-in-hand. Business cannot, and should not, divorce its success from the health and resilience of the social and ecological systems that give it life.

Moreover – in line with Peter Drucker’s famous dictum that the only purpose of business is to create a customer – the idea of seeing business first and foremost as a problem-solving engine, rather than solely a vehicle for maximizing short-term shareholder gain, would seem a much better and broader reflection of what successful companies actually do.

With specific regard to the third point above – and offering an inkling of what reorienting business as society’s greatest problem solver might look like – probably the greatest joy of my current role is the exposure I get to the work of some outstanding social entrepreneurs.

As a firm believer that the sustainability imperative represents the innovation opportunity of a lifetime, understanding and telling their stories (and EY’s role in helping them build the internal capabilities to extend their reach and impact) is something I find endlessly fascinating. After all, in many ways, social entrepreneurs are the purest incarnation of purpose-led business – a mash-up of the social mission of a non-profit with the market-driven approach of business to innovate new products, services or approaches to tackling society’s most pernicious problems.

Take Jibu, for example, a clean water franchise business in East Africa, conceived by brothers Galen and Randy Welsch as a better way to tackle the problem of affordable access to safe, clean drinking water. Its ingenious business model equips local franchisees with advanced, solar-powered filtration equipment that can clean locally sourced water and make it available at a fraction of the price of other bottled water – each franchise effectively becoming a water purification plant for the surrounding community.

More than the question of affordability, the structuring of the business as a franchise also neatly addresses the problem of sustainability (in terms of long-term viability). Whereas donor-funded water schemes often suffer from a lack of local ownership – as a consequence of which, around half of them fail within a couple of years – every Jibu franchise is run by a member of the community it serves.

This puts the very people who benefit from the service in charge of running it, combining their need for clean water with their desire to control their own destinies and build a more prosperous future for their families. It’s a virtuous circle that should see the growth of the business not only provide permanent access to safe water for more than a million people by 2020, but also create 8,000 jobs, in turn providing 8,000 families with a decent and reliable income.

What makes stories like Jibu’s more compelling still is the fact that, more often than not, social entrepreneurs are achieving this kind of success against a backdrop of massive resource constraints. These are master hackers, and you have to wonder what might be achievable if big business took the time to observe, draw inspiration and reverse innovate from their approaches.

Of course, encouraging business-at-large to do so is precisely the purpose behind searching for (and hopefully finding) that more beautiful question in the first place.

Does culture really eat strategy for breakfast?

As a self-styled purpose-led strategist, you’d probably expect me to agree with the maxim that culture eats strategy for breakfast and, by and large, you’d be right.

Any organisation is, at heart, a social construct – a coming together of people to achieve in concert something that they couldn’t achieve on their own. It follows that, while business models and strategies may come and go, what can and should unite them all is a clear sense of why the organisation exists in the first place (purpose) and a shared understanding of the values and norms of behaviour (culture) that actively guide how its people should pursue it. (Well that’s my story anyway, and I’m sticking to it.)

Whichever you believe ought to have primacy – whether culture shapes strategy or the other way around – what is emphatically true is that one is useless without the other. Just as strategy without culture is fundamentally rudderless, culture without strategy is toothless.

For compelling evidence of the latter, look no further than the abject failure of England’s rugby team at the Rugby World Cup, the underlying reasons for which were summarised with characteristic brio by Dan Jones in the Evening Standard the other day:

Under [Stuart] Lancaster England have developed pride, ‘culture’ (whatever that really means) and manners. Good for them. They have not, however, developed a breakdown specialist, a functional centre partnership, on-field leadership, a consistent playing style or any big-game chops. For this, heads must roll.

A more succinct dissection of England’s failure I’ve yet to see and it’s hard to argue with Jones’ assessment, given that every area in which England struggled against Australia – most notably the back row’s ability to deal with the breakdown prowess of the brilliant David Pocock – was entirely obvious and predictable to every rugby aficionado on the planet (save, it seems, for Bomber and the rest of his coaching staff).

The thing is, though – and this is the critical point – this England team’s fate wasn’t sealed by defeat to Australia last Saturday. It wasn’t even sealed the week before when they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory against Wales. The ignominy of being the first host nation to fail to advance from the pool stages has been in the post for at least a couple of years – the result of muddled strategy and selections that no amount of esprit de corps could hope to compensate for.