We would love to see a colleague from Mo Ibrahim Foundation join this party. Also if
it would be useful to identify whether there is a joint celebration we could make as part of this series, I would welcome
that opportunity. The Taddy Blecher case not only demonstrates how much of a rising exponential African youth productivity
can be on but how much we in Europe need to go and action learn from celebrating best cases in Africa. I was briefed on some
fabulous possibilities by leaders of www.afica24.tv in Paris and want to help celebrate the good news
chris
macrae washington dc 1 301 881 1655
__________
______________________________________________
TADDY (ADAM PAUL) BLECHER
PhD (Honoris Causa), B.Sc. (Hons) (Wits)
Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries (London) F.S.S.A.
PROFILE
Dr Taddy Blecher is the:
·Chair
of the South African National Government task team on Entrepreneurship, Education, and Job Creation,
Human Resource
Development Council of South Africa
·CEO of the Community and Individual Development Association (COMMUNITY)
·CEO
of the Maharishi Institute (MI)
·Executive Chair of Invincible Outsourcing
He is a pioneer
of the ‘free tertiary education movement’ in South Africa:
·Founded the first free tertiary educational institutions
in South Africa
·As a result over 5 500 unemployed South Africans have been educated, found employment, and moved from
poverty to the middle-class
·These formerly unemployed youth have combined salaries
in excess of R250 million p.a.($35m), with an expected life-time earnings of R9.5 billion ($1.4bn)
·Over 600 000 young South Africans in schools have been reached with one-week education and life-skills
training courses
·Has raised over R 450 million in cash, property, and
equity, to support free access for financially disadvantaged South Africans to successfully go through university and post-secondary
school education
As CEO of the Community and Individual Development Association (COMMUNITY), he has been co-founder
of six free-access tertiary education institutions:
1.the Maharishi Institute (2007)– to develop by
2012 the first financially self-sustaining free-access higher-education institution in Africa
2.the Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship (2005) with
Sir Richard Branson;
3.CIDA City Campus (2000) - the first free university in South Africa; [resigned August 2008][City Campus has achieved scale and
now operates independently of COMMUNITY]
4.MERU (2011)
Assisting with the creation of:
5.TSiBA in Cape Town (2005)
6.Eden Campus in Karatara, Garden
Route (2006)
In addition, he has founded:
·Invincible Outsourcing – first call-centre business ‘owned’ and staffed by students
·CIDA Empowerment Fund – a R 150 million education endowment fund;
·Invincible South Africa
- to reduce violent crime by 30% in South Africa by December 2013;
·CBE
Schools SA - Consciousness-Based Education, a daily Quiet Time programme in schools, incorporating Transcendental Meditation
– to transform educational outcomes in schools
Initiatives currently under development:
·The
development of the field of Impact Sourcing in South
Africa, through the creation of IMPACT SA BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) Academy, as a sustainable
means to help thousands of individuals gain access to education, training, jobs, and lifetime careers, breaking the poverty
cycle
·MERU: Ezemvelo Eco-campus – to create a centre
of excellence in poverty alleviation methodologies for sub-Saharan Africa
at a R35 million Nature Reserve donated by the Oppenheimer family
·Education
and Replication Centre – to package materials and methods to open free-access tertiary education across South Africa and Africa
oIncluding, 21’st Century Learning Labs
oMass-scale,
low-cost, high-quality, effective, enlightened education
·Africa
College Fund, in process to become a USA-based 501(c)(3) charity to fund free tertiary education in Africa
Other areas of involvement:
·The Elders – development initiative with Sir Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel. Involved in
the foundational strategy and creation of the Elders [with Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Mary Robinson, Archbishop Desmond
Tutu]
·innovationTOWN - premier South African innovation
awards;
Board Roles:
Current:
·Chairperson
of the South African National Government task team on Entrepreneurship, Education, and Job Creation, of the Human Resource
Development Council [reporting to the Deputy President through the secretariat of the Human Resource Development Council]
oLaunched
an initiative in January 2012, to put 100,000 small South African business online for free, bringing together Google, Vodacom,
and the Department of Trade and Industry, and the Human Resource Development Council
·Global
Center of Social
Entrepreneurship, University of the Pacific, California
·Community
Individual Development Association, and Community Individual Development Trust
·Maharishi Education for Invincibility Trust
·International
Board of Branson School of Entrepreneurship [co-founded with Sir Richard Branson: schools now launched in South Africa and Caribbean,
and under development for several other African countries]
·Invincible Empowerment Fund, and Invincible Outsourcing
·Supernews,
South Africa
·Patron of the Tomorrow Trust
·Cents
for Change
·National Director of Consciousness-Based Education
for South Africa
Former Board Positions:
·International
Marketing Council of South Africa [invited by SA President]
·CIDA City Campus, currently a ‘member of organisation’
and attend AGM’s
Dr Blecher is formerly a qualified actuary and management consultant.
Taddy turned down a R1.3 million per annum job in
1995 and numerous offers subsequently of dramatically higher salaries and has spent 16-years to help uplift the lives of historically
disadvantaged individuals in his country and to build access to education for all in South Africa.
HONOURS
·Inc.com
Magazine, author Tom Peters ranked Taddy Blecher as one of his top 5 most influential entrepreneurs in the world of the last
30 years, 2009
·$ 1 million award for Social Entrepreneurship, Skoll Foundation award to support his work in CIDA
City Campus, to honour the most innovative and effective approaches to resolving critical social issues world-wide, 2006
·Awarded two honorary doctorates: Goodwin College,
USA, 2004; Maharishi University of Management, 2007, in recognition of contribution
to society
·Global Leader of Tomorrow Award from the World Economic Forum,
2002. Recognised as one of 100 young leaders under the age of 37 around the world who are making an exceptional contribution
to 'making a better world’
·Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, 2005
·‘Favourite business personality in South Africa’, Glamour Magazine, 2005
·Ranked #5 amongst business leaders in South Africa, in the publication South
Africa’s Leading Managers, Corporate Research Foundation
·Recognised
by The Star newspaper as being one of the top 100 people in 2002 that made the headlines. He was ranked number six in the
country in the business category as, “An inspirational speaker whose incredible story made every major publication in
South Africa.”
·Supporters of his work have included: Sir Richard
Branson; Oprah Winfrey; His Holiness the Dalai Lama; Suze Orman; Oppenheimer family; Russell Simmons; Bill Gates; Michael
Dell; & leading South African and international corporations and foundations
AWARDS
vBMF (Black Management Forum Award) - a ‘shining example of achievement
and success’ in empowering managerial leadership amongst black people
vWitsUniversity
Alumni Honour Award
vRotary, Paul Harris Fellowship, their highest honour, for
‘service above self’ contribution to the community in the field of tertiary education
vJewish Report humanitarian Award
vToastmasters ‘Communicator of the Year’ Award
vThe Maharishi Award, 2008
vWorld Shining Humanitarian Award, 2009
vWits Humanitarian Award, 2009
vThe David Award for Gemilut Chesed, from the King David Foundation, 2010
vGlobal Hero Award, from the Global Center for Social Entrepreneurship, University
of the Pacific, California, October 2010
INSTITUTIONAL AWARDS
vSABC2 Achievers’ Award for education. The award pays tribute to African
excellence and is an acknowledgement of Africans who have made a profound difference.
vThe National Productivity Institute’s chairperson’s award for outstanding
contribution.
vGrand prix award
in the Age of Innovation competition for the most innovative organisation in South Africa,
vThe Nedbank Prosperity
Sustainability Award
v“Seedlings of Success” Award for the Maharishi
Institute; October 2010: chosen in Bahrain’s Education
Project for global education prize to recognize young (early-stage) educational institutions or programs that have maximum
potential to bring positive educational outcomes and significant good as they grow and scale. The judging for the award was
done by National Ministers of Education from 10 countries, and 500 educators from 48 countries; featured on CNN, Wall-Street
Journal, CNBC, and by over 100 international news agencies
BOOK CITINGS
Over 30 published books have profiled Dr Blecher’s
work, including the three most recent books by Sir Richard Branson (Screw Business as Usual, Nov 2011; Business Stripped Bare;
Screw It, Just Do It), Extraordinary South Africans (2010), The Optimist (Lawrence Shorter, 2009), The Opposable Mind (Roger
Martin, 2009), Three Feet from Gold (2009) the 100’th year centenary of Napoleon Hill’s, Think and Grow Rich.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Has lectured in
the fields of Strategy, Management, Statistics, Business Mathematics, IT, Insurance and Financial Services, Leadership and
Consulting.
WORK EXPERIENCE
Taddy is a former senior project leader with international
strategic management consulting firm Monitor Company, where he was rated in the top 1% of consultants in the firm.
Formerly an actuary at a large South African financial services organisation,
Taddy has won several awards and scholarships including the Liberty Life Gold Medal for top
Actuarial Honours student in South Africa.
CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
Dr Blecher has presented at over 300 conferences
over the last 15 years in South Africa and around the world on topics
related to poverty eradication, developing economies, innovation in education, and human potential development.
These talks include amongst others: Microsoft; Canadian Government; Alexander Forbes UK; Sir Richard
Branson’s Leadership tours to South Africa; The Elders; World Economic Forum; Skoll Forum;
Education Project, Bahrain; Global Center for
Social Entrepreneurship; Clinton Global Initiative, and Young Presidents Organisation.
NOTES ON ENDING POVERTY WITH CHICKENS
By way of context, armed with MIT database technology that emerged in the 1970s, my statistician peers and I have
researched the societal value multipliers of markets in 40 countries over a third of a century. My dad’s livelihood of entrepreneurial journalism on what is and isn’t economical about marketing practices goes back to
1949 when he joined The Economist. His curiosity and love of life had helped him to teach himself basic precepts of economics
from an Indian correspondence course while working as a teenager to navigate RAF planes in world war 2 out of modern day Bangladesh
My family and friends have become ever more concerned as to how markets can be used in 2 opposite ways:
- Dismally to become ever less economical and less sustainable,
- Optimistically to free (lively young) peoples’
productivities and communities’ sustainability.
Actionably, this dilemma of “questioning
how economics would increasingly rule the world” was the final warning which Keynes tutored his last classes of students
on including dad (Norman Macrae) at Cambridge in 1948. Any market system gravitated by purpose is a tensely structured exchange
of productive and demanding relationships. It is mathematically predictable that it will spin ever more uneconomically when
there are too many players with the same me-too-offers. They are at risk of resorting to more and more advertising and addiction,
more and more costly channels, uneconomic defensive strategies that professors in ivory towers are hired by the big get bigger
to preach, professional monopolies who lose the Hippocratic responsibilities for whole truth which societies entrusted to
them, and the depressing politics of humanly unproductive power games. This increases conflicts at borders
like nobody’s business - a terrifying consequence of man’s unnatural temptations to command and control which
Hayek termed as macroeconomics’ Fatal Conceit. And, as this compounds exponentially, across generations, educators,
children and adults lose quality time and open spaces necessary for common sensing of unique purposes, which innovation could
have helped free the human race to integrate, and helped save families to compound sustainability across generations.
For an interesting US CEO perspective on purpose and conscious leadership, search youtube.com for Mackey and rainforest
alliance, or go to wholeplanetfoundation.org where you will see how every 2 years Whole Foods doubles the number of Bangladeshi-inspired
microcredits it is planting across all the hemispheres –and deeply diverse cultures . It freely markets this, as its
people interact their uniquely purposeful business of sourcing as much organic foods as American supermarkets can afford.
My first experience of the internet was to cut and paste a book which I published openly with The Economist Intelligence
Unit with the aim of searching out: what is the unique multi-win purpose of any market that might have
critical impacts on life? This research started in1996, and I was fascinated how increasingly those who worked with the poorest,
including the originators of microcreditsummit, came up with more joyfully productive (and sustained value multiplying) definitions
of markets than those who worked with the markets of the richest men in the world. Today we can celebrate the knowledge that
banks for the poorest believe the true purpose of credit and savings is served when credit communally identifies
the moment in life a person most needs a loan to maximize her income generating entrepreneurship, and wish to develop her
family. Whereas the purpose big bankers in rich places believe in is: trapping customers, and communities, in
debt fanned by conspicuous consumption as well as trapping governments in debt so that we end up with the agencies of over-standardised
short-term ratings ruling the world. I would prefer my daughter to live in a 21st century where we empower deeply
cultural sustainable contexts determining what working lifetimes are available. This energetically and happily renews a model
which microeconomists openly began mapping in the 1950s: the search towards a 2 million “global village” networking
economy.
ON TO CHICKENS
In Bangladesh, Grameen Bank’s view
of ending poverty with chickens is: let’s help communities of the poorest work out how many chicken egg layers each
group of 60 poorest village mothers need. That way our country won’t suffer from accumulating any me-too marketing waste;
the village will support the optimal number of chicken layers, and there will be practically no costs of marketing thanks
to each direct exchange linked in @ village center groups of 60 purposeful maternal producers of services which children and
families need most.
BRAC’s view of ending poverty with chickens is the traditional scrawny village chicken
is inefficient – can we develop a chicken that lays many times more eggs making a better wage for the village chicken
keeper? After several years of asking this question it turned out that yes BRAC can, but 5 different jobs
were needed (each of whose producers is microfinanced just-in-time) with the consequence that a whole supply chain is redesigned
to be optimally sustainable in helping end poverty.
The other 4 jobs, beyond one person keeping a flock of
chickens in the village are:
Breeding
the superchicken
Para-vets
who are needed to regularly inoculate these chickens as they are more prone to disease than the traditional village chicken
Distributing
the surplus eggs of the chickens beyond the village to the cities
Now that we need ten times more chicken feed than ever before, sourcing this from land that
couldn’t produce human feeds
What is nice from an economical point of view is that Grameen
and BRAC offer complementary (nor me-too) competitive ways of ending poverty with chickens. While I am not an expert, I believe
you will find that over the years that grassroots entrepreneurial networks have grown, the similar dual
competitive choice of freeing villagers productivities and needs has been extended in Bangladesh to nearly a dozen different
agricultural markets, and some crafts and clothing markets.
I anticipate that some people’s
last question of this note will be : which is better - the Grameen way or the BRAC way? I personally recommend that we can
help improve each other’s race to jointly end poverty. Just as me-too competition isn’t economic wherever people
aim to end poverty, open collaboration is the innovative new economic model that the net generation’s full employment
needs. At least research for the biography of John Von Neumann demonstrated how he saw this as the way above zero sum game
to help the first net generation productively innovate using the computers whose collaboration purpose Johnny brought to life.
(See Biography, John Von Neumann, Norman Macrae)
It is true that those supply chains which BRAC reengineers
have an optimal chance to be the most efficient in the world of ending poverty. However Grameen mediates everyday communal
trust instead of advancing separated parallel industries. Grameen’s purspose includes deep resolution of cultural conflicts
(reference anything written by Mrs Nurjahan Begum). It also creates organic networking space for identifying what is the next
big thing – see how it went into mobiles in the villages before BRAC. Joyfully so because the village centre structure
of its 8 million membership community is now an extraordinary paradigm for 100000 hubs to experiment with the optimal way
villagers can end digital divides empowered by the new freedom to exchange life critical knowhow across villages. In any event,
there is so much for the rest of the world to action learn on the hi-trust meaning of free markets from both Grameen and BRAC
– as motherly villagers in Bangladesh cross-fertilise this nation’s wonderful 40th year in 2011.
Mathematically, I believe its true and fair to say that in the 2010s the more sustained methods of ending poverty
in developing worlds are congruent to the methods that promise emergence of the most productive jobs for young people all
over developed worlds.
best chris macrae
www.yclub100.com
wash dc 1=301 881 1655
note 2 added 1 dec 2011
dear joyce
wonderful meeting you at EU; as a MA in statistics I have worked for 20 years on
exponential maths of social performace -love to share some time' in DC I have only ever found one group who map exponenetials
at usaid and world bank - their buzzword is value chain analysis- their local facilitators include Dao in kenya and CARE in
Bangladesh
I
think we discussed how microcredit networks in your Nordica region MEED URGENLTLY TO continue the prominence of deep microcredit
that the Polish chair has celebrated into the Danish chiar- does the diary over the next 6 months suggest any key events-
and if so what would be best time to come over either to prepare for them or to be at one of them
Just a long shot - have you by any chance some across swede Borje Wallberg- he's
now semi-retired but for much of his life he mentored many of the swedes that worked as missionaries aboard and networked
their diverse knowhow; originally his family came from banking so he is a doubly valuable guide to who's who. In 2009 Borje
and I spent 2 days in Paris intervieing every Yunus partner we could- at that timje Borje was temporary director of the Yunus
partnership with Asian Insitute of Technology in Thailand
I understood your practices
connect with tanzania- so I will try and check with brac's former chief of staff who lives near me, who is a contact for BRAC
Tanzania
Also I do know Swedish Ingrid Munro leader
of Kenya's www.jamiibora.org - which was announced 2 years ago as youth's and south hemispheres most exciting replicationh mdoel bno less than Queen Sofia
of Spain, the royal who has helped celebrate all 15 years of microcreditsummit whose coordinator sam daley-harris I also know
quite well.
4
Bangladeshi and 2 leaders of 10000 entrepreneurs linked by intercity hubs, and estelle in paris and a Scot :Jeff
Nazrul (who moved to spain from Grameen about 5 years ago) guides me round the wonders
of which microcredits in Spain understand the gramen model
Prof
Bhuiyan (OFC) runs the most transfornational youth10000 jobs brainstorming competitions it is possible to host in a day
Mostofa is a Bangladeshi vilager who graduated from London university
and is now back in Dhaka. He has been involved in most youth projects ever since yunus got the nibel prize
Zasheem you have met
Jeff (also at Economist's
remembrance party) and I worked in 1990s on hi-conflict projects at a big 5 management consultants- these included work for
pharma companies in sweden and around 1994 full analysis of how unsustainable EU grants to Portugal were going to be
Jonathan founded the www.the-hub.net and Lesley linking in out of s. africa's is the hub africas most connected person- both went on a personal visit to ingrid
jamii bora this time last year. I am not sure if anyone at the stockholm hub most deeply shares our urgent interests such
as whether the EU will use or abuse microcredit as its last chnace for community revival and youth employment. Estelle and
Jonathan have atended most of the entrepreneurial revolution events rememebring my fathers work at The Economist in pursuit
of 1843 founders goals to use media and economics to end poverty and end capital abuse of youth. She is a filmaker and journalist
linking in French networks, and her father open sources a key component of digital cash. I need to urgently organise 2 days
of meetings in Paris. A key reason is the ceo of Africa 24 who operates out of St Cloud and aims to beat off CNN all over
afica by providing news africans need. On a good day Paris may be the place to reunite enough of Iqbal Quadirs partners through
Africa and Yunus'. There is currently a mortal war between these 2 people who originally partnered in bringing mobiles to
the villages in 1996. This is unfortunate as iqbal's networks at MIT map futures that realise my dad and my's 1984 vision
of how to prevent macroeconomics from destroying the net generation. http://www.normanmacrae.com/netfuture.html This web is maintained by fans of dad in Singapore where a major yunus tech summit happens in february
The 2 countries that specifically took my dads advice are poland in its first 5 years
of building economics opposite to communism (say if you want literature on that) ; the new vikings commissioned by the swedish
employers association in 1992 as an update on netfuture. Who is the highest tech leader in nordica that we know and who could
link in both to quadir and berners lee at MIT and yunus tech in singapore and intel
sincerely
chris
macrae
I skype at chrismacraedc - do you skype?
www.entrepreneurialunion.com wash dc 1 301 881 1655
www.yclub100/com the 100 leaders who most want 2010s to be youths most productive decade
