Author: Vikram Akula
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 9352779878
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
Vikram Akula founded SKS Microfinance with a clear mission: improve the lives of poor people in India by providing small loans. These small loans, used to start or expand businesses and generate earnings, were a proven path out of poverty for tens of thousands around the world. Vikram wasn't the first person to bring microfinance to India, but his idea was to do it on a much larger scale, for millions. He would do this by making SKS Microfinance a unique for-profit institution. SKS flourished, distributing billions of dollars in loans. The company was applauded for blending philanthropy and capitalism, and Akula appeared on the covers of the Wall Street Journal and TIME magazine as one of the most influential people in the world. But just as he thought he was making a difference, a storm was brewing. In 2010, a fierce political backlash in India created an implosion. Politicians began attacking microfinance and telling those living in poverty not to repay loans. Soon, SKS had to write off $280 million in loans and lay off 10,000 employees. For decades, microfinance had been heralded as a key solution to global poverty, but, nearly overnight, it came to be viewed as a villain. One of the most exciting recent developments is the rise of new businesses and entrepreneurs committed to social good. Social enterprises have the potential to transform societies, but there are risks as well as benefits. Micro-Meltdown is the story of SKS's tremendous success, the oversights that led to disaster, the eventual resurgence, and the lessons learned. It is essential reading for any would-be entrepreneur who wants to change the world for the better. It offers an insider's account of both the keys to success and the risks that must be managed.
Author: Mimi Swartz
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 076791368X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
“They’re still trying to hide the weenie,” thought Sherron Watkins as she read a newspaper clipping about Enron two weeks before Christmas, 2001. . . It quoted [CFO] Jeff McMahon addressing the company’s creditors and cautioning them against a rash judgment. “Don’t assume that there is a smoking gun.” Sherron knew Enron well enough to know that the company was in extreme spin mode… Power Failure is the electrifying behind-the-scenes story of the collapse of Enron, the high-flying gas and energy company touted as the poster child of the New Economy that, in its hubris, had aspired to be “The World’s Leading Company,” and had briefly been the seventh largest corporation in America. Written by prizewinning journalist Mimi Swartz, and substantially based on the never-before-published revelations of former Enron vice-president Sherron Watkins, as well as hundreds of other interviews, Power Failure shows the human face beyond the greed, arrogance, and raw ambition that fueled the company’s meteoric rise in the late 1990s. At the dawn of the new century, Ken Lay’s and Jeff Skilling's faces graced the covers of business magazines, and Enron’s money oiled the political machinery behind George W. Bush’s election campaign. But as Wall Street analysts sang Enron’s praises, and its stock spiraled dizzyingly into the stratosphere, the company’s leaders were madly scrambling to manufacture illusory profits, hide its ballooning debt, and bully Wall Street into buying its fictional accounting and off-balance-sheet investment vehicles. The story of Enron’s fall is a morality tale writ large, performed on a stage with an unforgettable array of props and side plots, from parking lots overflowing with Boxsters and BMWs to hot-house office affairs and executive tantrums. Among the cast of characters Mimi Swartz and Sherron Watkins observe with shrewd Texas eyes and an insider’s perspective are: CEO Ken Lay, Enron’s “outside face,” who was more interested in playing diplomat and paving the road to a political career than in managing Enron’s high-testosterone, anything-goes culture; Jeff Skilling, the mastermind behind Enron’s mercenary trading culture, who transformed himself from a nerdy executive into the personification of millennial cool; Rebecca Mark, the savvy and seductive head of Enron’s international division, who was Skilling’s sole rival to take over the company; and Andy Fastow, whose childish pranks early in his career gave way to something far more destructive. Desperate to be a player in Enron’s deal-making, trader-oriented culture, Fastow transformed Enron’s finance department into a “profit center,” creating a honeycomb of financial entities to bolster Enron’s “profits,” while diverting tens of millions of dollars into his own pockets An unprecedented chronicle of Enron’s shocking collapse, Power Failure should take its place alongside the classics of previous decades – Barbarians at the Gate and Liar’s Poker – as one of the cautionary tales of our times.
Author: Vikram Akula
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 1422171620
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 201
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Book Description
Around the globe, poverty has held too many people in its grip for too long. While microfinance - small loans to impoverished individuals - initially attracted attention in the press, it didn't achieve the scale, scope, and profitability necessary to substantially combat poverty. All that changed with Vikram Akula's creation of SKS Microfinance. In this highly personal narrative, A Fistful of Rice, Akula reveals how he pieced together the best of both philanthropy and (to his surprise) capitalism to help millions of India's poor transition from paupers to customers to business owners. As thoughtful as Barack Obama's personal journey in Dreams from My Father, as harrowing as Paul Farmer's battle against infectious disease in Mountains Beyond Mountains, and as gripping as Greg Mortensen's fight for education in Three Cups of Tea, Akula's story shows how traditional business principles can be brought to bear on global problems in new ways. A Fistful of Rice offers not only inspiration but also lessons for anyone seeking to transform tenacity, creativity, and innovation into potent tools for fighting even the most seemingly intractable human burdens.
Author: Kevin A. Carson
Publisher: Booksurge Publishing
ISBN: 9781439266991
Category : Anarchism
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
A history of the rise and fall of Sloanist mass production, and a survey of the new economy emerging from the ruins: networked local manufacturing, garage industry, household microenterprises and resilient local economies.
Author: Otaviano Canuto
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 0821385461
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
This book is a vision of how economic policy will evolve in developing countries over the next three-to-five years, delivered by renown practitioners working at the world's leading development institution.
Author: Amy Cortese
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470911387
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
Explores the local investing movement, whereby investing in local businesses rather than giant conglomerates helps earn profits while building healthy, self-reliant communities, and introduces the ideas and pioneers behind the movement and offers investment strategies.
Author: Vida Česnuitytė
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030868974
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 429
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Book Description
This open access book considers the development of the sharing and collaborative economy with a European focus, mapping across economic sectors, and country-specific case studies. It looks at the roles the sharing economy plays in sharing and redistribution of goods and services across the population in order to maximise their functionality, monetary exchange, and other aspects important to societies. It also looks at the place of the sharing economy among various policies and how the contexts of public policies, legislation, digital platforms, and other infrastructure interrelate with the development and function of the sharing economy. The book will help in understanding the future (sharing) economy models as well as to contribute in solving questions of better access to resources and sustainable innovation in the context of degrowth and growing inequalities within and between societies. It will also provide a useful source for solutions to the big challenges of our times such as climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and recently the coronavirus disease pandemic (COVID-19). This book will be of interest to academics and students in economics and business, organisational studies, sociology, media and communication and computer science.
Author: Marguerite S. Robinson
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 9780821349533
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 524
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Book Description
??? ... Microfinance is the method whereby financial services and credit is made available to the economically active but low income people of developiong countries. This book focusses on three key aspects of the phenomenon: 1) the shift from government- and donor-subsidized credit delivery systems to self-sufficient, sustainable microfinance institutions; 2) the results on the ground, on the way in which microfinance is helps people expand and diversify their enterprises, increase their incomes, raise their living standards and those of theri families, and boost their self-confidence; 3) the theroretical frameworks that had previously impeded the microfinance revolution, with suggestions for their improvement.
Author: Julian Gruin
Publisher: Alternative Sinology
ISBN: 9781526135346
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Why has China's 'transition' to a market economy not catalysed corresponding political transformation? In an era of deepening synergy between authoritarian politics and capitalist economics, this book offers a novel perspective on this central dilemma of contemporary Chinese development, shedding light on how the Chinese Communist Party achieved rapid economic growth while preserving political stability. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and over sixty interviews with policymakers, bankers and former party and state officials, the book delves into the role of China's state-owned banking system since 1989, showing how political control over capital has been central to the country's experience of capitalist development. It challenges existing state-market paradigms of political economy and reveals the Eurocentric assumptions underpinning liberal perspectives towards Chinese authoritarian resilience.
Author: Patrick Bond
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Zimbabwe
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
'This timely and provocative book provides a masterful analysis of the crisis of neoliberalism and the challenges of Zimbabwe. A must-read for all those interested in Zimbabwe's Plunge and the possibilities for the future.' - Tandeka C. Nkiwane, Smith College.
