Pete Blackshaw — executive vice president of Nielsen Online Digital Strategic Services and author of Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000 — points to low-hanging fruit in an AdAge piece called Marketers Love Conversation Unless the Consumer Starts It (11 August, 2008):

If the consumer voice is so important these days, why are brand feedback, or “contact us,” forms so get-out-of-my-face unfriendly?

I dare you to find a feedback form that winks even a quasi-friendly smile. And if you find one that allows consumers to truly communicate in their native voices — complete with links, photos, audio clips or videos — I’ll eat my just-published book.

How about it? How important are your customers really?

• Do you employ a ‘contact us’ web form or email?
• Have you taken it on a test drive?
• How easy is it to find?
• How easy is it to use?
• Was the language shaped by someone who thinks (please don’t take offense) like an engineer, or someone who thinks like a brand marketer?
• Who responds to feedback? What is that person (or group) empowered to do in an effort to satisfy complaints?
• What, if anything, would change if the motto of your feedback team were drawn from James 1:19: “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry…”

Africa Doesn’t Matter: How the West Has Failed the Poorest Continent and What We Can Do About It
Giles Bolton Arcade Publishing, New York, Copyright 2007, 350 pages

Giles Bolton is a British-born relief worker and diplomat who has spent a good part of his professional life as an on-the-ground representative of several international relief agencies working in Africa. He has seen the good, the bad and the ugly up close, and knows whereof he speaks.

His book is not a self righteous tirade against developed countries not doing enough. Rather, it’s a clear expose of what are the real problems facing poor African nations, why billions of dollars in public and private aid over many decades has done so little to raise standards of living in Africa, and, importantly, what you and I as citizens of the developed west can do to make a real difference.

Surprisingly, his answer is not “The West must give more money.”

He develops his case from both personal experience and careful research. Drawing on economic data from World Bank and other sources, Bolton lays out the relief industry in easy to follow charts – where the money comes from, where it goes, how effective is it.

He sketches out the African historical context, from pre-colonial times, to the century-long period of western colonization, the wars of independence, and the current political and economic struggle to ascend from poverty.

To dramatize the predicament African nations face, he uses the metaphor of a hypothetical African country – the Republic of Uzima — to which the reader has just been elected president, and follows him (you) through the first week in office and the initial briefings by various cabinet ministers. Bolton gives us a terrific appreciation for the difficulties facing even the most capable and honest leaders of these emerging nations.

To see life from the point of view of the intended recipient — Bolton introduces us to real families he knows in different countries — Marie in Congo and Lucas in Kenya, and follows them through a day in the life of a poor person in Africa.

The combined effect is to impart a clear view of where western aid has failed to achieve its desired ends in Africa.

Some key insights from the book:

• The aid industry, like others, is subject to economies of scale, as well as to the problem of large organizations — bureaucracy. Small relief agencies spend too much of their receipts on fund-raising and administration, rather than delivering aid to the needy. Large relief agencies have trouble executing on the ground, and are often subverted by corruption at the local level. Many agencies operate in the same areas but do not coordinate their efforts.
• Being dependent on the good will of donors, few relief agencies give objective reports on the effectiveness of the programs they run. Donors are more concerned with giving rather than with the effectiveness of their gifts. To many, it seems uncharitable to ask what good a program is doing. The dual effects invariably lead to lack of accountability.
• Aid must come in a form that works for the recipients rather than a program designed by well intentioned program developers thousands of miles away.
• Much of public aid is tied to developed nations own exports — grain & medical supplies, for example — and to paying the salaries and benefits of the administrators of the program. Bolton estimates that over 80% of public aid is “diverted” to recipients in the western developed countries.
• The majority of sub-Saharan Africa survives on subsistence agriculture. Bolton introduces us to Jean Marie who has a small plot of land, which makes her more fortunate than most her neighbors. But her living conditions are so fragile that the slightest bump to her living situation can knock her family into starvation, to seeking relief and becoming refugees.
• Disasters tend to attract large scale emergency relief, but then there is little follow-on to alleviate the conditions that led to the disaster in the first place. Living on the precipice of starvation continues to be the norm.
• The core problem is unemployment. Africans spend many hours walking to town to find work, not to go to work. When they find work, it is often temporary, and low paying. It is the lack of industry (not unwillingness to work) that is killing much of Sub-Saharan Africa.
• Many African nations’ economies depend on a few commodities – cotton, cocoa, coffee, tea. A bad season can wreak havoc with local economies.
• The great failing of the West is that its trade policies work to limit the full development of Africa’s comparative advantage — agriculture. World Trade Organization is largely concerned with fair trade of manufactured goods. Agricultural commodities are not addressed. Europe and the USA both subsidize their agriculture heavily. The result is they have dumped agricultural products on African markets, pushing out local farmers, and their policies limit African export sale of processed agricultural goods, reserving the higher value-adding processing for US and European companies.

The prescription Bolton calls for (after a plea that western nations live up to their pledges for giving aid) is primarily a call for free and fair trade with Africa. Being a realist, he understands that trade policy is a matter of special interests and lobbying. His call then is to individuals – you and me – to change our buying habits to favor African processed goods, as well as bring political pressure to bear on our elected leaders to reduce harmful farm subsidies.

“Poverty,” Gandhi is quoted as saying, “is the worst form of violence.”

If you are new to this subject, Giles Bolton’s book is a balanced, candid and reasonably dispassionate look at the aid industry as it works today in Africa. If the book has any shortcoming, it’s that the author doesn’t address the difference between relief agencies, most of which tend to not work, and development agencies, some of which appear to work admirably. He also basically gives the OPEC Arab nations a “pass” on their global responsibilities to help developing countries. Perhaps the author simply did not intend to cover this subject. But as each of the western countries is compared on public and private giving programs, the inquiring mind naturally tends to wonder how the extravagantly rich Gulf states compare.

That said, it’s well worth the read, and a great challenge to those who do give, to review their giving in light of what works and what doesn’t.

Mr. Salter’s book, Innovation Corrupted: The Origins and Legacy of Enron’s Collapse (Harvard University Press), takes advantage of court documents and other public information not available to earlier writers and may be the best informed treatment of Enron so far.

A few nuggets from Salter’s conversation with Martha Lagace from Working Knowledge:

Enron was an innovative company, and its downfall can be traced to supreme arrogance bred by considerable success, some extremely poor diversification decisions, and poorly conceived and implemented administrative practices that led, over time, to reckless gambling and ethical drift. This drift was facilitated by Enron’s bankers and advisors and largely missed by its board of directors and other watchdogs.

[S]upreme overconfidence and perverse financial incentives led to a gladiator culture in which executives proposed—and risk managers and the board of directors approved—a growing number of risky gambles with high expected returns. Meanwhile, building on intense lobbying to encourage further domestic deregulation and limit federal oversight of the energy industry, Skilling encouraged Enron executives to exploit to the hilt recent Securities and Exchange Commission rule changes as well as then-current tax rules.

To help disguise the company’s deteriorating financial position, many outside advisors and bankers either colluded in or acquiesced to these questionable transactions. Enron’s sophisticated risk analysis and control system also experienced serious breakdowns. These breakdowns, along with management’s increasing aversion to truth telling, isolated the board from many evolving realities. In addition, Enron’s supernormal growth and skyrocketing stock price made it difficult for most directors to challenge management’s strategy and tactics.

At Enron there were many opportunities for enormous personal gain that distracted top executives from the essential tasks of maintaining institutional integrity and building stable relationships with shareholders and employees.

In this vacuum, abstract definitions of purpose unrelated to corporate ideals, distinctive competences, and organizational opportunities easily gave way to uncontrolled criteria such as personal preference and opportunism.

Perverse incentives are legion throughout our system today. For example, perverse incentives for both mortgage brokers and investment bankers helped create the subprime crisis that we are now living through.

Mr. Salter concludes with a series of questions about Jeffrey Skilling, Ken Lay and the Enron Board. worth pondering and discussing in all our companies:

• According to what logic did Skilling and Lay, and ultimately the board, approve using the company’s own stock to capitalize its own hedging counterparties? (This was an extremely risky hedging arrangement that required Enron to issue more stock if either the current value of its stock or the future value of its commodity contracts declined and that, in addition, left Enron with no effective hedge on its contracts if both values declined at the same time—which they did.)
• Why did Skilling, at critical moments, treat differences of opinion, pushback, and penetrating questions from both insiders and outsiders as either stupid comments or narcissistic insults rather than opportunities for constructive dialogue?
• Why did Skilling, Lay, and Enron’s board of directors fail to understand and act decisively upon increasing internal evidence that Enron was financially distressed and heading toward insolvency?
• Why did Lay’s espoused faith and Christian values fail to guarantee his moral leadership and protect the enterprise from increasing immoral behavior?
• How did Skilling and Lay imagine that their personal conduct could influence the behavior of others within the company?
• What internal images of personal leadership and stewardship did their behavior reflect?
• How did they reassure themselves that they were doing “the right things” all along?

Our desks and nightstands are overflowing with books we’re skimming, reviewing, and reading to keep up with where business thought is going. We’re working hard to connect what we find to a biblical perspective on life in general and the business life in particular. We don’t endorse (nor have we reviewed in detail) every book in this list. But, since people often ask, "So what are you guys reading right now?" we thought we’d post this revolving list.

Check out the right hand column below our featured book or just click here. Feel free to comment on our selections and recommend anything you think we should know about. We enjoy the process of learning together with you.

Donald cut short a business career in Great Britain to add his depth to a 501(c)(3) non-profit. He says, “My agency works throughout the Developing World and is increasingly concerned to bring biblical perspectives to bear on issues of corruption.” If this sounds cut and dried, it isn’t. Donald writes: “Living ‘successfully’ in much of the world tends to require the giving and taking of ‘gifts’ in order to move about and function well.” This inevitably leads to the sometimes-fine distinction between a gift and a bribe.

“Our commitment to ‘seek the peace and prosperity (shalom – see Jeremiah 29:7)’ of the cities to which we are called implies at least passive resistance to the systemic evil expressed in favoritism for people of means and oppression of the powerless. On the other hand, a case can be made that much of what Americans would label corruption is in fact fluent cultural adaptation and that moralizing about it may simply be an attempt to impose alien values under a cloak of presumed fidelity to the Scriptures.

“Can we indeed address corruption biblically,” Donald asks, “without setting it in a comprehensive approach to business ethics? Do not concepts of justice and love demand that we look broadly at morality in the marketplace? In that spirit, here are a few resources that attempt to think biblically about corruption.”

Thanks Donald…

Click Here To Download Donald’s Bibliography