Unreasonable Fellows , livre ebook

Penguin Books Ltd - Myshkin Ingawala

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100 pages

English

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To achieve what you want to, to do what you truly believe in, you ve got to be unreasonable! How many of us dream about changing the world when we grow up? How many of us actually have the courage to take the path less trodden? The Unreasonable Fellows chronicles the journeys of ten social and environmental entrepreneurs who, with their go-getting attitude and passionate ventures, are doing their bit to make the world a better place. It is an inspiring account of how, despite the initial setbacks, these fiery men and women refused to give up. Instead, they learnt from each of their failures and turned it into success. This book teaches you to do the same and to never ever give up!

Informations

Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	15 janvier 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789351186045
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Nikita Singh with Myshkin Ingawale

THE UNREASONABLE FELLOWS
Contents
About the Author
1. Sanga Moses
Clean Energy
2. Donna Morton
Power to the People
3. Nathaniel Koloc
Don t Settle
4. Jennifer Guintu
Never Let Opportunities Pass You By
5. Ties Kroezen
Creating Impact
6. Zhaohui (Anna) Yang
Never Quit
7. Raj Janagam
Work Hard, Don t Stop
8. Saba Gul
Bliss!
9. Luis Duarte
Making the World a Better Place
10. Shivani Siroya
Invest in Good
Authors Notes
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE UNREASONABLE FELLOWS
Nikita Singh is the bestselling author of six novels, including Love@Facebook , Accidentally in Love and The Promise . She has co-authored two books with Durjoy Datta, titled If It s Not Forever and Someone Like You . She has also contributed to the books in The Backbenchers series. She was born in Patna and grew up in Indore, from where she graduated in pharmacy. She is currently based in New Delhi, where she works as a publishing manager at a leading publishing house. Nikita received a Live India Young Achievers Award in 2013.
With a library stocked with over 12,000 books, she is a voracious reader and adores her collection of fantasy novels. She is a cricket enthusiast and enjoys a good cardio workout.
Myshkin Ingawale is the CEO and co-founder of Biosense Technologies, an award-winning health-care start-up focusing on point-of-care noninvasive diagnostics. His work has been featured on TED, BBC, CNN and other notable international media. In the past, he has worked at Mckinsey & Company and been a researcher at MIT s SENSEable City Lab. He holds an FPM (the Fellow Programme in Management, equivalent to PhD) in Management Information Systems from IIM Calcutta and a BTech in electrical engineering from NIT Bhopal. He remains a passionate but somewhat deluded Liverpool Football Club fan. He is also easily tempted by anything with wheels.
This book is dedicated to everyone who dares to choose an unreasonable path
1
Clean Energy
SANGA MOSES

Sanga Moses-CEO, Eco-Fuel Africa (EFA)-is a devoted social entrepreneur who has committed himself to bettering the lives of his countrymen. His vision is to provide clean, inexpensive cooking energy to all Ugandans while improving socioeconomic outcomes and reversing deforestation. He is fluent in all major Ugandan languages and gets along famously with anyone he meets, Ugandan or otherwise. A former corporate accountant, Sanga is a graduate of business administration at Makerere University, Kampala, and has started three successful enterprises before EFA that currently employ over 120 people in Uganda. Moses is a TED Fellow, 2012, a Community Solutions Fellow, 2012, an Unreasonable Institute Fellow, 2011. He is a mentor and a source of inspiration for many in Uganda and around the world.
SANGA MOSES was born in a small village in Western Uganda during the Civil War in the early 1980s (he does not know exactly when, and there is no written record that he is aware of). His parents-Twagira Joseph and Nyangoma Loy-were cattle herders, and belonged to a tribe called the Hima, closely related to the Tutsis tribe. He grew up in the village, learning how to tend to and milk cows. Sanga s family owned about thirty of them. When asked about how his monetary background was growing up, he says, Rich and poor are relative terms-I wouldn t say we were poor by the local standards. We always had a lot of milk!
The elders in his village did not value education. You cannot blame them, says Sanga. They had never been inside a school and had no idea what it was all about. To them, it was important that children learnt their way of life, their traditions I was supposed to get married early, to contribute to the life of my community.
So it was that Sanga never actually went or made any plans to go to school-it was only his next-door neighbour, a few years older, who took him there one year at the start of a term. He wandered into the nearest classroom and sat down, trying not to attract attention. No one-certainly not the teachers!-noticed. The classroom happened to be the second grade, not nursery, where he was supposed to start from. Incredibly, Sanga just kept attending this class for the rest of the year, without anyone noticing that he hadn t attended any of the lower grades. He struggled in the beginning, but managed to recover slowly and eventually did well enough to get promoted to the next grade. To this day, he has not got to learn formally what the rest of the students were taught in the lower grades.
So does Sanga think this incident had any impact on him? Apparently not. He got the last rank in class in the first test he took, but his grades steadily got better.

Sometimes you can catch up-it doesn t matter where you begin.
Extraordinary!
Sanga grew up quickly. When he was in the fifth grade, he started his first business: selling milk.
He would get up earlier than anyone else and fill up a set of jerry cans with the milk his family s thirty cows generated. Then he would make his way to the trading centre of the village and be amongst the morning s first sellers. Then, he would carry whatever inventory was left over and take it to school to sell it to the schoolchildren. The school was six miles away.
In school, he was known as the milk boy . The bigger boys would sometimes bully him, take his milk, but, overall, Sanga managed, and managed well.
He soon realized, though, that selling to school kids is not the best business.
Why?
Bad trade, says Sanga. School kids never have a steady source of cash. A lot of them bought the milk on credit. Sometimes I would get paid weeks after I had sold the milk. Or in the case of the bullies, not at all!
The best customers were at the trading centre, and there, Sanga developed a list of loyal customers with whom he did regular business. He ensured his inventory was sold every morning at the trading centre.
Sanga remembers very little of the lessons taught but he does remember how his school uniform made him feel! Putting on a uniform in the morning was great! Because back home, you would put on a sweater-and that is that. Maybe you didn t even have a pair of trousers. But now I had trousers and a shirt. Didn t mind about the shoes, because no one at school had them!
He didn t learn much from his teachers, but dealing with his customers in class taught him a great deal. The kids were from different tribes. I learnt a lot about how to deal with them all. In hindsight, I think it was a great learning experience.
He didn t have any particular dream but knew he had to go further than primary school.
The secondary school was farther away from his home, not even in the same village. The school was a few sub-counties away from home and Sanga won a scholarship from the government to study there. He had to leave home and stay in a boarding school, near the Lake Mburo National Park in Uganda.
Things were different there. Sanga couldn t sell milk here, being away from home. But he did have to do something for a living. To earn money, he set up a second business: haircuts! He started a barbershop.
Did he know how to cut hair? Where did he get the money?
Luckily I had some money saved over from my milk business, but not enough. My mother sold a goat and secretly gave me the money to buy the things needed to set up the shop-the rent, the chair, the mirror Cutting hair is not difficult. I learnt by visiting other barbershops and watching them work.
Business was great. His fellow students liked Sanga s barbershop!
The problem was the teachers objected to Sanga missing classes to go run his shop. So Sanga had to hire his first employee-who would run the shop when Sanga was in school.
Sometimes he would rip me off! He was older than me. Sometimes he wouldn t turn up I had to make sure things were running well and pay real good attention to the money. It was difficult to manage on weekdays, because I had to be in class. The best I could do was pay extra attention to the business Saturdays and Sundays
Sanga did okay. I was actually a rich boy!
How much did he make?
I used to make about 10,000 Ugandan shillings about four US dollars every week.
Not bad for a school kid!
Sanga bought himself a pair of shoes and still remembers the day with pride. I became a king ! Shoes!
Sanga s exploits earned him the respect of his mates in school. His friends used to call him Da Investa (the investor).
Did he think about setting up a second or third barbershop?
No, says Sanga. I looked at this as a subsistence business. I didn t look at it as a business at all. It was just something that kept me at school, helped me buy books and generally kept me happy.
In the higher classes-secondary school (senior three), he got introduced to his favourite subject: accounting . The subject was taught by a Mr Mugisha Dawson, and Sanga loved the subject! No one related to it like Sanga in his class. He would pay rapt attention and relate it to what he was doing right and wrong at his barbershop. He gets animated as he talks about this, The first time the teacher came and taught accounting, I was like- wow ! It was the first time I enjoyed class. Because they talked about money and you know? I was so happy! I finally had something in school I loved.
At this stage, Sanga had big dreams. I dreamt of going into politics, of becoming President. You see, everyone in school looked up to me I was always given positions of responsibility-I would be the head boy, the class monitor, and I had so many friends. It went to my head!
But Sanga s dreams changed after school. Sanga went to Makerere University Business School to study business administration (BBA). An experience there changed his views about politics.
Student elections there were heavily politicized and were a big deal. Sanga became close to the ruling party student leadership. He was the chief mobilizer for the campai