NextBillion.net - Development Through Enterprise - Prahalad: Scale Up or You're Nothing - Comments

Re Easterly/Prahalad

_lance durham — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 15:47:42 -0400

to some degree, yes. HOW to scale up is a big problem. you are correct - there is no guide or set of standards. so, that being the situation, the question is how to deal with it.

when faced with high uncertainty of future results, managers are forced to make assumptions. but, are their assumptions correct or incorrect? how can we tell?

the answer is that we can't tell, before hand, which assumptions are correct or incorrect. if we could, we wouldn't have failures - either with BOP ventures or with official development efforts. so the question then becomes, 'how can we determine if these assumptions are correct or incorrect (and avoid failure/ create success)?' what do we do?

to handle this situation, some in the business + academic world suggest using "discovery driven planning", "assumption based planning" or "critical assumption planning". these techniques all focus on the same things:
1) identify your assumptions
2) design inexpensive tests to validate or invalidate your assumptions
3) change your assumptions based upon your tests
4) return to #1 as necessary
5) go for it or shut down based upon your new knowledge

failures are frequently the result of trusting assumptions that were actually incorrect. when Easterley writes about 'Planners', this is a big part of what he's talking about. ...to the degree that we can identify the assumptions made and how they actually panned out, studying failures can work well. studying successes can work well, too, and for the same reason.

but, you posed the question, "HOW do we scale up small, localized experiments?". the answer may sound strange, but i believe that the way we discover HOW to scale-up small, local BOP experiments is to design small, inexpensive assumption-validating experiments aimed at that very issue. ...think of it as 'organized searching'.

Easterly/Prahalad elephant in the room?

Rob Katz — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 10:51:11 -0400

Lance, don't you think the elephant in the room is HOW to scale up localized, small-scale experiments? There isn't a guide or a set of standards - it really depends on a series of conditions being met: good management, availability of funding, decent macro economic conditions, decent governance, etc. Not all BOP experiments are going to succeed - maybe it would be worthwhile to study those that failed and try to learn more about why...

Sachs/Easterley school???

_lance durham — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 20:16:30 -0400

from my point of view, Sachs and Easterley are rather far apart. Sachs and Prahalad are distant as well, but Easterley and Parhalad are pretty close.

...i rather think Easterley would agree that projects inspired by his 'school of development' needs to scale up. and i think that Prahalad would agree that 'localized, small-scale experiments' is where all of the large BOP ventures he mentions began. they are not that far apart.

Prahalad: Scale Up or You're Nothing

Rob Katz — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 14:39:35 -0400

Christine Bowers of PSD Blog reports that C.K. Prahalad delivered his standard bottom of the pyramid talk to an audience at World Bank headquarters yesterday. According to her post, Prahalad took a not-so-subtle shot at the Sachs/Easterly school of development, and failed to cite any non-Indian examples – a flaw with which Bowers takes issue. Her analysis is well worth a read; excerpted below: