Homenaje

May 17, 2012

I note with profound sadness the passing of Carlos Fuentes, giant of Mexican letters, one of my favorite Latin American novelists. In “The Death of Artemio Cruz” he wrote one of the couplets that sticks in my head today: “Esa mañana lo esperaba con alegría. Cruzamos el río a caballo.” Ironically, though I first read [...]

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Losing Paradise

May 16, 2012

I went back to Guatemala last week for a 40th reunion with my Peace Corps buddies. Five of us made it, and it was fun to try to piece together all those memories of when we were 22 years old and intent on changing the world, and living in a virtual Garden of Eden of [...]

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More on the Book of David (Roodman)

May 4, 2012

I’m back from a regional meeting of FINCA Africa in Lumbumbashi (say it with me), Democratic Republic of the Congo, during which I was able to meet and interview about a dozen clients. Stay tuned for a posting of this, hopefully next week. In the meantime, I want to return to my critique of David [...]

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Report from the Heartland

April 29, 2012

I was out in Kansas for a board meeting of our flavor company, and the news is good. We are hiring again, and we had a best quarter in four years. Until I joined this board, I never realized how chaotic and challenging the food industry is. You battle rising commodity prices for your inputs [...]

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Sound Check

April 28, 2012

Apologies to Neil Can you hear Lorraine say ‘Please!’ at the very end? I think she wants an encore.

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Giving David Roodman his Due (Diligence)

April 23, 2012

I finally got around to reading David Roodman’s Due Dilligence: An Impertinent Inquiry into Microfinance. My one sentence review is that, while it is an extremely well-written, well-researched and mostly balanced book, it over reaches in the sense of drawing bold, sweeping conclusions based on a surprisingly thin body (if it can be called that) [...]

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Gang Aglay

April 20, 2012

Well, some trips just seemed to be jinxed from the beginning. There was not a single segment of this trip to Istanbul, Azerbaijan and San Francisco that didn’t entail some kind of massive inconvenience: delays leaving, delays arriving, a lost bag — but today was the worst: I came out of my airport hotel to [...]

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My New Foot Cribs

April 11, 2012

Going on the road again next week, for an extended sojourn that will take me to Istanbul, Berkeley (talk at the Business School), Miami (Sustainatopia Conference) and finally Lumbumbashi, Republic of the Congo. Also, this just in, possible whistle stop in Azerbaijan. On a more serious note, I finally sprang for a new pair of [...]

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Interest Free Microfinance

April 6, 2012

I had a visit to my Oval Office at FINCA from Dr. Muhammad Amjad Saqib, Executive Director of the AKHUWAT Foundation in Pakistan. AKHUWAT has a unique microfinance model: they don’t charge interest on their loans. You might think this would pose a problem for sustainability — and it does; the foundation is still 30% [...]

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Meet FINCA’s Chairman

April 5, 2012

Check out this interview with FINCA’s Chairman, Bob Hatch, at the Tuck Business School at Dartmouth. Bob (aka “The Carpenter” in my book) talks about how FINCA got started, profiles one of our more successful clients, and highlights the central role that internal controls played in FINCA’s success in building a global network serving more [...]

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