Innovative Approaches to Reducing Global Poverty (Pb)

Publisher Marketing: This book presents many innovative approaches to reducing poverty through business commitment involvement, and leadership. Some of these approaches may look promising now at their current level of success but will turn out to be limited in their scalability or in their ability to sustain themselves and endure over time. However, all of them offer fruitful grounds for inquiry and learning. It is our intention that sharing the learning from these projects and initiatives from around the world will be useful to others committed to assisting the poor in escaping from poverty - especially by bringing the poor into productive business activities. It is also our intention that these experiences stimulate ideas for new directions that build upon and go beyond the rich variety of projects and successes described by the authors in this book. The book supports C K. Prahalad's work made available in a number of ways including his very influential book The Fortune at the Bottom ofthe Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits (Wharton, 2004). Prahalad's work has called attention to creative ways to think about the question ofpoverty and how it might be reduced and eventually eliminated. He suggests ways.ofthinking and acting that break many ofthe traditional rigidities that occur in how we think about markets and business practices. Although one theme ofPrahalad's work relates to the benefits of marketing to the poor by supplying products better fitting the needs of low income individuals and groups, his work also emphasizes ways in which the poor can produce innovatively conceived and designed products for themselves and for others. This emphasis on enabling the poor to become productive is also presented forcefhuly in Craig and Peter Wilson' s, Make Poverty Business: Increase Profits and Reduce Risks by Engaging with the Poor Greenleaf 2006. Like Drucker, they see the real challenge to be helping the poor find work that is productive and sustainable. One of their contributions is their emphasis on the importance of creating access to credit and insurance as an important part of enabling people to achieve productive livelihoods. Contributor Bio:  Wankel, Charles Charles Wankel is Professor of Management at St. John's University, New York. He holds a doctorate from New York University, where he was admitted to the Beta Gamma Sigma national honor society for business disciplines. Columbia University's American Assembly identified him as one of the nation's top experts on Total Quality Management. He received the Outstanding Service in Management Education & Development Award at both the 2004 and 2005 meetings of the Academy of Management (AOM). AOM also presented its Best Paper in Management Education Award to him in 1991, and he has been selected to serve as an officer of AOM divisions every year for more than a decade. Along with Robert DeFillippi, he has been editing a multi-volume series for AOM on management education issues: the Research in Management Education & Development Series. Wankel is the leading founder and director of scholarly virtual communities for management professors, currently directing more than seven listservs with thousands of participants in more than 70 nations.(A Google search for "Charles Wankel" will provide you with an awareness of the scope of his online prominence.) He co-authored a bestselling undergraduate textbook, Management, in the 1980s with Prentice Hall, published a scholarly book on interorganizational strategy development in Poland, and numerous scholarly articles, monographs, and chapters. He has extensive international experience, ranging from the United Arab Emirates to Vietnam, Japan, Lithuania, Malaysia, Singapore, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Mexico. He has been an invited lecturer to Harvard and Columbia, as well as the Czech Management Center, University of Warsaw, Polish Academy of Sciences, University of Malaysia, National University of Singapore, and University of Toronto, and he taught and researched at Kaunas Technical University in Lithuania in 1997 under a Fulbright Fellowship Grant. His current research interests include managing geographically and temporally distributed teams and new pedagogies of management education.