An American teacher, LouAnne Johnson, famously noted that “Words are thoughts and if we don’t have enough of them we can’t think”.  Working with at-risk teenagers, she was struck by how easily adults give up on kids who have made mistakes. “If we give up on them, they give up on themselves” she argues “but if we believe they can overcome the challenges they face, they believe it, too”.

Understanding a unique web application like the Yala clearly presents a challenge both for those familiar with the management issues and for those familiar with the technology. This demands new words. For management folks these include the words: portal, module and skin. While ideas fresh to the technically well informed include: complex relationship, discourse and management from below. Therefore, I am trying hard neither to gloss over technical complexities nor to ignore the human ones.

For example, one of the contributors on Snowcovered.com posted the question:

"A Yala looks at issues not only from above but also from below." What does this mean? How will this benefit anyone? How does it benefit you? Case studies maybe?

To which I replied:

"What does it mean to manage bottom up? A case study? How about Muhammed Yunus (got the Presidential Medal of Freedom last month, not to mention the Nobel Prize). He lends tiny amounts of money to the very poorest of borrowers and has released millions of his fellow Bangladeshis from poverty. His bankers are rewarded with gold stars not million dollar bonuses.

"But that is only half the story. Nowadays there is a thriving “international development community” of caring, selfless people in charities and pressure groups. In 2005, they got together in London for Live8, which led the world's wealthiest nations to double their aid budgets. Yet beneath the surface you find disarray. Such charities publicly champion aid; yet privately admit that merely handing cash to governments that are frequently corrupt is a wretched failure. Better “governance” is their latest cry. But any attempt to cut money to bad governments ties them in moral knots.

"Pretentious schemes are the norm. The United Nations Millennium Project, for example, is a 3,800-page plan to counter poverty that makes 449 proposals to meet 54 different goals–while holding no one accountable.

"The Grameen Bank’s very different approach was not dreamt up by some remote Western aid agency but is a tried and tested business solution that grew up from the grassroots. This is 'looking at issues not only from above but also from below'."

Here is Michelle Pfeiffer as LouAnne Johnson in the there-are-no-victims-in-this-classroom scene from Dangerous Minds, looking at issues not only from above but also from below.

And since I mention Grameen and Yunus in the Daniel Pink news item, I thought I should give my source, William Easterly, for these controversial remarks on the effectiveness of Western aid to the rest of the world.

Here he talks about his book “The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.”