Occasionally, I return to a little reading from a favorite book or a favorite author. Recently, I did this with one of the authors whom I have come to admire, namely, Muhammad Yunus. And I actually met him a decade ago. Yunus is a businessperson and one-time professor. He is from Bangladesh, which is a very poor country. And he became known worldwide when he received Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
Yunus was instrumental in forming the Grameen Bank. The purpose of this bank was to do micro-lending---giving very small amounts of money to people (mostly to women) to begin their own little business ventures. As he puts it, he wanted to help the poor leave poverty! His is a man who is small in stature, but huge in ideas. He is a soft-spoken person, but his actions reverberate with immense sound.
In his insightful book, Creating a World Without Poverty, he tells an interesting little story that illustrates his style. In 2005 Yunus was in France where he was to deliver some lectures. He was contacted by Franck Riboud, CEO of Groupe Danone, the French company that makes Dannon yogurt, who asked for a meeting. So in their meeting Yunus told the story of Grameen Bank and microcredit. Of course, Riboud was fascinated! How many times does a global business leader get to hear someone like Yunus say, “we’d created a program to lend money to beggars…!
It turns out that Riboud was interesting in finding a way to enter the market and be able to sell to countries with huge populations of poor people. As my business buddy would say, that requires an entirely different business model than selling yogurt in Europe or the USA. Perhaps, Yunus would have some good ideas.
This is how Yunus began to hear the CEOs story and how Yunus began to see possibilities. I like the way Yunus puts it. “It seemed to me that there were many opportunities for other kids of businesses to bring similar benefits to the poor. So when, over lunch in a fine Paris restaurant, one such opportunity seemed to be presenting itself, I decided to seize it if I could.”
And then comes the most powerful insight for myself. Yunus says, “It was a spur-of-the-moment impulse, not the kind of carefully planned business proposal that most executives prefer. But over the years, I’ve found that some of my best projects have been started, not on the basis of rigorous prior analysis and planning, but simply from an impulse that says, ‘Here is a chance to do something good.’”
I like that last line and the spirit that not only utters it, but acts on it. I want to be able spiritually to move in that direction. Spiritually, I want to be alert to those opportunities which come without planning or analysis. I want to be able to seize the chance to do something good.
In fact, I think I can imagine the Spirit of God regularly showing up at the margins of my life and offering opportunities which I miss because they don’t fit into my normal pattern of doing things. And probably most of those opportunities are not big deals nor do they come with much drama. But it likely is in the little question I get or perhaps even the look that I too easily overlook.
The key is to see the chance. If I miss the chance, I miss the opportunity to do something good. Maybe this is the appropriate place to ask God to give me a second chance. And when I keep missing them, give me a twenty-second chance. I want to become a spur-of-the-moment spiritual guy…just like Muhammad
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