Ripples From The Zambezi [Paperback]

I was *way* off.

This is - in my estimation - a great book by a true visionary, Ernesto Sirolli. The two chapters in the middle of this book "The Esperance Experience" and "The Esperance Model Applied" are as good as business-writing gets. In Sirolli's world, the glass is neither half empty nor half full. Rather, the water is gushing over the top of the cup. The stories he tells here of enterprises 'facilitated' in the bleakest economic conditions imaginable...well, it can't help but turn you into an optimist.

But Sirolli goes further. He takes these experiences and imagines them on a grand scale where, as he says, "reciprocity matters." Calling it a "civic economy," he envisions a world benfiting from "generalized reciprocity, from people helping people to succeed, with the understanding that well-being of the community is to everybody's advantage."

Don't misinterpret these sentiments. Sirolli is a capitalist at heart, but he presses for a system "beyind capitalism...which enhances participation in the creation of wealth, not only in its accumulation."

How does he connect the dots from tiny Esperance to his grand vision for a civic economy? I urge you to read "Ripples from the Zambezi" to find out.

I am an associate professor of economics at Minot State University. Sirolli teaches the concepts of economic development the way that I do in my economic planning and development class, but he does more than just teach the concepts. He has taken a concept, tried it and found it successful. But success is a matter of degrees. Not being satisfied with one success, he has refined his method - enterprise facilitation - over many years and many different places.

Start with the basics - a semantic foundation. What is economic development? In my class, I go with a definition provided by Jane Jacobs. Economic development, Jacobs writes, is "feasible improvisation." Sirolli follows this definition faithfully. He goes into semantics more than most economic authors. Sirolli describes development as an unfolding of economic potential in people. But Sirolli is not a man with his head in the clouds. His trinity of management concept notes that successful entrepreneurship is about knowing how to market, knowing how to manage financially, and having the technical skills to produce and sell. The problem is that few entrepreneurs go into operation knowing all three. They need a helper to fill one or more holes. The trinity concept, when applied, saves many businesses just starting.

I was glad to see Sirolli make many references to important, original, twentieth century thinkers such as E.F. Schumacher, Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers in Ripples from the Zambezi. Sirolli said many things not only regarding economic development, but also of a general nature, that I agree with. I emphatically agree with what he says about education, masters and teachers.

It is the way of the world that planning - or at least too much planning -- is usually deadly for economic development - with the exception of the task of building the infrastructure to support development. What Sirolli outlines is a potential - no, actual -- alternative.

With one case study after another, Sirolli shows how skill and passion in people is what economic development is all about - and how that skill and passion is cultivated fearlessly with the system of enterprise facilitation. Sirolli and the process that he demonstrates is "anti-dogmatic," "anti-idealistic" and "anti-authoritarian." Development in Sirolli's book is not about solving a particular macroeconomic problem, such as unemployment, or slow economic growth. Sirolli deftly refers to the writing of Carl Rogers as he states that development is on the level of the individual, not the problem. "The aim is not to solve one particular problem but to help the individual to grow so that he can cope with the present problem and later problems in a better, more integrated fashion. Rogers' therapy was not a matter 'of doing something to the individual' but rather 'of removing obstacles so that he can again move forward.'

It is not uncommon to see criticism of the kind of economic planning which alienated Sirolli so much. But what Sirolli did in this book was to first put forward, and put into action, a system which is an alternative - an alternative to the kind of planning which has ruined whole regions and nations. It was a great experience to read the criticism of the SWOT methodology at the end, and not the beginning of Sirolli's book. It really brought home the point that there are already other things which we can do, which have been tried, which are better.

I was pleased to see the Sirolli methods have been tried first in the United States on the Great Plains. He really put his ideas to the test by coming to this region. If enterprise facilitation will work in little towns in South (and North?) Dakota, it will work anywhere.