Leadership Individual Assignment – November 22nd 2010
a) Describe your favourite leader from history, a novel, or a film, or personal experience.
Leader - Muhammad Yunus
From Academician to Social Activist
In the early 1970s Bangladesh faced a series of problems like floods, droughts, cyclones, Liberation war which caused massive destruction of the infrastructure and collapse of public services like transportation system, famines, and problem of refugees.
All these problems made Muhammad Yunus to shift his career from being a professor at the Economics Department at Chittagong University and do something to help his countrymen. He first worked on increasing agriculture productivity through irrigation. It was a success and he further provided farmers a good supply of fertilizers, seeds etc. The experience which he gained from this made him realise that such efforts are not helping those who are at the bottom of the pyramid.
Banker to the poor
He searched for the solution in the village where he started his irrigation facilities and realised that people have the skills but are not able to make money out of it. This is because of the lack of initial capital required to commercialise their ideas. This made him start the service of ‘Microcredit’. The best part about him according to me is that he was not belonging to this field. He was an academician who ventured into social service because he wanted to help the people, and then started microcredit because that seemed most logical to him. He was finding solutions to the problems which he was facing. He initially worked with one of his students and lent money out of his own pocket. The excitement which such a small step created among those people got him further involved in it. Microfinance was thus born. He led by example. He was always working on the ground level with all his volunteers. It was a very positive approach as this was a new field and both he and his followers were learning through...
