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Stanford Business magazine

 

Business Basics Taught with Goats, Soybeans

It was one of those aha moments. In January 2007, Business School students Scott Raymond and Katherine Boas visited Thailand on a Service Learning Program study trip. There they met social entrepreneur Mechai Viravaidya, founder of the Population and Community Development Association, which extends microloans to entrepreneurs in Thailand’s rural villages. “Mechai said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we had a basic business curriculum that everybody could learn so that people who receive the loans could use them wisely?’” Boas recalls. “Scott and I looked at each other and said, ‘Well, we could do that.’”

Boas and Raymond, both MBA ’07, returned to Stanford to research and write the “Barefoot MBA Curriculum,” a teaching guide for development professionals. The curriculum presents basic concepts of business that are applicable everywhere, but are told as stories that appeal to people in a certain area. In the first version, written in English and adapted to rural Thailand, the lesson about interest involves the loan of a goat to a neighboring farmer, cost benefit is demonstrated by the sale of pigs, and the concept of competition is a tale of two soybean vendors.

Raymond and Boas returned to Thailand last summer, thanks to a GSB Service Learning Program fund that provided airfare and living expenses. There they presented their ideas to local English-speaking representatives of the microfinance organization who tested the lessons, in Thai, in a classroom of village entre-preneurs. The curriculum is purposely not copyrighted. It is intended to be translated into any language; its stories can be shaped to any local issue.

Six months and many revisions later Boas and Raymond told participants at the Schwab Foundation Social Enterprise Summit in Rüschlikon, Switzerland, about their work. “Social entrepreneurs from around the world, especially but not exclusively in microfinance, were excited about a free, adaptable tool to teach business skills to anyone anywhere,” Raymond and Boas wrote in their blog. “We arrived at the summit hoping to find additional partners to adapt and implement the Barefoot MBA; we left with a stack of business cards of people eager to help.”