Bad business

A bad thing occurred last week. In fact, very bad things occurred. I want to talk about them. 

But first, I want to talk with you about some good things.

We have a “thing” about youth pushed into hard places, like refugee camps.  We believe in them – they are solvers of problems, not problems to be solved. We create relationship spaces for young people to discover the power of a person, a mentor, who believes in you. We set up training for them that can lead to careers in photography and music. They learn how to be healed and to heal others, counseling other youth facing tough trauma. They solve problems as we coach them in critical thinking. 

Since 2011, that’s 14 years, our Youth Center in the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan invests in about 3,000 youth a year. Refugee camps don’t go away. Political solutions to make them go away are always just around the next corner, but not really, not yet.  

We believe that everyone should get a second chance (or a third or fourth one!) to get an education. Poverty, war and displacement create a dozen or more obstacles to ensure that a young person is prevented from getting those chances. So, we create a dozen or more ways to overcome those obstacles. 

Since 2000, that’s 25 years, more than 25,000 young people have gotten that second chance. We invest in entire school systems and thousands of teachers to ensure that those who were sidelined can shine, achieve, surprise themselves and us!  Schools always have students, because every year, littles are born that will become bigs and show up at the schoolhouse door 6 years later. And teachers will always be more creative this year than last, because next year’s kids have different songs, singers, moves, vibes – but they will always learn what they learn and how they learn it through the quality of relationship with those teachers. (Especially true for those young’uns sidelined at the economic edges, locked out of a chance to go up.) 

Questscope is only one of many hundreds of thousands of organizations who take seriously the needs of the next generation – from young entrepreneurial adults all the way to days-old newborns whose lives are at risk because of being born in the wrong place – because of war, or poor malnutrition, or another dozen reasons to die. 

Now the bad news. The very bad news. The funds that sustained all this life-giving work stopped, instantly, a week or so ago. No warning. No questioning. No, “let’s see what impacts are generated and what can be improved.” Just. Stopped.

This flies in the face of good business practices. A business that wants to stay in business must first-of-all pay attention to its customers. A business that wants to be successful cannot afford to be lost in group-think: that what the group thinks is therefore what is true. A good business collects data, analyzes it, and acts with an eye to getting good feedback. 

A business with a future is aware of the context that makes it successful. A critical factor in the context is the satisfaction and goodwill of the customer. And a really good business views its employees as its primary asset – especially in this age in which mining and interpreting information is critical to survival in very volatile contexts. And laws protect those businesses’ employees from being discarded because of an ideology. 

All these good business practices went out the window with this decision to stop funding. 

So, the very bad news is that all the benefits of good business practices have apparently been scuttled. And it is not limited to non-profit organizatinos that work internationally. Our own State-side organizations that must abide by these good business practices are now faced with arbitrary, off-the-cuff decisions that do not make good business sense. 

We will lose the gains we made in all the programs that we successfully implemented in all the difficult situations we had to adjust to. Thousands of other organizations will lose their gains in so many various and important ways. Consider the babies that will die, the children whose growth will be stunted because of malnutrition, the youth that will find themselves without any way to go forward in life. They will all see and know how and when the opportunities ended. Just. Like. That. 

Do we want the world we exist in, the place we share with our clients and customers, to comprehend that we are unreliable, untrustworthy partners? Do we want to miss the lessons and learning we could have through cooperation with them? Are we willing for the world to pass us by as we violate our own rules of fairness that create trust critical to good business?

Decades ago, two companies, Sony and RCA, considered the television screen, the cathode ray tube of its time (which required nice, expensive wooden cabinets to put that heavy tube thing in). RCA decided that all that could be known about the TV screen was known.  Sony decided, maybe not. Today, Millennials, gens X, Y, and Z look at me funny when I mention RCA. But everyone has a Sony screen. Heck, you can fold, roll, and tuck a Sony screen

Bad business decisions lead to bad outcomes.          

We appreciate your interest in us and your willingness to help us survive these bad business decisions. We do not want to lose our most precious assets, our staff. 

These staff are the ones who make it possible for our most precious customers/beneficiaries to become people we will entrust our lives to one day. I’ve been around long enough in the Middle East as the founder of Questscope (43 years!) to be seen by doctors and nurses who were once scruffy middle school kids who could hardly pull together the coins to stay in school. But they did. And now they bring great blessing to me, to you and to others. They bring life in places that try to specialize in death.

Let’s bring life. Let’s do good business. Let’s have good outcomes. 

Thanks for considering how to help us in these unprecedented days. 

Curt