Fractal Entrepreneurship

Folks wonder what kind of jobs fractal ventures could offer.

I would like to answer that question by and by. But first let us go down the history lane and understand how jobs first started.

At the very beginning, historians believed that most all needed to cooperate to ensure a clan or tribe had enough food, shelter, protection from natural elements and child care.

The complexity of specialisation and trade thereof might have come in only with the advent of tool making, hunting, foraging, child bearing and age to begin with. This probably took a more serious turn with the advent of discovering fire for cooking, agriculture, pottery and metalwork.

Soon ability and inability dictated who specialised in what and who traded what for what.

The growth of commerce or the art of pricing a product or service became a new found activity with myriad pushes and pulls that decided a price tag…some of them included some rather cruel reasons such as sheer muscle power and domination! Soon, it was possible for some to sit and relax while others toiled away…

Within every fractal venture an environment is created whereby, yes, specialisations matter but no one sits about while a few others toil!

Jobs are basically categorised as jobs of:

1. Communication
2. Marketing
3. Sales
4. Investor management work
5. Order management work
6. Customer Relationship Management work
7. Accounting work
8. Legal work
9. Technical work
10. Administration work
11. Logistics work
12. Documentation work
13. People work
14. Care for Infrastructure work
15. Assets management work
16. Fractal Health Management work
17. Franchise Management work
18. Inclusivity and Diversity work

Mostly these are all common sense based work except for the technical work.

Everything else most all can do provided they have a flare for the job on hand.

Typically folks who join fractal ventures find that they have to be on their toes most waking hours, as even living life is a process for fractal entrepreneurs.

The following are the jobs that are required to be carried out by every fractal entrepreneur outside of actual working hours!

1. SKY meditation
2. SKY Introspection
3. Kaya kalpa
4. WFPB diet with Daily Dozen framework of Michael Greger
5. Natural parenting in case of entrepreneurs who are parents
6. Being dutiful to self, family and society
7. Non violence in communication
8. Fitness regimen
9. Minimalistic lifestyle
10. Being a world citizen
11. Learning to be a problem solver however steep problems may be.

Tough jobs, don’t you think?

If you come across a fractalite, you can safely say that they have been seasoned by life well!

Folks who want to become fractal entrepreneurs are like soldiers who wish to join the army. These are folks who know that they have to keep their body and mind trim, healthy and alert. They have to wear the uniform on their souls and when duty calls they will keep cause above all else in their lives.

Such folks have a huge scope to skill themselves in any of the areas above. But without the right attitude they cannot fit themselves within any fractal venture.

Persons who have a post graduation degree or more or equivalent would fit the role of the visionary entrepreneur of a new fractal venture.

Persons who love management and/or doing things with their hands can become the manager or the skilled entrepreneurs managing and creating assets for the visionary entrepreneur to sell.

Typically every fractal taken care of by a visionary entrepreneur in a city, would encompass five or so sub fractals, each run by a group of manager and skilled entrepreneurs. The skilled entrepreneurs outnumber the others in any fractal.

This makes the fractal model a powerful tool to alleviate poverty.

Every fractal venture sells only sustainable products or services. Each is carbon neutral or negative in its operations. Hence a fractal venture helps to stall global warming.

Inclusivity and Diversity form the spine of every venture. Truly, each fractal venture removes bias, hatred and divisions in society.

Fractal entrepreneurs are collaborators. Not competitors. They will not kill or snuff out anybody else out of business.

Imagine working on a job with these in the background!

I am sure everyone will want a fractal livelihood!

Would you be keen to promote such ventures? Do write to me at radha@fractalentrepreneurship.org

Be blessed

It has always fascinated me to see the beauty in nature. It’s been a puzzle really until I understood how effortlessly it gets created. Created through Fractal geometry.

The person who first gave a name to this phenomenon was Mandelbrot. He discovered Fractals in Nature

You can see them everywhere

In plants, trees, deltas of rivers, in the ways mountains form, in the arteries and veins of your body, within your DNA….everywhere…

You can see them in garbage piles; in leaf mounds; in the way particles settle down when you cast them in the air with a flick of your wrists!

What do you think is the reason? Mandelbrot discovered that there is a basic characteristic, an intent and a design to all things in nature!

Self similar, repetitive patterns evolved into beautiful designs such that energy efficiency remained intact at its core.

Trees branched out similar patterns of branch, and leaf arrangements in order to get maximum solar energy.

Roots branched out to receive maximum nutrient intake.

The energy efficiency worked on an exponential principle. Never a linear one. For example, take the case of a mouse and an elephant. The elephant is 2,00,000 times bigger than a mouse. But it uses only 10,000 more calories to survive!

There is however no single cell in nature that is singular and huge. The efficiency of bigger units in nature is because of efficient buildup of self similar nano cells or units of energy.

In the place of trying to study objects in layers and layers of microscopic details to know more about them, scientists now do a quicker analysis of getting to understand the basic self similar design of a sometimes chaotic pattern and keep drilling down further to the tiniest self similar pattern and thereby understand the intrinsic nature of an object.

I just decided that if I, a small human being with not much power to me were to bring change in an otherwise chaotic world of unsustainable problems, I had to play God and create fractals in social entrepreneurship! That led to the birth of fractal entrepreneurship!

I incubate entrepreneurs to create tight, and tiny business units that are sustainable and then help them to scale through replication exponentially.

In this model, I understood that like in nature it had to be all encompassing if it had to impact beneficially. Hence I infused at the basic core of every design of business unit, core fractal patterns of sustainability, inclusion, diversity, equity for all and a highly distributive structure.

God took several years to arrive at what nature is today and it is still evolving.

Mine is too!

If you would like to contribute to this noble cause in any way, do get in touch with me at radha@fractalentrepreneurship.org

Be blessed!

I have received a lot of brickbats for the way I run fractal ventures. In just ten years of time, I stand before you bereft of all my assets and earnings. Yes, you heard it right. I have had to do several things that I ask my fractal entrepreneurs never to do! Pioneers have it tough!

One of the things that I teach them, which like me they never follow, is to run their ventures with other people’s money. Never their own. Has it been possible? Only around the third year or later. The first three years as a fractal entrepreneur, today, as I speak, are fraught with toiling and bootstrapping. 

Like me though, the ones that exist are smartly earning extra money through all kinds of ways to keep afloat.

In a world full of woes, shining beacons like fractal ventures are the early pioneers that are evolving and therefore do not have a financial framework waiting with open arms to invest and promote them. GEM (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor) reports that while developed countries have their governments backing funding of social entrepreneurs between 40 to 50 per cent, those in the more coloured parts of the world have government funding of 10 per cent or less only. Families, friends, colleagues and personal funds form most of their options with banks playing the Shylock game! 

Finances continue to stay in the hands of the powerful while those who heal through commerce are pitted against each other along with the rest of the folks who engage in hardcore commercial pursuits. If at all there are financial institutions that do fund folks that heal through commerce, then those have the privilege of doling out portions as they see fit simply because there is not enough going around for all and the ones giving have to look noble enough as givers. Such is the pitiable state of the world. We seem to have failed as a species on this planet on many fronts. Which is exactly why fractals have to exist, evolve, grow and impact.

Amongst the fractals, like trees in the forest, wealth is distributed. Never hoarded in any singular pockets. But every visionary entrepreneur is left high and dry to face the world that cannot gauge the beautiful person each one of them turns out to be. There is however a small portion of the world’s population that cares and invests in fractal ventures…and those are customers! Customers who see the true impact of these ventures.

At the very beginning of initiation into becoming a fractal entrepreneur, is a formidable innovation exercise conducted through a heavy-duty innovation process called IDEIn. On engaging with this, fractal entrepreneurs develop the foundation of the directions for their venture based on unshakable sustainability principles. Never can a fractal entrepreneur do something unsustainable even at the point of bankruptcy. To illustrate, an instance comes to my mind of a past incubatee of mine. She is not a fractal entrepreneur now. She had a beautiful concept promoting sustainable principles in creating plant based dairy alternatives. However, she would not accept to keep them in bottles as the breakages were high in transit. She wanted to badly opt for plastic, disposable containers. She could not continue in the incubation as this went against basic fractal principles of never getting tempted to do unsustainable things in order to earn better in the short term! 

In the same breath, I have to point out to two other ventures working in the area of whole food plant based sweets and snacks, that refused to engage in exporting their wares to countries beyond India in order to not create a larger carbon footprint! If they had opted for this they would have become richer by now. They prefer to wait and open franchises in other countries that stress on the necessity of being local over importing wares from far off lands.

Stubborn little davids. Scarred and wounded but not out. 

There are countless attempts these davids have made to “pitch” their ventures in front of grant givers, funders and investors. The number of times and the manner in which we have all been turned down or been forced to refuse to accept as a deal is enough to give heart attacks many times over! Even we can falter in our steps when we turn to look back and reflect on our journey so far! The reasons we have been turned down would be as follows:

1. There have been 2000 more applications than what we could offer grants for. It was so tough to decide. Sorry!
2. While we love your concept, we are forced to fund other projects that are removing the maggots from the eyes of living victims in society! Please could you reapply later. I respect this reason actually…
3. We are sorry to say that we only fund technology-heavy projects
4. We are sorry to let you know that your venture seems too lightweight compared to the ones that use heavy machinery and equipments to reach similar goals
5. There’s another that goes…”I mean, why fund a venture that works to help marginal farmers out of poverty by supplying naturally grown native vegetables while another contestant exports pink baby onions!”
6. You are not as glamorous as xyz
7. You are not the apple of the eye of the donor
8. You do not come from the cream of universities
9. Your english is not impressive enough
10. Funding you is not going to push me into the aura of glory
11. I cannot see how you can achieve things as easily as you say as someone else who we wish to fund makes it out to be so tough!
12. We do not have a process of elimination and will fund every project but you must dance so hard on the tip of your toes and excite our souls to eternity until we burst into flames for us to open our tight fists!
13. I like what you do but my CA doesn’t think that my money would grow if I invested in you.

These and more happen to us. Our reaction is to joke about it and say, jaane dho yaar! And we laugh and move on to the next step. Never mind the limb that is falling off our shoulders as it got sawed out trying to work up that silly intrinsic dance act to impress poverty ridden guardians of empty coffers!

On the other hand we, too, have turned down many offers. Offers we have turned down run as follows:

1. We wish to take on a giant equity if you want us to invest
2. You have lovely concepts but why enhance the lives of the labour class by treating them as co-entrepreneurs!
3. The core of what you do is great, but you must cut down expenses by not stubbornly adhering to sustainability principles! Commerce cannot happen if you wish to be green!
4. We will be the bosses and you must simply comply. Hand over all intellectual assets and we shall direct how things need to run from here
5. All this is fine, but what is my exit strategy?
6. Don’t you know you are privileged that we are even considering investing in you? Just leave it to us.
7. Sure we can offer money. Interest is just 35 per cent.

The funding that has all the time worked for us have been small investments from happy customers and help from other fractal entrepreneurs who help to rotate funds. Period. This makes us focus with all our might on marketing and telling the world about what we do in the hope that we might add more people to our fractal community. 

I reflect a lot on the reason behind this situation and I realise that the world is still caught up in the grips of wanting positive ROIs and that SROIs are still in their infancy of seeming to be a matter of interest for the investing groups of the world. Maybe the world is too poor truly! It is indeed a vicious cycle. In our case, the fractal ventures evolved since the world is so messed up. But the world is so messed up that it cannot invest directly into ventures whose SROIs are bright and shining. Most of the funds, for example, are available for curing cancer but not much for preventing it and none at all for those who survive it! I can vouch for this as I am one such a survivor.

The day social entrepreneurship is considered as a necessity for climate change and we set aside budgets for it above all other activities, we would start progressing, is my opinion. Today the rate of individuals leading or operating from a social enterprise itself forms a very low percentage. It is just between 0.4 to 14 per cent only, in countries globally, based on surveys done in 58 prominent countries that engage in such activities according to GEM! For us who live and breathe social entrepreneurship, it comes as a surprise to watch people engage in any other way in their lives! Cannot everyone see the doom ahead if we continued living the way we live?

However, since fractal entrepreneurs do not lament and move on to the next step, I now have the following goals to reach:

• Create a fund to fund fractal entrepreneurs
• Keep the search on for ethical funders who are keen to invest in genuine well-paced social ventures that are simple, effective, totally sustainable and impactful with the future in mind.

Would you like to join our community and fund us in any way, if you are seeking to invest in ventures with high SROIs? Do write to me at radha@fractalentrepreneurship.org. If you seek to impact using simple but innovative means, you have reached your destination. We don’t have to put on an act or show off muscles grown through artificial protein supplements. We are elementary, deep and profound. We are here to stay, heal and grow steadily. Be blessed.

Ask any fractal entrepreneur or anybody about the biggest issue they have in life and you will immediately get the reply – Fear. Is it just fear though? Most often it turns out to be phobias…big and small.

Fear, I discovered, would never leave me. It is a good alert system to have. It is a temporary reaction to definite events and stimulus that prompts me to understand and overcome a roadblock that could have hurt me otherwise.

Phobias, on the other hand, I discovered, were set behaviours that repeated when remembering the fear of facing the stimulus of the fear again.

As a child I had a fear of dark places. It built into such a phobia that I would never venture into a room if someone did not switch on the light in the room.

As I got older it became a necessity for me to overcome the fear as I did not enjoy having avoidable weaknesses within me. I watched myself when I approached a dark room. I noticed that my mind imagined that a fearsome lion, vampire or thief might leap out of the shadows to get me. I reasoned again that none of these had actually happened to any of my family members! And the statistics of a thief jumping out was much less indeed! I began to live minimalistically in order to never tempt thieves and would superimpose the thought of lion and vampire with pictures of a starry night sky and galaxies each time I entered a room. I would also train my eyes slowly to see in the dark and use my limbs to guide my way. A phobia was dealt with. Fear did not have to die out as it ensured I would be careful in dark places.

Facing fear fearlessly is what fractal entrepreneurs are taught. This process fully acknowledges a fear without brushing it aside. Fears are needed as they push us to solve problems, ideate solutions and motivate us to get up and move. But one has to be very careful to avoid turning the fear into a phobia.

The admonitions of a math teacher made an incubatee fear accounting. She had to learn to do math her way, much differently from how others did. But on learning to deal with it albeit differently, her phobias came down while fear gives her just that little motivation to check things longer and earlier than others who don’t have that fear.

Another incubatee was petrified about having to take back home the bad news that she might not bring in the monthly take home that month. Expenses had been high and income had gotten a hit. If she gave up her take home, business might hobble onto the next month. Past instances of a similar situation had brought on adverse reactions. Just going back home seemed like a huge deal. She tackles this phobia with step by step process of discussing with her family members, showing them her achievements so far, and pointing out the great impact she has on society. She faces her fear almost fearlessly. But she has only replaced her phobia with well detailed steps of solutions. Never will the fear leave her. It will be there and ensure that she is sensitised enough to discuss her inability to sometimes not bring in money in parts or whole as she was still running an upcoming social startup.

Another incubatee had a phobia of facing losses. The first time she faced them she had to take a loan. She hates to take loans as she then needs to face several relatives who scorn her for being financially weak. However her desire to work in her startup was huge. She learnt value engineering, cut costs, to focus on the few initiatives that brought in money, removed white elephant like initiatives and to tell her relatives that what she does is special.

To the many fractal entrepreneurs who are ridden with anxieties the incubation process enables them to define and list their pain points first. Then each pain point is taken and the IDEIn process of Innovation is applied to them. By this process, incubatees conduct literary research, ethnography, experts research and finally experiment at low cost. They learn to fail often and fast but eventually, they develop a mindset that helps them to face every fear fearlessly. 

The incubatees know that the ultimate end of an innovation to face fear fearlessly might result in success, pain or death. These 3 events are made to be seen as objectively as possible. Fractal Entrepreneurs understand that success is a transient event. It gives us a scope for taking the next step to a goal. But if we focussed on success alone, we might stop building the blueprint for someone else to take up where we got stalled. And if we focus only on success, with so many things going against vulnerable human beings, the probability of odds against us is so high that it is foolish to depend on or develop a culture based on success! Success should be a motivation for the next step but the goal should be to leave a legacy of the blueprint of processes taken and achievements or experiences had in order to pass the baton on to someone else to take up and charge forward. The other side may also happen. A miracle could take place and you might be chugging along nicely again!

They understand, too, that pain is a temporary phenomenon and can be overcome with time. Pain needs to be respected and sat through and addressed. Death or relief from pain would be the ultimate end of pain. Both are relief points of sorts. 

Fractal entrepreneurs are aware of continuous pain. They know that this needs addressing and can be heart wrenching. But the processes needed to heal partially or wholly, just need to follow problem solving techniques with the next step in mind always. To stagnate meant to give up in an untimely manner. It is ok to die fighting fate. But none of the fractal entrepreneurs can live stagnating.

The journey of doing our best with the tools that are the best is what emboldens the ever innovating fractal entrepreneur.

The process goes like this:

1. Everyday ensure you spend time by meditating, exercising and eating a whole food plant based diet. 
2. List your pain points and use the IDEIn methodology to solve it. If it is a question of mental chaos, use SKY introspection techniques to solve it
3. Move to the next step.
4. Never die until you are dead.
5. Remember that you are the best for having done your best. Not for winning. 

This process brings out sharp focus on addressing issues. Fear then does not turn into phobia but motivates one into developing intelligence and skill required to address the fear in the best possible manner until it’s time to say goodbye. The act of dying should rest with fate, never with ourselves.

The fractal entrepreneurs are perhaps the highest form of karma yogis of modern times. They acknowledge fear and use it as a motivator to perform while looking out to ensure that they dont fall into the trap of converting it into a phobia.

Fear is alright to have, therefore. Do you agree? Do write to me at radha@fractalentrepreneurship.org

Be blessed.

Just over a 100 people lifted out of poverty

Just over 300 smallholding and marginal farmers supported in their poison-free farming pursuits.

Just 500 acres belonging yo these farmers heaving a sigh of relief.

Just over 2 lakhs whole food plant based food meals distributed.

Just around 1.5 lakhs kg of poison-free food ingredients sourced from around 30 conscientious farmers.

Just 2.5 lakhs native and naturalised plants and trees plants in nearly 1000 gardens.

How did this come about? You may wonder.

I spoke to you about my failures in the last podcast. The folks who stand the rigour of our training are simple folks who are passionate about living well.

Each of them came to me with various issues.

One of my incubatees loathed having to handle people. He is a wise person and has greater love for animals than human beings as he found that human beings tend to be more self-centred. He himself is generous to the core. He understood the concept of all life forms being part of the Universal Energy. He learnt in his own way methods to deal well, the unsavoury act of dealing with human beings, especially their weaker and meaner sides.

Another incubatee had been always loved by all as she is affable and good natured. The fact that sometimes running a business would bring up issues that irritate customers was totally not in her realm of happy times with society. To be in someone’s bad books did not feel comfortable in the least. Overtime she understood that in order to spread impact and cause you had to stand firm and face chaos and make sense of things and attempt to change it for the better. If you failed it was ok and you just moved on to the next step with the happiness that you tried your best.

My youngest incubatee loathed opening an excel sheet! Talking to irate customers was facile for her as was mentoring her colleagues or creating new products. She would run a mile if she had to tackle accounts. Today she is on top of it and growing to understand what a superwoman she can actually be.

Another young incubatee used to get anxious about financial dips and arguments amongst team members. She has learnt the art of facilitation and that of cost cutting and saving to keep herself less stressed in business.

A skilled entrepreneur with high irritability was a tough one to crack. She now keeps an image in her mind which she brings on whenever she gets irritated. That of her venture growing into several fractals across the country…even the connection with God could not change her. But this single imagery has proved to be so powerful that she is going around giving better than the best!

There was this cantankerous skilled entrepreneur who got sick by getting angry for everything. He is able to stay within limits such that his health is not impacted by keeping the mission of the organisation in his mind.

Quite a handful of entrepreneurs are ridden with traumas of past failures. They are all compassionate to themselves and are finding ways to heal and to perform.

“Face the camera? No way!” A common fright that grips these entrepreneurs. Now they have become selfie experts doing guerilla marketing and bootstrapping by pumping away videos after videos!

Cash Flow in the red? They understand that the parta system of the marwadis will keep them out of trouble…Well, just about!

Writing about oneself? Ouch, who would do that? My entrepreneurs can!

Speak for oneself? Touch the on button and they can tell stories!

Make the sky fall on their heads? Well, they do turn around to look at me sometimes for that wee bit of reassurance, but my oh my! Do they stand their ground?! It is I who can sometimes falter watching them wounded, wondering, “Have I created a system that would simply engulf and sacrifice its soldiers?” Perhaps I have…But I am totally convinced that if wars were fought thus, then peace would reign forever in the world!… For war it is! 

Why bother to bring prosperity by planting native plants without using pesticides? Why nurture children without babysitting them with authority or dulling them with praise? Why eat food that will not make you sick? Why force farmers to grow poison-free food? These and more…why ever do youngsters have to do things this way, sacrificing their lives literally for the sake of sustainability of the planet and peace amongst societies? Fractal Enyrepreneurs are doing these even as I speak.

I guess one has to define the word success here…What do fractal entrepreneurs see as success? Let me list them for you:

1. Visionary entrepreneurs see success if the skilled entrepreneues and manager entrepreneurs get their basic take home month on month whatever be the travails of business even if it means danger to their personal finances.
2. They see as success if they can keep breathing and pushing their venture to the point of fractal success when investors or franchisees opt to sink their monies into the venture to fractalise it more and more
3. They see as success even if they get to shed a tear or two or scream in pain for those few terrible seconds, if they shrug it off and get to the next big step to keep the movement going forward…even if limbs feel like they are going to fall off.
4. Skilled and Manager Entrepreneurs see success if they can do their superior technical work that only experts know, seamlessly without getting their minds form blocks to progress
5. All think they are successful if they practise meditation, exercising, introspection and eating whole food plant based diet everyday.

Now let me list what they will NOT consider as failure:

• If they make technical mistakes 
• If they fail to remember
• If customers get irritated
• If cash flow dips due to unforeseen risks and due to the sheer battle of pushing forward a sustainable business missing the attention of potential clients

Bootstrapping for them is not merely what it represents…it is burdenstrapping as they have taken on the huge responsibility of changing lives of people from poverty to prosperity…and do you know what, they are succeeding!

Even fundamental to the hardwork put in by fractal entrepreneurs, the single aspect that is making them succeed big time is that they are forming a big community of people who look out for each other constantly, simply because they speak the fractal tongue!
If you want to know more about how they survive, what drives them and from where they source their courage to prevail, do write to me at radha@feactalentrepreneurship.org. Be blessed.

My failures are the only way I learn to be a better mentor. I welcome them with open arms as without knowing things firsthand one cannot be the best mentor or entrepreneur.

I incubate visionary and literate entrepreneurs but I consider the failures of these entrepreneurs as my failures. Their successes are mine as well.

The most important aspect of my mentoring is in how successfully a visionary entrepreneur is able to remove poverty amongst the skilled and manager entrepreneurs. There is raw pain in these entrepreneurs. Poverty is not only about money and materials, but most importantly  about thinking and behaving. Here is where there are battles that get lost so often!

There was an angry young man who joined one of my incubated ventures. Anger meant that he could use blades and knives to hurt as well…Trying to understand him showed how society could hurt the child in him so severely that he resorted to hit out at the slightest provocation. He was a fantastic skilled entrepreneur and could turn waste to wealth easily. We lost him….not due to his anger which we could bring down by several notches…but to greed…For as soon as he realised that he could have a more peaceful encironment around himself, the opening up of possibilities that a social venture gave him, was too tempting to make him stay within the community and do the grind of helping himself and others…It was nicer to help just himself…

I lost two very good visionary entrepreneurs who could not bear the pain and sacrifice, that comes with helping others while helping themselves. This is a mandatory requirement asked of a fractal entrepreneur. They came to me when their chips were down. It felt exhilarating as long as they were learning and innovating. But the moment they needed to learn to survive in spite of helping others, the pain was too much to bear and they quit.

I have lost several aspiring women entrepreneurs due to pressures from family due to impending marriages; dominating husbands; child delivery and sheer lack of believing that they can…

There were also two cases where two traumatised minds enjoyed the process of releasing themselves from the bonds of trauma through my mentoring and then there was not enough energy to go ahead with becoming a social entrepreneur! They just wished to wallow in their newly found peace!

I lost a cowboy who loved to shoot from his hip but not before he learnt to pause some before pulling the trigger!

I have had to refuse to take on several youngsters as at the very beginning they could not comprehend that the idea with which they came to me in the first place implied doom to them or the planet. I would give options for these kids to choose but they would simply opt for a dangerous, far-flung fanciful option quite outside my area of mentoring. I remember particularly this kid whose main ambition was to do business, become rich and own several BMWs…I hear tell that these vehicles blow up sometimes…even the choice of the poor kid was bad!

I battle every day with vengeance, jealousy, lack of integrity, manipulation, blindness to truth due to layers of external influences that stop minds from staying curious…adults are just wayward children…

An interesting aspect about getting out of poverty is the rising feeling of hierarchy that folks feel. There is a certain claim to being close to superiors, namely the literate that automatically makes the newly released get into a pecking order with new entrants. It is quite common amongst women and subtler or aggressive with men. A deep drive towards making them introspect on who they are and their relationship with all life forms and the Universal Energy, just about sometimes works. 

Stealing, cheating, backstabbing, bickering about team members, anger tantrums, dominating when visionary entrepreneurs are absent, are some very common actions that occur. The bigger issue is assuming one knows it all and turning back on the system after enjoying the fruits of all the labour of the mentors, who give away precious knowledge accumulated over years in a few hours and then demanding to be compensated for the little that went unpaid due to the pulls and pushes of enterprise…now that, too can happen.

A few incidents of questioning the foundation of the fractal model simply because of traumas in personal life is also present. For example systems of rigour about food, meditation and more will refuse to be accepted as the norm or as solutions, as the incubatees might be surrounded by an environment that taunts, mocks, makes difficult the process of upholding fractal principles.

Spouses and moms and in some cases dads have truly been pains that cannot be shaken away due to the emotional connections incubatees have with them. Some of these close relatives in fact, thrive on the glory created by fractal ventures but behind the scenes sometimes make it a living hell for the incubatees! The biggest issue which so far has been painful is having to face the threat of getting misused, as the model is extremely open and free. Only those incubatees who have an integral and strong core withstand these turmoils bravely.

Mentoring folks on compassionate detachment from all relationships will be looked upon as a “cult” activity and that would lead to questions or dropouts.

A few times the more relevant business skills are a problem threatening for dropouts but this incidence is comparatively lesser than the mind-related ones! I have had incubatees who abhor financial management, marketing, selling, facing negative cash flows, asking for loans, asking at all, managing people, simply checking mails, replying to things, managing time, facing irate customers, facing natural calamities or accidents in life…you name it and it exists!

Fifty per cent of the incubatees used to stay back. Covid has reduced this to thirty per cent. The folks who stay back in the system have one thing in common. They believe that they can do it together and that by themselves alone they might have to suck up the muck doled out to folks like them in society. This is the single common reason in all! Just this reason has given me immense confidence in the model.

Amongst this thirty per cent many still flounder but compared to their peers in society, they are truly healthier and more entrepreneurial! Even the seventy per cent who quit are better off about facing life and about entrepreneurship. 

My failures reflect how much of a budget I have to enable. They are in fact great tools to enhance my model! If I had had more money to pioneer, I would venture into incubating the most difficult people that society has written off! I believe my limitations are to do with money required to undue the several ills already created in the system! Which is why I am probably doing what I am doing. 

What do you think of failures in your life? Do they bother yoi? Do they scare you? Do you have questions for me on fractal entrepreneurship especially related to failures? Do write to me at radha@fractalentrepreneurship.org. Be blessed.

The first time I learnt about Fractals was when I was in college. I learnt about it as a mathematical concept. The second time I came across it was as a social movement in Africa, of sustaining teams creating processes and copy pasting their structure to form well linked groups, that helped to form a powerful movement. I got truly inspired and started researching more about Fractals.

Fractals, I learnt exist all around us. Every simple pattern in nature is repeated, with different scales at times, to form never-ending complex patterns. 

From then on, one of my favourite hobbies is to discern the fractal in parts, of every being or object in Nature.

Branches, leaves, striations on surfaces, patterns on skins, fruits, vegetables, wings of insects, coastal lines, in the meanderings of rivers…they leap out of their base at me showing me how they evolved and grew complex. 

To translate this to real life like the Africans did was an amazing concept to witness.

I was taken in by this concept as I found that the maximum effort was mostly required only in the initial stages when the blueprint of a basic simple pattern was created. Once this got perfected it just required project management and monitoring to guide the process of ” Fractalising.”

I had the honour of being in the team sent by the Indian government to Sri Lanka, along with Architect Kirti Shah. We were to recommend to the Indian government the manner in which it could offer money to help refugees rebuild their homes. Driving down from Colombo to Jaffna will be an experience that I shall never forget. Getting whisked by young men as young as my son at every toll post that was heavily guarded; surveying home after home that had bullet ridden walls; questioning refugees in military camps who had to stand all the time as there was just no place to even squat…I will never forget those experiences. Above them all what truly touched me was the fact that at every stop at every village, we had a group of persons from the local NGOs visit us. They had similar information to give us and questions to ask of us to enable better formulations of our observations. When I took one of the persons aside and asked him how the pattern of their performance was so similar in nature, he replied, “We follow the Fractal Methodology that you find amongst African social movements. We designed one holistic process for one NGO and replicated it according to various scales to ensure our goals are reached. I was truly impressed! Without these NGOs we would not have been able to conduct our survey effectively. The Indian Government took our recommendations to the T and offered financial assistance to rebuild homes for refugees of Sri Lanka. And I came back home and did a lot of research on fractals in nature, methodologies and societies and in no time The Fractal Model was born.

I was but an ordinary citizen with no mafia or powerhouse supporting me. I could however see that I was surrounded by many like me and more than people like me, there were folks with lesser advantages in life than what I had. I recalled that as a fourth grader, I had been asked by my class teacher to stay by the side of two classmates of mine. These children had failed the previous year. I was told never to leave their sides and to ensure that they studied. They were thought to be bullies by the rest of us. But the teacher, Mrs. Mason was known to be free and generous in using a wooden ruler on those who erred. I chose to stick by the girls. Many things happened but the most important thing that stuck with me was the fact that they passed that year!

I recollected this incident, looked at it as a possible unit design of fractals in communities and formed the fractal model for social entrepreneurship.

By this model, visionary entrepreneurs who were literate took on as co-entrepreneurs from more disadvantaged backgrounds and enabled them to do only what experts could do.  This resulted in a sustainable and innovative social venture bringing prosperity, and equity to all. Once such units get created they get replicated as franchises across the country, making self-similar units of business homes offering sustainable products or services to customers.

On ground this has helped over and above 100 families get out of poverty.

I truly believe that the Fractal Model would have multiple benefits! It would flatten the economy; alleviate poverty, take literacy to its rightful heights; remove unemployability; bring in wealth without the destruction of the planet and a lot more! 

It has the capacity of creating a hockey stick growth amongst the social ventures. It truly mimics Nature in its evolution processes. 

What do you think? Would this Fractal Model do all the magical things I feel it might? It would be wonderful to know! Do write to me at radha@fractalentrepreneurship.org. Be blessed.