A most satisfying put-down of Jeffrey Sachs, notoriously arrogant liberal Columbia University economics professor comes from Magatte Wade, an Africa born immigrant who is a successful entrepreneur. It is found (of all places!) on the Huffington Post.
Wade takes to task not just the condescension of liberal academic do-gooders, she eviscerates the naïveté and sheer ignorance about the way business works emanating from a man supposedly so brilliant that he achieved tenure at Harvard at the youngest age in the university's history. It just goes to show how thoroughly stuck in abstraction and how unrealistic one can be and still be regarded as brilliant on elite campuses.
A small sample:
In my first company, Adina World Beverages, I had spent years traveling to trade shows and retail stores in order to get our beverages into Whole Foods Market, Wegmans, and dozens of other high-end retailers. As a consequence of many thousands of miles and hundreds of hours of relationship building, I had gradually built up an effective network for selling our products. I had gotten our products into retailers by paying close attention to market trends as well as to the idiosyncrasies of various buyers both retail and wholesale. Moreover, even before hitting the pavement to sell product, I had designed the entire company concept based on a prior identification of a market niche that I believed I could fill. My success at selling on the ground was directly linked to my identification of a niche prior to creating the company. I knew that the cultural creative demographic would relate to both the product and story that I was promoting.
By contrast, Sachs had begun with a self-important "save the Africans" concept, obtained tens of millions in philanthropic donations for his projects ($50 million from Soros, $15 million from Gates, etc.) and then gone on to carry their White Man's Burden. Only after spending gobs of other people's money did it occur to them that "Oh, maybe we need to find a way to sell the products that we are encouraging our villagers to produce."
This is one to savor.
Hat tip: Richard Baehr, Norm Hapke
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