Next week we have the board meetings for FINCA International and the Holding Company, so this week the office boils with activity as we prepare our reams of documents and reports for the boards and various committees. Reviewing them, I am always amazed are the sheer extent and scope of the efforts of my brilliant, hardworking team, and silently revel in my good fortune to have attracted such amazing talent. I would never tell them this, of course, as they would probably ask me for more staff and higher compensation. Not that they don’t all deserve it, but in our social enterprise world we have to be perpetually concerned not only with the competitive forces of the marketplace putting downward pressure on our operating costs, but even where these are not so pervasive we have to do our best to keep our prices low and affordable for our clients: the lowest income entrepreneurs on the planet.
So it’s a good thing I keep my people too busy to read websayito entries like this one.
Speaking of compensation, towards the end of Chapter 28 in Part II of DQ, Sancho Panza makes yet another unsuccessful plea for a wage increase, given that fulfillment of his master’s ultimate promise — of making his escudero governor of a small state — appears increasingly remote. Don Quixote hears him out, and, using a common employer tactic, asks Sancho how much he thinks he should get. When Sancho tells him he thinks he is owed 20 years of back wages, Don Quixote laughs and then unleashes a stream of vituperation upon his long suffering servant, who, reduced to tears, begs forgiveness.
Somehow, I don’t think this would work at FINCA.
Rupert