If someone asks you, how would you improve Bangladesh? What would you say; this single question gives so many answers from so many different people it makes you wander. Just think about the number of times people you have met have come up with a solution or two. There is one underlying fact in all the answers, - they are mostly driven on passion. This passion originates from past experiences of difficulty merged with a desperate answer to resolving particular issues.

Indeed, when I thought about this project, I thought I knew what would be silver bullet to improve the country of Bangladesh. Its simple right, help develop the management teams in Bangladesh and everything else will follow through easily, develop world class managers and you are in a position to compete with the rest of the world - well then comes the market research. Let’s look into some of what I have discovered

Bangladesh is very hostile. It’s a developing country where opportunities are difficult to create. The greed in everyone pushes for short term gains with long term losses. Almost everyone who tried to create a new business was always hindered by threats from a variety of different sources, Bribery was almost impossible to avoid. This revelation makes me want to stop partially because it reminds me of a vengeance that I have once felt against the people of Bangladesh. I had the fortune of being able to travel to quite a few places around the world - mostly for business and I have come to realise that the country I feared the most was my own. When I go back to Bangladesh, I assume that I am going to be cheated from the moment I step out of the airport, and indeed with the taxi fare I am cheated. After some personal loss, I felt sick about the people I am with - and I challenged my family as to why I should be there, my question is why, why should I try to help my neighbours around me and why should I try to help the country on the whole. After all, everyone in this forsaken country is greedy and would be trying to cheat me at every turn. I didn't need this, I could be anywhere in the world. We definitely need something to address this!

Politics, would we ever come out of the dynasty style governments, did the founder of the nation really just wanted his family to lead it. It’s quite clear that we don't have world class leaders from any of the existing parties. Why did Professor Yunis refuse to enter politics? Aside from being a cut-throat business to enter politics, would we ever get figure head like President Obama to quite plainly set the path straight and lead us to fortune. And how do we survive in a country where the streets are closed to allow for the movement of political ministers while Ambulances lay in wait at traffic jams. Everyone knows that there is probably a better way to do this! Our education system is creating huge numbers of over-achieved globally useless people - even when its private. I was fortunate to be in a position to build teams in the UK and in Bangladesh. I even had the fortune of being able to cherry pick the best. I have had seen more qualifications per CV in Bangladesh then I ever did in the western hemisphere, yet the quality of the people were far from what was needed. Surely we have to do something here!

Well here is my new silver bullet to help the country, A calm, collected and not so passionate approach to helping the country. Bangladesh hostility is fuelled by Passion - we need to keep passion controlled, the political system needs our support rather then criticism for it to succeed - we need to lobby and suggest to the government better approaches for our problems. Indeed if plenty of people support the programmes within projectBangladesh then we automatically get powerful voice. We need to think about the roots and nourish them with world class guidance such that they can compete with the world, and with the many more things that we can do to improve the country we need to help our managers become better managers and lead the countries teams in the global business world.

I have talked to several people on how we could improve Bangladesh with projectBangladesh, they all like the idea and would like to get involved; Rather then leading with fixed ideas on how we could do this I have started this project with a more pragmatic approach. projectBangladesh would act as a managed platform to facilitate the improvement of the country. Everyone, especially professionals are invited to become members (its free:)). Through the members I hope to run the projects by encouraging people to champion individual improvement programmes. projectBangladesh will attempt to facilitate with tools as required by each improvement programme hopefully sponsored by interested individuals and companies. The process will always be democratic and follow processes which are useful to the groups.

The overall process would be run as follows,

Initially send us an email with how you think Bangladesh should be improved and the experience you can bring to the table – subscribe and join our groups, we would group similar ideas or improvement areas together and get programmes on the run. Once the groups would be formed, we would ask the groups to elect people within the group to run it. The elected leader within each group will also form the board to manage projectBangladesh, and how it should act to ensure appropriate support is provided to all the groups, this would be in the form of policies and processes that needs to be applied across the groups. All programmes must be run on a voluntary basis, with group members sharing out the burden of running the group.

So what would you gain, well from past experience in similar organisations and forums I can say that if this is done properly then the members of the individual groups will gain invaluable positions as 'experts' within the field of improvement, and become fairly hot commodities for any organisations active in the field. e.g. if you contribute and can become an expert member within an educational group - you would easily become a valuable member for any academic institution, anyone championing a political stream can be invaluable advisors to the politicians.. Each group will have goals that they hope to achieve and will drive towards those goals. Finally the ultimate gain for all of us is that if the groups can change the country then the country would improve.

So... lets get the ball rolling, join the forums here, start or contribute to the discussions and we can take it from there

.........just one little caution, this website has been started on May 2009 so expect teething problems

Kind Regards

Rasel