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400 pages, Hardcover
First published February 21, 2012
Arvind saw a golden opportunity forming in the budding domestic market for jeans. Today, the company sells four brands, priced between $7 and $30 a pair. Its best-selling label, Ruf & Tuf, caters to rural India, home to 70 percent of the country's 950 million people. Before Ruf & Tuf was introduced in 1995, most rural Indians had only seen jeans on television.
It took some creativity to crack the rural market, where many Indians still prefer custom-tailored clothes. Rather than fight that mindset, Arvind conceived "ready-to-stitch" jeans. Ruf & Tuf jeans are sold as a kit: two legs, buttons, rivets, zipper, leather label and an instruction booklet for the neighborhood tailor.
"over 90 percent of articles are pessimistic. Quite simply, good news doesn't catch our attention. Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear...Our early warning system evolved in an era of immediacy, when threats were of the tiger-in-the-bush variety."
In dangerous situations, the amygdala directs information around the prefontal cortex. This is why you jump backward when you see a squiggly shape on the ground before you have time to deduce stick, not snake. But because of the difference in neuronal processing speeds, once our primitive survival instincts take over, our newer, prosocial instincts [wired into the much slower prefontal cortex] stay sidelined....Over the past 150,000 years, Homo sapiens evovled in a world that was "local and linear" but today's environment is "global and exponential."
Today's global and exponential world is very different from the one our brain evolved to comprehend. Consider the sheer scope of data we now encounter...From the very beginning of time until the year 2003, humankind created five exabytes of digital information....in the year 2010 the human race [was] generating five exabytes every two days. By the year 2013, the number will be five exabytes produced every ten minutes...It's no wonder we're exhausted."
"Right now a Masai warrior with a cell phone has better access to information than the president of the United States did just fifteen years ago...If we stop thinking of the world's poor as victims or as a burden and start recognizing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs and value-concious consumers, a whole new world of opportunity opens up. The BoP [four billion people occupying the "bottom of the pyramid", surviving on less than $2 per day] market potential is huge: 4 to 5 billion underserved people and an economy of more than $13 trillion purchasing power parity"