Club Lunch: The Other Hundred Entrepreneurs – A Look at the Everyday Entrepreneurs Who Drive the World Economy

Thursday, May 7, 2015
12:30pm for 12:45pm – lunch
1:15pm – address
1st Floor

Speaker: Chandran Nair
Founder and CEO of the Global Institute For Tomorrow

The Other Hundred Entrepreneurs, a not-for-profit book by the Global Institute for Tomorrow, was about the people who have never written a formal business plan, hired an investment bank or planned an exit strategy. Some work for themselves, others employed a few people, still others a few hundred. These were the people behind the statistic that small and medium-sized businesses contributed half of all jobs in Africa and two-thirds in Asia. In the rarefied world of global business, an obsession with funding and finance, debt to equity ratios and return on capital mean the idea of what an entrepreneur was has lost almost all connection to the ways in which a person sets about trying to improve their well-being by starting a business. Mr. Nair wanted to return the word “entrepreneur” to its roots by capturing a tiny part of the enormous variety of ways in which entrepreneurship manifests itself around the world, thriving across cultures, classes and genders, in everyday life and in the unlikeliest of places.

Mr. Nair was the Founder and CEO of the Global Institute For Tomorrow (GIFT), an independent pan-Asian think tank providing content rich and intellectually challenging executive education from an Asian worldview. He was a regular speaker at the global forums including World Economic Forum, where he was a member of the Global Agenda Council on Governance for Sustainability, APEC Summits and OECD events.