Office Max!

Good lessons on running a small business from the land of NGOs.

Our roots are middle class. I think middle class interests play a big role in characterising our work. We were quickly buoyed by our abundant funding. Although we felt far more modest than the Big NGOs (nicknamed BINGOs), we still showered ourselves with facilities like the telephone, fax machine, and computer. Yes they may be basic facilities but everyday we wanted more. Our phone bills kept rising: up to one million rupiah (US$500) per month - compared to fifty thousand rupiah (US$25) a worker needs to rent a room monthly! We became dissatisfied with simple computers, we wanted colour notebooks. We paraded like executives. We would fly or take cabs to meetings instead of huddling in a bus or train like we used to.

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