Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the Worlds Greatest Business Case for Compassion Pdf

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FREE INFINITE VISION: HOW ARAVIND BECAME THE WORLDS GREATEST BUSINESS CASE FOR COMPASSION PDF

He was the founder and former chairman of Aravind Eye Hospitals. He is best known for developing a high quality, high volume, low-cost service delivery model that has restored sight to millions of people. Since inception, Aravind Eye Care System a registered non-profit organisation has seen over 55 million patients, and performed over 6. Venkataswamy was permanently crippled by rheumatoid arthritis at age He trained as an ophthalmologist, and personally performed overeye surgeries. InVenkataswamy and partners of Aravind founded Aurolab, [6] an internationally certified manufacturing facility that brought the price of the intraocular lens down to one-tenth of international prices, making it affordable for developing countries. Born 1 October in Tamil Nadu, India, Govindappa Venkataswamy [10] was the eldest of five children in a farming family. He walked two kilometres to school each day and his early lessons were written in sand from the riverbed. The untimely deaths spurred his decision to become a doctor. Venkataswamy earned a bachelor of science in chemistry in from American College, Madurai. In he received his medical degree from Stanley Medical College in Madras, graduating second in his class. He was in medical school when his father died, leaving him the head of the family. After receiving his medical degree, Venkataswamy served as a physician with the Indian Army from to He was discharged after contracting a rare Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the Worlds Greatest Business Case for Compassion of rheumatoid arthritis. He was years-old at the time. The condition permanently twisted his fingers out of shape, and left him bed-ridden for two years. He decided to train instead in Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the Worlds Greatest Business Case for Compassion. He held these posts for 20 years. Inat a conference on rehabilitation for the blind, Venkataswamy met Sir John Wilsonfounder of the Royal Commonwealth Society for the Blind later known as Sightsavers International. The latter had been blinded in childhood by an accident in his school chemistry lab. The two established a lifelong friendship. Venkataswamy then led Tamil Nadu's initiative to establish mobile eye camps that took sight-restoring services into rural India. He established a rehabilitation centre for the blind inand an Ophthalmic Assistants Training program in In his clinical work, Venkataswamy personally performed over one hundred thousand successful eye surgeries. With Wilson's support, Venkataswamy also started India's first residential nutrition rehabilitation centre in Madurai where children with potentially blinding Vitamin A deficiency received treatment, while their mothers were given training in how to grow and prepare nutritional meals. Venkataswamy pioneered mobile eye camps with the government, and later implemented this practice at Aravind. Teams of doctors and nurses from Aravind regularly visit rural villages where they conduct 'eye camps' that screen patients for vision impairments. Those requiring glasses receive them on site. Patients requiring surgery are brought back to an Aravind hospital, where they receive surgery, room and board, return transport and a follow up visit at no charge. Each year Aravind hosts over 2, camps, averaging 40 camps every week with community partners. Venkataswamy introduced a tiered pricing Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the Worlds Greatest Business Case for Compassion at Aravind. There are no income assessments or eligibility criteria for free or subsidised treatment. Patients decide whether they would like to access Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the Worlds Greatest Business Case for Compassion, subsidised or paid services. In practice, one patient who pays, subsidises the no-frills surgeries and pre- and post-operative care of two non-paying patients. Nurses, known within the Aravind system as Mid-Level Ophthalmic Personnel MLOPare trained extensively in discrete skills, and specialise in different areas of the hospital work flow, including administrative work, diagnostics, nursing and counseling. In the operating room each surgeon, is assisted by four MLOPs. With stream-lined processes, Aravind averages 2, surgeries per doctor per year compared to a national average of Since Harvard Business School has distributed more thancopies of 'In Service for Sight' their original case study on the Aravind model to the top twenty business schools in the United States. Nallakrishnan, R. Janaky, G. Srinivasan, G. Natchiar and their respective spouses, Meenakshi, R. Ramasamy, Lalitha S. Together, they formed the Govel Trust to manage the hospital, and defined Aravind's mission: To eliminate needless blindness by providing high quality and compassionate eye care affordable for all. Namperumalsamy's sister, P. Vijayalakshmi and her husband, M. Srinivasan also joined his work. In the initial years he and his team faced many financial difficulties. Venkataswamy is the founding member of Seva Foundation a US-based non-profit organisationthat partnered with Aravind in the early years by widening the organisation's access to the latest technology, and skilled volunteers. Seva continues to collaborate with Aravind in various aspects of eye care management, education, and research. Venkataswamy never married. He lived with his younger brother G. Today, over 35 members across three generations of Venkataswamy's family work at Aravind. Former President of India A. Abdul Kalam, a friend of his, wrote, "In the Aravind experience I see the path we need to take, a transformation of life into a powerful instrument of right action. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Govindappa Venkataswamy. MaduraiTamil Nadu, India. India: Harper Collins India. Retrieved 28 September Kasturi 1 April Ministry of Home Affairs. Archived from the original PDF on 10 May Retrieved 1 October Business Today. Archived from the original on 1 October The Hindu. Retrieved 29 September Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Illuminated Spirit. Harper Collins. India: Harper Collins. Retrieved 30 September Routledge Handbook of Entrepreneurship in Developing Economies. USA: Berrett Koehler. India West. Harvard Business Review. Abdul Berrett Koehler. The Wall Street Journal. Archives of Ophthalmology. Blog Pyramid. The Asia Pacific Heart Journal. Recipients of Padma Shri in Medicine. Bir Bhan Bhatia V. Udupa R. Marthanda Varma Mary Verghese K. Dholakia M. Krishna Menon J. Jasbir Singh Bajaj P. Sethi K. Vardachari Thiruvengadam C. Goyal Vera Hingorani K. Mathur N. Antia M. Deo P. Rajagopalan M. Ahuja Sneh Bhargava K. The Power of Creative Constraints, by Pavithra Mehta & Suchitra Shenoy

See what's new with book lending at the Internet Archive. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. You must live in your soul and face the universal consciousness. To see all as one. To have this vision and work with strength and wisdom all over the world. Perhaps the white-haired man with curiously gnarled fingers paused here for a moment before scrawling the next line. To give sight for all. The impossible rarely deterred Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy. As a young surgeon he watched a crippling disease permanently twist and freeze his lingers out Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the Worlds Greatest Business Case for Compassion shape. Those fingers went on to perform more than adelicate, sight-restoring surgeries, but Dr. V, as he came to be known, Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the Worlds Greatest Business Case for Compassion not stop there. In he founded Aravind, an obscure eye clinic operating out of a family home in Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the Worlds Greatest Business Case for Compassion India. He was fifty-eight years old. Aravind was his post-retirement project, created with no money, entrepreneurial experience, business plan, or safety net. What it did have was 1 1 beds - and an oversized mission. When intuitive goodness is pitted against unthinkable odds, it stirs the imagination and awakens possibility. At Aravind, if you cannot pay for surgery you do not have to. If you cannot reach their hospitals, they will come to you. At first glance it seems a venture too quixotic to be effective. But Dr. V integrated a heart of service and deep spiritual aspiration with the best practices of business. In this way, he forged a high volume, high quality and affordable approach to service delivery that put a serious dent in a problem of global proportions. Today, the Aravind Eye Care System is the largest and most productive blindness prevention organization on the planet. Each year it sees more than two and a half million patients and performs over a quarter of a million surgeries; the majority of them for free. Aravind is luminous proof of what is possible in our world. None of this means Aravind is perfect. Its leaders, Dr. V included, are regular people who struggle, make mistakes and muddle through Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the Worlds Greatest Business Case for Compassion shortcomings. Fallible like the rest of us, with only this difference: together, these ordinary individuals made a series of uncommon decisions and commitments that turned into something extraordinary. Simultaneously, it insisted on financial self-reliance, resolving not to depend on government aid, private donations or foreign funding. In its self- selecting system, there are no eligibility criteria to be met, no income assessments done. A barefoot farmer can choose to pay for surgery, while the man who became President of India true storycan opt to receive quality treatment for free. It is a generous arrangement, all the more intriguing for being vigorously profitable. The nonprofit organization makes a considerable operating surplus, and its patient services, including all new growth, are entirely self-funded. It invests tremendous energy in bringing eye care to villagers too poor to seek its services. Its policies ensure that all patients get the same high standard of care. The same doctors work across both free and paid services, and patient outcomes hold their own in comparisons with the best hospitals in the world. The efficiencies that render this possible help make Aravind one of the lowest-cost, highest quality eye care systems in the world. Its focus on the penniless does not preclude the breadth or sophistication of its services. It offers a comprehensive range of specialty care covering everything from corneal ulcers to cancer of the eye. Taking on a goal that far exceeds your capacity has a powerful side effect. It primes you to find allies everywhere. At Aravind, this translates into a counter-intuitive commitment to training its competition. It works with hospitals in its own backyard, helping them replicate the Aravind model. Aravind not only permits them to copy the very processes that give it a competitive advantage - it actively encourages them to do so. It runs a consulting service that has worked with over hospitals across 27 countries. When the intraocular lens implant that revolutionized cataract surgery in the 1 Prahalad, CK. Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. It proceeded against informed opinion and global pressure to set up its own internationally certified manufacturing facility. Today, its ophthalmic exports are indirectly responsible for improving surgical outcomes for millions of patients in over countries. They are uplifting evidence that an organization with a social mission does not have to depend on external funding, or run at a loss, or make compromises in efficiency, scale, quality or scope. Aravind is a glowing exception to all the usual rules. Most of them Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the Worlds Greatest Business Case for Compassion to answer the same implicit question: how has Aravind reached its current scale and success while giving specialized, high quality services away for free? The framing of that question tends to limit the scope of the answer. Aravind is an unconventional model that came into being - not despite, but because of- the deep-seated compassion at its core. Here is a model that demonstrates the power of integrating innovation with empathy, business principles with service, and outer transformation with inner change. Framed this way, a new line of inquiry emerges. How did Aravind design systems that thrive by serving those in greatest need? What experiences and insights spurred its leaders to make the unexpected choices that they did? And, at a time when western health care systems are in crisis and social enterprise pilots are proliferating across multiple sectors - is Aravind an inspiring singularity, or a repeatable miracle? These are some of the questions examined in this book. And at its core is a simple riddle that entwines them all: If Aravind is the extraordinary answer - what were the questions? New Jersey: Wharton School Publishing, 6 Aurolab, Aravind Eye Care System 7 To understand the Aravind model - what made it work and what continues to fuel its expansion and impact - one must approach the heart and mind of the visionary surgeon who set it all into motion. In that sense, this book is also an invitation to walk awhile with Dr. V, see the world as he saw it, meet the people who would join him, and catch a glimpse of the lives they touch. In the end, it is an invitation to experience a spark Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the Worlds Greatest Business Case for Compassion that which drives our deepest intentions to action. Ultimately Dr. This story lives on that arc. It is the tale of a revolutionary business model set in the developing world, focused on the sustainable delivery of eyesight. But it is also the journey of an unlikely hero with an impossible dream whose story transcends its own specificity to speak of universal truths. To be of service to others is to serve ourselves. Our limitations do not define us. And embedded in the human spirit is a wisdom and strength that can rise to meet our greatest challenges. Together we can light the eyes of millions. How did you do it all? How do you keep on keeping on the way you do? How do you persuade so many others to do the same? V, who can sometimes be very somber during interviews, is at his sunniest. He smiles and says nothing. V chortles. When you have spent some time with Dr. V, you eventually begin to understand his seemingly irrelevant answers to questions that refer too closely to the grandeur of his achievements. V simply. How did you get Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the Worlds Greatest Business Case for Compassion to work? And, after a few more digressions on Everest, unexpectedly, he does. You say I will help you and then you do what you can. Even when we started, we did good quality work, so the rich people came and paid us. And we could treat the poor people with the money saved. The poor people brought more poor people; the rich people brought more rich people. Seated in Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy - Wikipedia

Practice for perfect vision. This in essence was what Dr. V always returned to. He believed that the evolution of an organization ultimately hinges on the evolution of the individuals Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the Worlds Greatest Business Case for Compassion it. And that clarity in thought and action requires a discipline of mind and heart. He believed that when you sharpen in self-awareness and commit to pushing the boundaries of your compassion, you tap into a deeper wisdom that informs and transforms your work. You become a more conscious instrument of your highest calling. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Search for:. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.