Running Strong
When the Great Ethiopian Run started it was not the biggest event in Africa, now is one of the largest, and recognized as one of the top twenty best road races in the world. The top two in Africa are the Two Oceans Marathon in South Africa and Great Ethiopian Run.
The Great Ethiopian Run is an event management company specializing in mass participation running events. Since its inception Great Ethiopian Run has staged over 100 races in different parts of Ethiopia.
The Great Ethiopian Run received a trophy as they won Best International Running Event. Capital sat down with Ermiyas Ayele General Manager of Great Ethiopian Run to talk about the awards and this year’s events.
Capital: The Great Ethiopian Run has been recognized as one of the planet’s best races what does the award mean to you?
Ermiyas Ayele: Challenge Awards are presented by Runners World and powered by ”Let’s Do This,“ the award aims to recognize the best challenge events, organization, charities, communities and individuals. For the year over 2018/19.It is one of the world’s biggest online entry platforms with over 18,000 race events currently listed on its site and over 1 million monthly website visits.
Great Ethiopian Run has won the international race category for which is one of 13 award categories which also include cycling and multi-sport events including race events in the international race category include the famous New York City Marathon and the Boston Marathon, the Two Oceans Marathon in Cape Town.
So the awards means a lot for us, it is recognition for a long period of hard work, as you know the great Ethiopian run has going on for the last 18 years in making good numbers of participants, and create a good atmosphere. in the competition big events like, New York Marathon, one of the biggest, Boston Marathon, one of the oldest which is over 100 years were included, so to be in that competition and to be recognized, means we are doing something special, so It encourages me and my team that we are in a good truck in delivering international events. As you know tourism has a big potential for Ethiopia and this recognition will help in attracting big running tourists to come and see Ethiopia. It is also part of branding Ethiopia to the rest of the world which help tourism directly, but at the same time it helps to attract FDI, beside it magnify the image of the country provided the peace in our country will be sustained.
Capital: Tell us about challenges you have gone through over the last 18 years.
Ermiyas: There was a lack of experience in managing a race and there were not any event management companies at the time. If you go to Paris or Berlin, the marathon organizers work with companies to provide barricades and other materials, but here you need to develop some because they are not locally available or you have to produce a lot like the Olympics, or the World Championships, the level of planning is high many people fail to plan ahead when they organize events. We work on planning the run a year in advance. This means that on November 17, the afternoon after the race we go over feedback and think about how we can improve for the next year and begin planning for the next year’s race.
The challenge is a lot of people think that they can do plan this type of event in a short period of time. Many people ask why we ask people to register six months in advance. However, if they wait until later there will not be space. 
Capital; What about the success?
Ermiyas: The success is doing the event without interruption. The success is event management, as they say event management is not rocket science it is all about experience. If you have the experience, you can anticipate problems and situations you may encounter. Doing each event successfully each year helps us develop a very good strong team in the office as well as to over 30 professional teams in helping us to deliver the overall successes having an annual successful event that takes place every year, that brings everyone together for the image of the country as well. In addition to the strong staff members there are also volunteers who work with us. We use over 400 volunteers for the event and such activity has an impact on the culture of volunteerism.
Capital: Talk about your motto and your fund-raising brand.
Ermiyas: The motto or slogan of this year is “girls to be seen, heard and valued” which have to do with women’s recognition, that is the main message of this year. We change the message every year. Running for a cause is our official fundraising activity which we have been doing for the past 18 years to show that running adds value.
Capital: You are doing to charity to the community.
Ermiyas: In the past we raised and distributed for over a dozen charity organizations, but this year we plan to raise two million birr, we were able to raise close to one million birr last week, so we are already half way there. For this year’s plan we want to build a school in Waghimra Zone, Amhara regional state, as you know the zone is in a very remote, inaccessible place where there are over 400 schools under shade trees, Literarily tree, branches are used where even teachers kneel down to teach. As you know Haile Gebreselassie built one school so we want to take his leadership to build another school.
We have tried to raise one million birr so far, the rest hopefully will be collected on race day and we will go to Waghimira Zone to lay the foundation and when the school is finalized, we want to do an event for the community. So building a sustained school, that paves an opportunity for the community is something that we can do for this year.
The money that we have been raising is increasing, Last year we were able to collect 1.8 million birr, a year before it was 1.6 so it has been increasing so doing charity work is a healthy business that has been partnered with NGO,s the support of over a dozen of local charity organizations.
For such activities, the World Running Organization, the Association of International Marathons and Distance Races (AIMS) the Great Ethiopian Run are the winners of the inaugural AIMS Social Award. The award, highlights races working towards achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.
Capital: What other activities are you working on and what is your plan?
Ermiyas: In recent years our focus has been on taking mass-participation races to all corners of Ethiopia; developing capacity in the office and event teams which are staffed by Ethiopians; and working with sponsors on a range of publicity campaigns.
Great Ethiopian Run has consulted on races in Africa including the Millennium Marathon in Accra, Ghana and the Great South Sudan Run in Juba, South Sudan.
Capital: Anything that you want to add?
Ermiyas: For this year we are obliged to change the course of the race in connection to the construction of the Sarbet-Kera road and we have to change it back to the palace route as the palace is opened to public and we advice all participants to come on time and do some physical activities in the mean time before the day of the race.
Reimagining capitalism
The French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville’s travels across America in the 1830s coincided with the emergence of socialist theory back in Europe, a movement he presciently and stridently criticized. For Tocqueville, the balanced capitalism he witnessed compared favorably to the options back home, such as ceding power to the government or a more feudal system “managed by a few rich and powerful individuals.
“The inhabitants of the United States almost always manage to combine their own advantage with that of their fellow citizens,” he observed. Tocqueville’s musings inspired Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” and filtered into the very first issue of Forbes, printed during Russia’s Revolution, when the magazine’s founder, B.C. Forbes, famously declared that “business was originated to produce happiness, not to pile up millions.”
Milton Friedman was another 20th-century admirer of Tocqueville, particularly for his focus on political equality as a driver of prosperity. But Milton Friedman famously held that among all the constituents of business – the customer, the employees, the community – just one ultimately mattered, the shareholder. The only social responsibility of business, he declared, was to maximize profits. If shareholders wanted to spend their profits on altruistic projects, great, but that was at their sole discretion, with the assumption they were buying something of value, perhaps social approbation or the assuaging of guilt.
Thomas Piketty, the author of “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” stated that this maxim gave people private equity deals and employee buyouts. And to many of the world’s most successful capitalists, it also created many of the current ills. “How wrong I was about Milton Friedman – most of us were,” says M. Jones, who built a 5 billion dollar fortune exploiting market opportunities, including shorting the 1987 market crash. He further stressed “It came at great cost to other corporate stakeholders and eroded the trust on which companies, and civil society, depends.”
According to Thomas Piketty, in an era when consumers crave authenticity, the Tocque¬ville version, which sees profits as a by-product of business rather than its singular mission, offers a natural strain of capitalism that’s already hugely popular, especially among younger Americans. For Millennials, according to a massive Deloitte survey in 2018, the bottom three priorities for a business should be profits, efficiency and sales. The top three? Generating jobs, improving society and innovation.
Authenticity explains why 87% of Americans as per Gallup survey approve, while disliking Wall Street and big business, continue to love entrepreneurs and 96% of them small business. And why purpose-driven companies like Patagonia and Warby Parker are wreathed in halos, no matter what they’re selling or how rich the founders get. Jeff Bezos reportedly said “When we’re acquiring companies, one of the things I look at very closely is ‘Are the founders of a company missionaries or mercenaries? It’s actually very easy to tell – missionaries make better products and services. They also engender the one authentic trait that’s ultimately the most profitable: trust. According to Jeff Bezos, that word “is what allows you to expand the business.” Of course, trust is a double-edged sword. As Facebook treats user data as a chit rather than a covenant, the company’s reputation, and its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s, has tanked. It’s also why Wall Street remains about as popular as big tobacco.
But even in finance, roots of authenticity shoot up. Impact investing, long dismissed as a niche for do-gooders, has emerged as a growth area, with some 35 billion dollar committed in 2018 to fund businesses that carry societal benefits without sacrificing returns. “We’re talking about solving problems using innovation and entrepreneurship,” says Nancy Pfund, who founded DBL Partners and has raised 625 million dollar in three venture funds. Her flagship, with investments in Tesla and SolarCity, has ranked in the top performance quartile across this decade. Nancy Pfund further noted “When you just look at the super-short-term shareholder, you’re not taking advantage of innovation – and you’re cheating the future.”
Paul Collier in his book entitled “The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties” stated that the numbers are getting larger: Breakthrough Energy Ventures, backed by a consortium of billionaires such as Gates, Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson and Jack Ma, has pledged 1 billion dollar for startups that promise radical solutions to carbon emissions. A similarly platinum-plated tycoon cohort, including Bono, Laurene Powell Jobs and Jeff Skoll, has backed the Rise Fund, an arm of private equity giant TPG that has deployed 1.8 billion dollar in 25 investments they think will have significant impact on society.
Paul Mason who authored “Post- Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future” stated that for those who rightly still believe in America as the land of opportunity, a Fox News survey from just a few weeks ago should offer pause: 42% of Americans do not think “the way capitalism works in the United States these days” gives them “a fair shot.” Even more troubling: In a country that has always held true to the premise that you could make it through hard work – or at least your children could – 18% thought that the American Dream is out of reach for their family.
And there are ample stats to back up the sentiment. In the United States the top 1% of workers, collectively, earn vastly more than the bottom 50%. The legendary investor, Warren Buffett explains that “The market system as it gets more specialized pushes more money to the top. The natural function of a more specialized market economy is to divert more and more of the rewards to the top. That’s something I don’t think we’ve fully addressed in this country.”
But the situation is actually far worse than yawning income disparity. According to Warren Buffett, Americans have historically viewed the superrich as heroes, not villains, for a simple reason: “We all thought we could be like them,” he says. It’s the accelerating lack of upward mobility that’s fueling much of this populist anger. For all the anecdotal success stories, if you’re born in the wrong Zip code, to the wrong parents, the road to The Forbes 400 has never looked longer or narrower.
Take venture capital, the clearest starting point to a billion-dollar fortune over the past 20 years, a door the vast majority of Americans have no way of opening. Paul Mason asserted that just 15% of the money goes to women founders, 1% to black entrepreneurs and less than a quarter to anyone who lives outside California, New York and Massachusetts. Yes, a far more global, diverse pool now has access to those funding meccas, but that’s little comfort to a parent whose kid goes to a so-so public school in a city or region that’s been left behind.
“It needs to be a national priority to level the playing field,” says J. Case, who for the past few years has conducted a Rise of the Rest bus tour, traveling the country and putting millions into more than 100 companies that aren’t in Boston, New York or the San Francisco Bay Area. To J. Case, it’s both civic duty and opportunity, as brilliant minds lie fallow in low-cost areas desperate for high-growth hope. Nancy Pfund actually counts women leaders before investing in a firm, almost two thirds of the companies in her funds have a woman at the CFO level or higher.
All these efforts are on the margin, short of a commitment to create educational opportunities for those with ambition and then a track for them going forward. “We will have the resources,” Warren Buffett says. “The question is, will we in effect pull everybody in who’s able-bodied and willing to work 40 hours a week so they can make a decent living, raise a family?”
To be continued .
Tekur Shita
A New Amharic book has joined the book world. The new book entitled ’Tekur Shita’ written by Mohammed Nesru known as ‘Sophonias Abis’ was inaugurated last November 4, 2019 at Wabishebele hotel. The book is a collection of 25 short stories with 200 pages. The writer began writing the stories 10 years ago.
Hawassa University art school lecture Zemen Demeses gave a review of the book which was published by Mohamed Nesru. It is the second work of the author. Previously he did a poetic book called Amilphata. Mohammed Nesru studied fine arts at Hawassa University and was a columnist at Addis Tegen newspaper, Addis Admas and also Fiteh magazine. There were 3,000 copies published.
