If you’re involved or interested in charity, social good, business, management or leadership, then I highly recommend The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World having found it important enough to read it twice in the space of the few days I’ve had it!

And it’s not even about social media, web 2.0, or marketing. It’s far more important than that.

In all honesty, I wasn’t aware of Jacqueline Novogratz (here’s a Charlie Rose interview with Jacqueline) and her work, which includes founding the Acumen Fund, but I happened to see a post by Seth Godin which described it as important and essential – and then said Seth would buy a number of copies for bloggers to read and then pass on to their friends.

Which is how I ended up with an unexpected airmail package last week.

The book is a partly a personal account of how Novogratz was motivated to apply the knowledge and processes of business, learned during her time Chase Manhattan Bank and the  Stanford Graduate School of Business, to begin micro-financing projects, having heard of the success of Professor Muhammed Yunus and the Grameem Bank, and starting by founding Duterimbere, a microfinance organisation in Rwanda.

Her account of her time in Africa, and the thought process behind the philosophy of combining charitable investment and entrepreneurship is enlightening, moving, at times harrowing, and importantly inspirational to produce actual results. The fact that Duterimbere spans both sides of the Rwandan Genocide, means that you’re presented with the humananity of women who worked to better the cause of poor women in the country, but were also caaught up in various ways in the genocide, whether as victim or as perpetrator.

It’s this honesty and moral ambiguity that had the greatest effect on me as I read the book – Jacqueline is brutally honest about her efforts to improve the situation of the poor, and especially where her well-intended efforts failed, particularly in her early attempts at building relationships with the women she needed to work with, or was trying to help – indeed she’s very honest about a number of mistakes made in her work with Duterimbere, and that’s probably why the organisation was able to celebrate it’s 20th anniversary in 2007, and survive the troubles which ripped Rwanda apart.

Suffice to say that the lessons of leadership and management contained in the book are applicable to any situation in which you’d like or need to be able to build successful working relationships with individuals or groups of people, regardless of their financial situation.

And it’s also the first book I’ve bought/received which my partner has voluntarily started reading – in this case before I’d even finished reading it!

And once I’ve done my duty in passing it on, I’ll be buying my own copy to refresh my memory on a regular basis:- The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World