Poverty Standards 2011

Last year I had written a blog called SpellCheck 2010 (http://let-it-rain-now.blogspot.com/2010/08/spellcheck-2010.html) after reading an article by P. Sainath who talked about a very innovative way the government of Maharashtra adopted long ago to remove famine. They just removed the word, famine!

If you are following the recent discussion in the media about the definition of poverty line, you'll see that you are poor only if your monthly spending is below Rs.781, or rather, your daily spending is below Rs. 26. Now note that this is not just for food. This spending includes everything, including what is known as non-food essentials. Utsa Patnaik, an Economics Professor of JNU, in an article in "The Hindu" today, highlights how this money is not enough even to get the basic nutrition, leave alone the non-essentials.

I am reminded of the story of a man who was walking in the forest and saw a bulls-eye on every tree, and an arrow struck right at the bulls-eye! He was amazed! Finally, I am going to meet the world's best archer! Then he saw a little boy, with a quiver full of arrows, shooting an arrow to another tree. Before the man could reach the boy, he saw the boy running to the tree, and drawing a circle around the arrow, with the arrow as the center of the bulls-eye!

Why do we do such games of cooking numbers by creating meaningless definitions? Aren't there more obvious ways of defining who poor, or is it turning out to be very difficult? New dictionaries, new standards, new arithmetics cannot solve real hunger!

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em

India in the past few weeks has been facing an interesting dynamics created by the great leveler of modern times - Twitter and Facebook, clubbed with a very active visual media. Many in the political framework were least prepared for this kind of an 'intrusion' into their privileges. To a large extent, even those who created the mass movement called Team Anna, were also new to this stage, and were at times doing certain embarrassing performances. They were not alone in these performances, since some from the political class also gave them company in these. Overall, on this new stage, with many performers, everyone looked quite novice - the leaders on both sides, the followers, all. Like the children who are first on stage.

However, what goes undebated is that this new stage can have a positive transition into a new equilibrium for India, if all the players accept each other, especially if the existing actors accept the new actors on the stage. The government has to perhaps have special focus on the voice of the people which is becoming very active on this stage. The senior leadership also has to accept the tweeting new leadership, whose influence on a large cross section of India is very high. The question is not whether everything that gets talked on this stage is right or wrong. What is pertinent is that there are a lot of prevalent perceptions which get debated on this stage. This cannot be ignored.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em - the principle I learned in the Electronics textbook, while studying Klystron amplifiers. The emerging leadership from political classes, social sector, masses should adopt this principle, and start using the 'great leveler' as an effective tool. The technology visionaries in the administrative machinery should use data analytics tools to make sense out of this seemingly high noise on the stage. The connectors between the mainline and the social sector should dream big in effectively using analytics (speech and text, and even video) in the coming years to create the entire India as a greatly leveled stage.

All this is possible, if the leaders stop the current mud slinging, and start appreciating the fact that we are in a greatly leveled world, a highly transparent world, and then, we might as well embrace this new stage for advancements of our nation, advancement for all its people.

Jai Ho.

We worship you, Oh deadline god!

‘I don’t care how you do it, but you have to meet the deadline, coz the customer is waiting’, yells the manager, whose hands-on life was buried deep many years ago. In fact, the firm loves him, because if he is hands-on, in touch with realities, he cannot push the deadlines. The deadline god will not be pleased. Let us pour the blood of young lives which we fatten anyway through vulgar salaries, gyms and basketball courts in our campus. What else are we feeding them for, if not to offer them to the deadline god! The youngsters slog, day in day out, and they meet the deadline. Mails of appreciation flow, awards are given in the next meeting. The customer looks at this piece of _ _ _ _ (work) and is horrified. He calls the manager, only to know that the ownership has been shifted to the maintenance team!

‘Oh my God, the software is not working, and we have only four days to give it to the customer. If we don’t meet the deadline, we lose our face, we lose our reputation’. Here comes the priest of the deadline god again, the manager. ‘ Looks like the architecture is alright. But we don’t have time to fix. So let’s give a patch. That will meet the deadline. We will fix the consequences later’. So the patch comes in 4 days, and there goes the customer and the maintenances team to suffer the consequences for ever.

Looking at the crowds that support the mass movement, isn’t it silly to expect any different culture. The masses who have worshipped the deadline god always, they do not know any other god, they do not worship any other god. The god needs to be pleased, even if blood flows. The god needs to be pleased, even if the architecture strengthening needs more thought. The god needs to be pleased even if many millions have to suffer the consequences of this patchwork. But what else do we expect from the devotees!

With all due respects to all the people involved in the movement, am I the only cynic to see a parallel in the behaviour of the followers?

The gods must be crazy

Close to 20 years ago, I was part of an agitation for a 'just cause', led by a 'democratic' leader against the 'autocratic' authorities of an educational institution. The emotional frenzy, being part of a charged environment, was an experience by itself, which led us into unbelievable chaos, and when we opened our eyes to face the reality, the 'democratic leader' had more fiction than fact, the 'autocratic' authorities were not so autocratic after all, and the 'just cause' was more just to the people who led the movement. Since then, I decided I will not be part of mass movements and signature campaigns, since by design somewhere down the line they get diluted, sabotaged, and even surgically modified by other doctors without your knowledge.

For this reason, despite the presence of wonderful leaders like Kiran Bedi, Santhosh Hegde etc. in this movement, I still kept my independent thinking about the whole issue. But of course, I still respected the passion with which they were doing, since they share a common end goal with all well meaning people of India, which is to weed out corruption. So, while I did not quite approve the mass movement approach, which many a time get followed by many who cannot be the first ones to throw the proverbial stone at the sinner, I still observed with interest.

However, I was surprised at the way the Government handled the movement yesterday. I am still puzzled who went crazy. Or is it that there is a larger gameplan that the government has, only a part of which they were playing yesterday? Maybe not. Or else, why a 7 day imprisonment in the morning and a release in the evening? Why the unholy hurry in many decisions? Why the afterthoughts?

I see classic absence of leadership and effective communication by the leaders of the government. I see blindness by them in not seeing how the common man connects the various scams on one side, and Anna's movement as the only hope! Whether that is correct or not, that is the perception of the helpless masses of India, and that perception will soon become reality if not handled very carefully. It is too early to say if that reality would be the solution.

Why isn't there that boy in the government circles who is shouting that the Emperor has no clothes! Why is it there is no hurry in effective communication by the government to the masses? Why isn't the government touching the hearts of people who are tired of corruption that they will rally behind anyone who leads, without any careful look into the detailed agenda? Why is there a hard insensitivity by the leaders who are in a hurry to be more right than understanding?

Is it too difficult? Is running the government above common sense of common men like me? Or have the gods that be gone crazy!

1 < 1, 1+1 > 2

In lines with the thought of collective intelligence, there is a very simple concept which can be implemented by NGOs focusing on people with disabilities. Concept is straightforward. The disability a person has is typically in one faculty, be it in the eye, be it in hearing, be it in physical movement. Left alone, or even in groups of people with the same disability, they have a disadvantage. However, group the people of various disabilities together, and you together have the disability issue resolved, and the advantage of teamwork. A visually disabled person put together with a physically disabled person and a hearing disabled person make a great team if specialized coaching can be given on various types of teamwork. Disability hence do not any more become a disadvantage. They will also always enjoy the company of another person and hence monotony of work is gone too.

1 is less than one with the disability. However 1 plus 1 is more than 2 with the collective intelligence, just as in team cycling.

The thought was triggered when I read about a Chinese NGO working with disabled people whose name is One Plus One. I have checked with them if they follow this model. Respond to me in this blog with your views and also if you know NGOs who do this already.

Collaborate to Focus Better

Pranab Bardhan, a professor of Economics, wrote in Boston daily that "activists who romanticize the poor should keep in mind that the horrors of capitalism fade in comparison with the horrors of pre-capitalism". Many times we get lost in our own 'isms', thinking our 'ism well' is the world. With many 'isms' in the world, and each having its rightful place, we are running out of time in getting the pieces together into a master design. A master design where the red 'ism' and the 'green' ism all have a beautiful role to play and make awesome patterns.

The business world has been consolidating quite well in the last many years.This for sure has eliminated a lot of redundancy. Competition between players is definitely what makes different silos create competitive designs. However, in the business world, the paradigm of competition has moved up to extremely high levels of maturity.

If you take technology companies, years ago companies competed in bringing a new technology first to the market. Then when that became level playing, they moved to certain technological advantages within a certain standard. When that layer also became a level playing field, they moved up the value chain of competition to compete on pricing. Then came revolutionary companies who insulted the pricing game by ridiculously low prices which the giants got worried about. Over time, even that layer got leveled. The competition then evolved to service differentiations, which too did not take much time to level. Now the game is all about competing companies collaborating with each other to offer value-added solutions. The game is about cloud offerings where you no longer can live alone. Competition and Collaboration going beautifully hand in hand.

As a response to Pranab Bardhan's article, I wrote that a single brush stroke that paints all NGOs is too large to be real. What is needed is a constructive next step by leading NGO organizations and NGO consortiums in driving the thinking of Collaboration, where all who are focused on the people, be it NGO, be it corporations, be it governments, be it political parties look at optimizations in their own ecosystems, eliminating redundancies and boosting the strengths. The ecosystem, whether local or global, is large enough for everyone to pursue their passion, while still hand-holding and learning from one another.

If the business world is imaginative in this, we better learn from that imagination and apply it to the world that focuses on people - the social world. It is time we moved up the levels of maturity to a level relevant for the people. The business world moved up the layers to focus on the primary motive of their existence, which is profit. The social world likewise have to keep its focus on the primary motive of their passion and existence, which is people. The steps needed to achieve this are obvious, and there are many examples from the business world we can apply. We are also at a time in history, where technology itself is all oriented towards collaboration.

Let's collaborate and work systematically to focus better on the people.

Platform 9 and 3/4

Some people say heaven is right here, amidst us. It's just that human sensory capabilities are not enough to recognize that. True or not, I do not know. And perhaps it does not affect me.

However there is another world which exists right amidst us. A world which was always there but you never noticed. The world around you, you thought you noticed but you never noticed. Through your money, and through your spare time, you even thought you were doing something great in this world. That kid you gave alms, that family you helped construct a house, that school you gave money, that child whose education you support. Well, that was just the tip of the tip of the advertisement of an iceberg. This world is huge.

The world of Platform 9 and 3 quarters (drawing the phrase from Harry Potter) does not believe in photo ops, big funds, publicity. This world does not care about new buildings, new cathedrals, new temples - unless they can give them security and shelter everyday. This world cares about one more person to clothe, one more person to feed at least a meal a day, and increasingly so. This world does not need a big and mindless, big bang technology intervention. This world needs incremental interventions, patient observations for new value adds, and sensitive introduction of improvements, taking care that the last of the least are also not ignored.

Mahatma Gandhi has very famously said, "Recall the face of the poorest and most helpless man whom you must have seen and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of use to him? Will he be able to gain anything from it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny?"

Now this does not in the least mean that there is no place of big dreams. In fact there is place for big and bigger dreams and visions. It is just that these dreams will have to be firmly rooted on the grassroot needs, existing patterns, and taking off from there. The dream has to be from the eyes of a weaver who sees the disjoint patterns and creates a beautiful canvas connecting them. The dream has to be of incremental impact, and may that increment be minor or major. The dream has to be of optimizations, of efficiencies, and evolving from the rich experience of the countless people who have dedicated their lives to grassroot work, respecting the opinions of people who have dirtied their hands.

A dream, a vision in that direction which evolves from the wonderful people who are already there and their wonderful experiences, a weaving that connects them to the wonderful world of technology, the philanthropic world and the other familiar worlds in the platforms around us, and a humility to patiently and systematically build up towards realizing that vision - such a dream can transform the world. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes hand holding. It takes respect. But it will work, through its own gestational period, into beautiful creations.

Platform 9 3/4 can then be the heaven they say is amidst us - a heaven our human senses can recognize and feel.

The Beauty and Efficiency of togetherness

"No man is an island, entire of itself,

Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main

Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee."

There is nothing more profound than this, which was penned by John Donne in the 16th century. Yet how far as humans we have drifted away.

This is true in every aspect of human life, and all the more in any venture that the human being is part of. We love to glorify individual achievements, individual leaders, individual role models. Yet any of these individuals would admit like Isaac Newton did back in the 17th century that "if I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of the giants.

This generation perhaps is a little more blessed than the previous, with the powerful peer to peer exchange of ideas and opinions, thanks to the Web 2.0 and 3.0 avatars like Facebook and Twitter. How about taking this further into organizational design and design of human interactions?

Too much of precious time and energy is wasted by wonderful human beings working in isolation. The same is true even with the devices and technology thrown around. The same is true with many bandwidth hogging applications whose intelligence is centrally driven. The same is true with many organizations who waste precious human time and energy and even physical bandwidth from across the world since the so called 'intelligent decision maker' sits in one part of the world. So many smart phones being still used as simple voice devices, with the processor power and other capabilities wasted away. So many high power computers still being used as word processors, or at best as Skype machines. So many smart human beings still being used for much less skilled work. The absence of an overall view. The absence of respect for the power in your neighbour. The blind eye towards wastefulness. The absence of respect and recognition of the person next to you!

In the topic of social foraging, they say, the solitary whale would join the group of whales to maximize its probability of effective hunting. Or it is said that many ants work together so harmoniously as many cells in a human body, that the group of ants become an organism by itself. Now that is a beautiful extension of what is natural. Cells working together in a body, parts of the body working together in creating the collective intelligence, and people working together in achieving many times more as a collective organism of people.

This needs careful design of this collective organism. You can't just assemble a few cells and expect it to work together most effectively. You can't just put together a few human body parts and expect it to be an intelligent human being. Now if these things are pretty obvious, why is it that we do not so carefully knit together the organization in a similar fashion, where as creators of this organization we have clarity on what is needed and then assemble the right body parts? After knowing the theory of diffusion in propagation of innovation for many years, why do we not carefully apply this in organizational design.

I am sure many do, yet many more don't, since they are busy figuring out how their own names can be glorified. I wish away the days of glorifying the individual as much as getting amazed at the power of a carefully designed togetherness. I wish away the days of glorifying individuals as great social changers as much as that amazing well knit group from across the globe who together made a difference, a difference that stays. I wish away death thereby, since while John Donne recognizes the loss of a piece of me, I am excited that there is no death of this collective organism since new cells, new parts, new human beings, new creatures take its place in the lasting design. I hope this thinking makes a difference to the world around, where we would go back to the drawing board to design beautiful patterns of the collective organism for making a difference. It is much more than rallying behind one leader, it is much more than a few slogans together. In fact it is none of these. It is in creating a different world of patterns where the individual is no more.

Bridging the Participation Divide – A Cloud & Rain Approach

Everyday we read in the newspaper that the rich philanthropists around the world are adding a few more billions for social upliftment in the developing countries. It’s wonderful. Yet the cynic in me keeps shouting out, “But if there is so much money, why am I not seeing a change in the lives around me? For instance, the slum near the place I live, is still the same, 18 years after I came to Bangalore, and so many years since Government and Philanthropists have been pumping in money into various activities of development – not sure where, but not definitely here.

I often have the privilege of meeting elite groups of philanthropists, almost always backed up by the ‘Desis’ who boldly proclaim in a heavy American accent that their ‘Dils’ (hearts) are still ‘Hindustani’ (Indian) and want to do something for their beloved country, who have yet another idea of investing multi million dollars into the development sector in India. I play to them my tune of “Bridging the Participation Divide”, which I with two good friends of mine in the social sector, have been passionately discussing and putting new flesh every time we meet or talk about it. These philanthropists listen with interest, over cups of beer in some of the premium clubs and hotels of Bangalore. They even appreciate, my passion, and my decision to leave corporate life for this bold dream. Yet to my surprise, they always share with me that they were not quite worried about having a couple of millions (and dollars, I mean), wasted, for the sake of an idea. After all, unless you take risks, where are the rewards? I humbly remind them that similar experiments have failed earlier and there may be some learnings from those. But in all these conversations, I realize that my definition of failure was coming from my middle class upbringing where every rupee was considered important, and that did not connect to these great people whose level of charity was in millions of dollars, and their wastage margin far outweighed my savings target!

Nevertheless, I am still convinced that unless I see change in the lives of the people around me, be it in the slums, or be it in the rural villages around Karnataka, or even in the lives of the children in some of the schools in Bangalore itself, these millions do not mean anything to me. To a beggar on MG Road, what difference does the Metro make unless he gets better prospects of revenue? To a child on the street, what difference does any development agenda make unless there is better prospects of filling his hungry stomach everyday? To a child in the rural village of Karnataka, what difference does technology make unless it takes him and his friends to new levels of knowledge and dreams about the future?

It is in this context that the passion about ‘Bridging the Participation Divide’ makes a lot of sense. What good is technology, if it is to be worshipped from a distance? What good is a computer in a village, if it only further increases the awe about computers? What good is high bandwidth or higher processing power if it only increases the ‘digital divide’?

Unless we make technology a friend to these people who we try to ‘improve’, unless we take the pains to go through the long route of building companionship with technology, the body will reject it like a thorn in the flesh. Those who love the patronizing approach of introducing technology will soon lament how these ‘poor Indians’ do not want to learn and compete in the ‘global marketplace’. A few years later, another philanthropist will come into the scene, repeat the same mistakes, waste a few more millions of dollars, and by then one more Manjunath, who grew up in the slum would be struggling to get his daughter married and would be pleading desperately with the local money lender.

With the advent of cloud in the market place, bridging the participation divide is an important theme to explore. Any technology company or philanthropist who wants to invest money in the social sector or in the Bottom of the Pyramid market will do good to invest a very small portion of this money into doing this grassroot research. This will involve introducing technology and solutions in an absolutely non-intrusive way, monitoring it in a zero-overhead fashion, gathering data to be put into an observation model which gets iterated week over week of the experiment, new shows get added to the yatra of participation, and the model enriches. The data gathered will also be experimented on the various cloud mechanisms available, be it IaaS or PaaS or SaaS, and will also try out very optimal communication mechanisms and protocols, some of which may even be a combination of machines and humans, in line with leading edge work getting done on lightweight data representation methods, and see one after the other, cloud solutions coming to be of relevance for this rural crowd. The cloud stays meaningless to the villager unless it rains on them – rains opportunities, rains connections, rains wealth.

As this train moves on, technology will become a friend, a friend who is helpful, a friend who also tells your good things to others in the rest of the world. The technology will make the rural teacher of Karnataka now a global resource to teach physics in a very unique way. This technology will make certain practices in that small village in Karnataka known to another corner in America or Africa, to that unknown child whom the ‘development millions’ has not touched yet.

The scenarios applied will vary from sector to sector, be it education or be it telemedicine. The fundamental approach will be a mindset which looks at the target population as the customer, and will be treated like a true customer anywhere in the world. The philosophy will be one of respect to the customer in that rural village, respect to his friends, respects to his community, respect to the various practices which are time honoured in his place, and then introducing technology as a friend to power the strengths they already have, to broadbase the best practices, to lead to evolution of new practices. Technology will be another manure to their fertile land, fertile in their own indigenous ways.

A little more patience, a little more humility, and we can truly impact that neighbour of ours, that slum around us, that village around us. The learning models which come out of that will be rich and reusable. The spread of the impact will be viral. In that mela, the person who sowed the seed will be forgotten. The reapers rejoice. The harvesters revel. The sower moves on, quietly, to the next global village.

This is what ‘Bridging the Participation Divide’ is all about, and what PrismTree is trying to evangelize with the corporate sector and philanthropists. Contact me at jacobcv@prismtree.com if you think this unique value proposition of ‘diligent focus on the strategic value of building a sustainable community using technology as an effective support and optimization resource’, makes sense to you as a philanthropist, as a corporation. You can fund the initiative for a sector relevant to you, and with a few more players who can fund, we can make this yatra very exciting – cloud on top, and rain on your back.

Shine on, diamond

Rubbishing great people, by citing rules, is a familiar pattern in this world. The rule and legality may be right and hence courts and administrative bodies may have to uphold such things. But what gets missed out in the process is much grace and gratitude for these people, who themselves built the institution which has now gone against them. But looking at it differently, maybe it is a sign of their greatness which is getting displayed, when they themselves get taken for granted in their own organizations. A true example of servant leadership.

This is what Dr. Yunus is facing now in Bangladesh. Varghese Kurian of Amul in India had similar experience. He built the great organization called Amul, and brought in levelness in the society of Gujarat, and subsequently the whole social fabric of India. More about his story is in the book written by him titled "I too had a dream". But finally he had to step down.

If our leaders had the wisdom of saints like Sri Buddha or Jesus Christ, then things would have been indeed different. Someone said to Buddha, “The things you teach, sir, are not to be found in Scripture”. “Then put them there”, said Buddha. After an embarassed pause, the man went on to say, “May I dare to suggest, sir, that some of the things you teach actually contradict the Scriptures?” Buddha smiled and replied, “Then the Scriptures need amending”. Jesus once said, “Sabbath is made for man, not man for Sabbath”. But of course, these are great people who lived on the earth, and not even their followers in the religions practice these principles. Then why do we expect better things from administrative leaders of the country!

I think, the experience of being rubbished by an organization you built only enhances your greatness. You only enhance the lustre of the diamond by rubbing it harder.

Setting up the Asia Center of a Social Organization

Excerpts from a seminar I led recently on setting up an Asia center of a Social Organization

Introduction

Someone said to Buddha, “The things you teach, sir, are not to be found in Scripture”.

“Then put them there”, said Buddha.

After an embarassed pause, the man went on to say, “May I dare to suggest, sir, that some of the things you teach actually contradict the Scriptures?”

Buddha smiled and replied, “Then the Scriptures need amending”

Birth of a new organization from a well established legacy. This can bring in an interesting mix of advantages as well as potential pitfalls. If we carefully define the right mix of the legacy and the present, we will get an exciting new organization. It should very clearly take the strengths of the legacy and beauty of the region. Then you get a beautiful baby.

I list down 7 fundamental principles which will be helpful while the new organization is being carved out.

1. Reusable Patterns from the legacy of experience

An identification and enumeration of the reusable patterns of success and failures has to be done from the history of the organization. This can be extracted from the archives and the invariants have to be drawn out of that as a pattern. The important thing of course is whether it is all well documented, and if not, how much of that can be re-created by talking to some of the existing leaders.

The pattern can be of establishing new relationships. There may be an observable pattern of how the parent organization established new relationships with the local contexts. It may have been community relationships, political relationships, relationship with religious groups. The way in which this is re-applied will definitely be according to the 21^st century Asia's parlance and context. However, the pattern stays.

The pattern can be of methodologies. There may be documented methodologies which need to be studied, on how community projects were implemented. These methodologies can be looked at for re-application.

2. New Blend of Resources

There has to be a new blend defined for Resources in the organization. Resources are always one of the most critical assets of the organization. Resources fall under the categories of a) Human Resources, b) Technology and c) Tools. From the identified reusable patterns of Resources, we need to have clarity on how to contextualize it to the new organization.

For instance, there would have been a pattern of effective communication to the partner organizations using travel or newsletters. The reusable pattern here is not the travel or the newsletters, but that of effective mass communication. For re-implementation of the successful pattern of communication, the paradigms of the age like Facebook, Twitter etc needs to be used effectively.

There are many state of the art tools in place in the world now. There are many companies which focus on technology solutions purely for the non-profit sector. There should be an active thought towards taking the Asia organization's formation as an opportunity to bring in some of these trends, and then that ultimately influencing the Global organization to follow the leadership in these Resource Areas. Asia is the hotbed of Highly educated human resources, leading edge technology research and development as well as state-of-the-art tools & concepts. What better place hence to learn from than Asia.

There is a small research activity happening within PrismTree Consulting towards having a light-weight social project management tool, which draw in the best from the technology sector, and make it is easy to use in the social sector. Technology has evolved much, and many of them will come in future to aid the whole field of project management and metrics. Data mining and related data analysis research has advanced tremendously, and the social sector is one of the best places where the results will be phenomenal.

These are just examples. The highlight of this point is that we should use the birth of the Asia organization as an opportunity to bring in certain world-class practices in resource usage, and try them out, and reapply the same globally.

3. New Blend of Processes & Policies

Processes are another critical asset of any organization. The reusable patterns of processes have to be analyzed and re-applied. Process is the area where there will be maximum temptation of sticking to legacy. Processes of status reports, processes of management meetings, processes of status meetings, work flow, finance, Human Resources, policies. This area needs maximum care in definition, or else this is exactly the area where the legacy can be debilitating.

There is always a temptation to reapply a certain process, regardless of whether it fits in well in a new context. If a process does not make sense to the new context, we should have the ability to throw it away. A blanket is no longer a blanket if it does not keep you warm. Care should be taken not to cut the person to fit the coat.

Emphasis should be on light weight processes and track-able metrics which can be mapped into the goals and objectives of the organization.

4. New Blend of Values

Values of the organization should be reapplied in spirit and not in letter. While the fundamental values of integrity, stewardship etc. remain the same, the visible values have to be redefined for Asia, based on the cultural context. For instance, the West may have a culture of top-down decision making, while the eastern culture may have a practice of consensus. The values typically should also include Partnership Interaction, Trust, Mutual Respect etc. While these aspects are invariant across geographies and across time, the implementation of these values have to be well defined in the local context. The way in which Trust is manifested will be totally different from a western context as that of an eastern context.

Many times, the passion for the organization will prevent us from redefining the Values with the new context in mind. We may argue that this has worked over the decades, and so it should work. We may argue that anything else will be a dilution. The way out in such situations is to question ourselves again on what is our Vision, and what are the Values we can define in the new context which makes internal and external sense.

5. Newness in Localization

Localization with the culture in terms of expressions is one aspect which differentiates success and failure of many organizations.

Take the example of the introduction of baby milk powder by a company who was very successful in the west, and took the product to the Middle East. p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }Unfortunately, they overlooked the simple fact that in the Middle East, people read things from right to left. So the bottle which was meant to be a way to make a sad baby a happy baby, turned out to be exactly the opposite, and the product a disaster !! While this may sound like a very far fetched example, there are many subtle things we do in organizations, in the same manner or worse, causing phenomenal damage.

Hence, it is very important that the organizational definition takes this into account, and has a leader also who can understand the Asia context.

There are some companies who have extremely well localized in India that they are household names in India. They bring in the new flavors, the new packaging, the new advertisements, all of which apply to the local context. They have done excellent cultural contextualizations. Our generation in India grew up thinking, and perhaps many still think, that Surf Detergent Powder is Indian. The advertisements are Indian, the faces are Indian, the pricing also was Indian. There was an easy penetration into the society, and that helped the success of Surf in India. If you ask an average Indian where Bata Shoes is headquartered, they will say it is in India. There are many who know that Bata has international presence, and they even take pride sometimes in thinking how an Indian company like Bata has spread worldwide! That is the level in which Bata is visible in the streets and homes of India, because of their very interesting ways of branding and reaching the masses, despite being foreign.

6. Organization Structure with Empowered Management

One of the main areas where many multinationals fail in India is in their inability to give up control to the local region. Even the ones who claim success will agree that they are not able to extract the full potential from the region, as much as they do in the West. Then they write crazy books to justify certain pet theories that Indians do not have the ability to conceptualize, architect and develop leading edge products. However, where they have failed is in not being able to let go. Endless meetings at off hours do not make executives in the local region more efficient. They make them zombies.

The organizational structure should reflect the empowerment, and the roles should be optimally defined, and filled with people who have the calibre to create and expand the vision of Asia organization, and lead it with a hands-on approach.

7. Empowered Innovation

Last but not least is the concept of Empowered Innovation, which has to be practiced in a very strong fashion. I have seen corporates failing in empowered innovation in the region. Every new innovation gets reviewed by the “Headquarters”. This is all because of the tight hold that the parent body holds.

An organization without a locally empowered innovation culture will perish, or even worse, live an apology of life. There has to be some investment made in having a research wing in the organization or funded by the organization, to breed innovations in the social sector. This should result in some interesting concepts and solutions that come out which marry the best of available resources in the world with the social context in Asia. Unless you set apart money and resources for these, innovation does not happen. Asia organization can hence be a good reason to pilot this initiative, if it is not already there. The business world is increasingly focusing on making Asia as the breeding ground of innovation because of the opportunties for fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. A social organization does not have to work hard at being in that sector, since the primary mission itself is in the massess of Asia. What better opportunity will we get for innovating than this?

Conclusion

Let me conclude with a story. When a man whose marriage was in trouble sought his advice, the Master said. “You must learn to listen to your wife”. The man took this advice to heart and returned after a month to say that he had learnt to listen to every word his wife was saying. Said the Master with a smile. “Now go home and listen to every word she isn't saying”.

With an openness to listen to every word that is being said and unsaid in the local context of Asia, with an openness to draw from the rich legacy of the organization over the last many years, I see the Asia organization as a very exciting opportunity to try out a very relevant organization, with learnings of decades, but not having to carry the weight of those years behind. Fresh in spirit, rich in legacy, the organization has all the opportunities to become a role model example of creating a locally relevant organization in Asia, and that leading over time to transformations in the global organization. This needs a great level of empowerment by the global leadership, an attitude of open eyes and ears to see and hear things that are seen and unseen, said and unsaid.