Shaping Sustainable Tomorrows

From Boardrooms to Backstreets

Arun Maira has been in the trenches. Of business and government. Despite occupying some of the highest positions – as Chairman of the Boston Consulting Group, as a Member of the Planning Commission under Manmohan Singh or currently as Chairman of HelpAge International – he has never lost sight of those at the lowest rungs of the ladder. With stints across geographies, sectors and types of institutions, he has a keen sense of what it takes to engender systemic shifts.

One of his more memorable and life-altering experiences was at the Tata Group. At 25 years old, he was the Executive Assistant to Sumant Moolgaokar, Vice Chairman of the Tata Group and Executive Chairman of Tata Motors. Moolgaokar told him to “listen and learn, not to instruct and teach.” A lesson that Maira quickly absorbed, sharpening his knowledge of hands-on factory practices while reading management books.

He recalls a tale about the illustrious chairman from his many years of working with JRD Tata. Tata had an elaborate clock on his desk that was no longer functional. He asked his secretary to shut the door and leave him to his own wits for a couple of hours. In that time, he dismantled the clock but could not piece it back together. Apparently, he tinkered with time pieces and clocks often, so he even possessed a toolkit for this. Sheepishly, he called his secretary with the clock parts in a brown paper bag and asked her to get it fixed from an expert roadside tinkerer. His was a hands-on approach that seeped into all levels of the organization.

Lessons from The Family

Maira also attributes his own zeal for lifelong learning to his mother’s limitless curiosity. At 90, she said did not want to add years to her life. Rather, she wanted to add life to her years. After Maira’s father had died, more than two decades ago, she lived alone till 97, constantly reading and learning for as long as her senses permitted. She used to be a Montessori teacher earlier, and even till 95, she continued to teach the children of domestic workers and street sweepers.

When Maira was a Member of the Planning Commission, his seven-year-old grandson wrote a letter that seemed to indicate what the Commission’s mandate should be: “The Planning Community (he even referred to the Commission as a Community) is a place where all the poor people of India can come, and there will be someone to listen to them, and then they will not be poor anymore.”

His mother taught him to listen to the sounds of nature; his grandson, to the voices of the marginalized.

Listen, Learn and Lead

In Shaping The Future, Maira offers guidelines on how leaders can drive changes across complex self-adaptive systems. To propel system changes, Maira argues that design thinking is inadequate. After all, designers themselves are embedded in the system. It’s like changing an aeroplane’s design while flying. A critical practice such leaders need to master is deep listening – to a diverse range of voices, and especially to people who are unlike them.

To counter Weapons of Mass Destruction, we need “Ways of Mass Dialogue”. He observes that even in schools, the best talkers (debaters) and writers are rewarded, rather than the best listeners. 

He bemoans the fact that “[global] institutions and national governments are being run by people who are experts everywhere, but who don’t listen to common people anywhere…”

The Big Impact of Small Steps

He also exhorts young change makers to exercise restraint before trying to remake the world. He cites Mahatma Gandhi’s message to always consider the impact on the poorest person or the most marginalized sections before acting. Sometimes steps can be small, and seemingly inconsequential, but every action counts.

Maira’s definition of an eco-system leader is “Someone who takes the first steps towards something that they deeply care about and in ways that others wish to follow.

The planet desperately needs such leaders to tackle climate change. After all, on that front,  Maira warns that the Titanic has already crashed into the iceberg. And some passengers are still partying in first class, while others on the lower deck are being submerged. To tackle such a scenario, he believes we need to fundamentally alter the foundations upon which our societies and economies are based.

While creating technologies that enhance effectiveness or efficiency, we must also attend to values and beliefs that lie below these. What are our ethics as a society? “It is time to pause and reconsider the trajectory of scientific and economic progress.”

Feminist Eco-Visionaries

As far back as 1972, Donella Meadows had studied the limits of heady economic growth in her The Limits to Growth. The team’s study was commissioned by the Club of Rome, and it estimated that by 1960, human extractive processes had already depleted 60% of the earth’s capacity for self-renewal. Extrapolating such growth into the future, the group warned of what Maira terms an “approaching bankruptcy.” Then in 1987, Go Bruntland wrote Our Common Future – and defined “sustainable development” as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.”

Hazel Henderson, as a mother, had a first-hand feel of what air pollution could do to a child. Despite being a school drop-out and an immigrant – having moved to New York from Britain – she was unafraid to raise the issue about rising fumes and their impact on kids. She formed a group called “Citizens for Clean Air”.  But each time she suggested something, she was always told that it wasn’t practical from an economic viewpoint. So she started reading widely across domains – “economics, sociology, political science, and philosophy.”

As a feminist, Henderson observed that mainly masculine values of “competition, domination, expansion” govern current economic systems. And necessary feminine values of “nurturing, humility, peacefulness” are difficult to inject into systems. In general, she argues that men foster nation states that compete or dominate over one another. But women are accustomed to running smaller systems – like families and communities. Which require cooperation and interdependence.

Gradually, her activism started gaining traction and she was invited to be a member of a US Congress body, asked to join President Carter’s economic task force and became an adviser to the Environmental Action Foundation. She also published a book titled Creating Alternative Futures in 1978.

Rewiring Economics To Reflect Social Concerns

Maira argues that most economic models fail to capture the complex realities we inhabit. They are also poor at predicting the future. Economists can measure growth, but they are less capable of measuring social inclusion and ecological impact. They must now define goals that include growth along with inclusion and sustainability.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo would agree. They observe that economists’ views on the efficiency of free trade are divorced from the social reality that undergird human lives. Any changes to drive efficiency in the global economy engenders shifts and disruptions inside local and national economies. There are always winners and losers, costs and benefits.

Vibrant Cities Versus Planned Cities

In Seeing Like a State, James Scott observes issues with managed forests over time. When seemingly unnecessary bushes and wild plants are removed, and trees are planted in an orderly fashion, over time, the forest weakens. Similarly, scientific agriculture – which propagates the monoculture of a single species – also denudes soil in the long term.

And so too with cites. Planned cities are often less amenable to ongoing needs that emerge in an organic manner as different people settle in and move about. If Le Corbusier is the prototype of a dictatorial city-planner, Jane Jacobs is the opposite. She listened to people on the ground and suggested a bottoms-up approach in The Death and Birth of Great American Cities (1961).  As Maira puts it, “Le Corbusier saw a visual order. Jacobs saw an experienced order.”

Greening The Planet with Gandhi’s Wisdom

Gandhi had suggested that India should not follow the path of Western industrialization. Because by doing so, many Indians would become mere cogs in a machine, and moreover, such a path would lead to environmental degradation. He advocated for India to have local communities caring for smaller ecosystems and helping each other.

Maira suggests rather than focusing only on economics, we ought to focus on the strength and cohesion of local communities. We ought to return to Nature, whatever we take or borrow from it. And encourage businesses “of the people” – like the Amul co-operatives or the SEWA group of women’s enterprises. In general, we ought to focus less on growth and more on citizen welfare.

Reinforcing Gandhi’s dictum, Maira says: “Rather than benefits for yourself, think about what benefits your actions will give to others who are much more in need than you are.”

References

Arun Maira, Shaping The Future: A Guide for Systems Leaders: How to Be, Think, and Act in the New World, Notion Press, 2023