Sustainability at its heart is about delivering better standards of livability. Human Rights in the business context as a block within the ESG Lego structure is fundamentally about operationalizing dignity within our communities of affect. ESG gives sustainability to its legs; the indicators, the frameworks, the risk roster expressed through publicly facing ratings which drive trust and transparency.

But are we measuring impact through ESG within the Corporate Human Rights Indicators? We are trying to establish a ‘humanity hygiene’ baseline, the complaints, incident statistics, resolution numbers, access infrastructure etc. It gives a reliable performance snapshot to the investor class regarding social risk, the subliminal cues of reading between the data lines, the grid of numbers flashing in front of our screens. ESG data, as I have written earlier in a LinkedIn post, is an early warning detector of an impending crisis.

The global progressive values paradigm often colloquially labelled as woke, which is often carried over to the ESG meta framework, reflective of the culture wars in US Politics ahead of the presidential polls.

In the era of acute geopolitical crisis with the Gaza humanitarian debacle, the Ukraine War which has been moved to the backburner despite the European Winter coming up, Human Rights and its applicable iterations will gain salience, as a human tragedy is pinging on our news alerts and saturating our Instagram feeds every few hours.

‘Being Human’ is good for business and society as live in a hyper ‘risk society’ in an Ulrich Beck vain.

There is a reason migration is an eternal business model, people want jobs and businesses want cheap hands and it is a perfect marriage of demand and supply. Global labor chains are fragmented based on skill and race (Iskander 2021). There is a migration industry operating in the billions of dollars facilitating this transition between multiple migration corridors. There is an implicit tendency to look at migration through remittances or the security lens, but it is this meta business paradigm which sustains migration through inherent embedded precarity, vulnerability which creates disposability of limbs and life, just look at construction sites in the gulf and southeast Asia which are memorials and graveyards of labor. The remittances sent home bolster the current trade balance of many countries and stabilize the currency. This is soaked in blood, toil, and humiliation of the labor migrant, seen across a phone screen where the call is taken from the back of the bus 67 on a late Sunday evening from Little India to the ulu dorms in Tuas.

At the heart of the advisory business is pragmatic problem solving with the best of actionable ideas undergirded by the best of class research (which usually consultants snigger with this is as ‘too academic’). The key is imagination to help the client through the poly crisis, which is dynamic and complex. Thinking about solving it rather than the scope of work will make consultants indispensable in the multiple transitions that confront us.

Knowledge ecosystems for impact, sustainability and impact communities of practice are blurred where scientific research, academia, public sector regulators, investors, think tanks and corporates collaborate in often non compartmentalised manner as the issue at hand of the transition is wicked and no linear SOPs exist.

Each of the stakeholders have their own incentive architecture but survival bias led to a just and purpose led transformation is a layered process. No clean contours will lead the cartographies of transition, h-index hegemony will lead to open access science and hopefully consultants will embrace the critical thinking of academics and academics the cost pragmatic approach of the private sector.

ESG is essentially a layer of non financial risk data to aid better understanding of investments and will not save the world itself unless linked to the larger purpose of a meaningful transition. The next explosive asset class for the investor tribe are transition linked businesses and financing the transition needs a new Marshall Plan of a new scale. As the leading climate finance leader in a Bloomberg Zero Podcast (Avinash Persaud) said that climate change is a finance problem, I would go a step further, the transition is not a multiple PE opportunity yet. It is not a retail business yet, such as digital which took a quarter of a century, cheap phones and even cheaper data to transform culture.

ESG is seeping into regulatory culture and business as usual which is a welcome change. Paying customers particularly the elites need to think of the transition as a must need product, then the cultural shift will occur and an opportunity to be attractive to the retail investor.

Digital is an assault to the senses whenever we scroll our feeds on Twitter or the hard copy pink papers such as the FT. There are a few characteristics of the digital which are exemplary, ability to aggregate users and for pattern recognition, and fundamentally to shrink space-time. We are surrounded by technology, and the ubiquitous nature of digital has taken quarter of a century to emerge as is gauged from a16z’s conversation to Kevin Kelly. The human being in the realm of the digital is a ‘data-double’ which is a data point or a coordinate available for transition. Data is the new oil, but for whom?

The prowess of the digital spans a spectrum from the core to the periphery as per my conceptualization as a scholar of technology and society. The traits of technology will interact, refract, and diffract of the terrain of the community and the company, which ensure that the other vital C, the client has its pain point in everyday operations remediated or solved. The sectors which generate a massive tranche of data at a velocity are well suited for the digital economy. Aggregators of any typology from real estate to retail will bring the service to the tap of a smart phone. ‘On Demand’ is a feature of digital economy, however the digital incorporates human labor as a technology in terms of ‘Humans as a Service’ as per Jeremias Pressel in his Oxford University Press Book of the same name. Digital is not sans human labor, however digital maps, morphs and mutates the human of the human into digital features, which are conducted by human coders only to optimize the business value. However, the question which cuts through a knife into the haze of digital rhetoric is.

What additional value is the so-called digital transformation, adding to the consumer?

The core purpose of a business is to serve the client at the point of their need, to solve their problems at the best sustainable price, rather than blindly jump on to a band wagon without critically thing through the second order impacts. Oman struggles with the digital economy as the local cartography is pinned to the building number and the way number rather than a name, which makes deliveries harder to make. The cash centric culture also makes it challenging for the digital players to map transactions. The Omani consumer is price sensitive client and seeks to touch the product before making a purchase, although the culture as other things with time evolve.

The cab transportation sector in Muscat was ripe for disruption as flagging a cab on the street at 45-degree August heat during peak summer was a strain especially when one is with elderly parents. But with the presence of digital cab aggregators such as O Taxi, it makes for a better quality of life in turn better businesses. In India, Cash on Delivery is a feature of local adaptation of the aggregator economy. The digital is therefore a plastic wrap which covers the product. The optimizer rather than the substrate, bringing a disparate set of actors to the consumer, and not a universal panacea.

Each local culture will lend imports into the digital paradigm, and Gulf will do the same. The applicability will also depend on the user case. It is about time that the focus is shed back on the need rather than the shiny possibilities that the digital offers, keeping in mind the culture.  With the gulf in the post oil, post pandemic scenario laser focused on job creation, digital is an opportunity for reskilling but also deskilling where low-income labor will be impacted. Digital is therefore deeply contextual, and the youth would have to be skilled as per the risks as well as the potential. 

Re-blogged from : Digital Transformation | Solving pain points (ketnode.com)