When a person leaves home, migrates the body only leaves as shards of the soul stick behind. The home and the host land are a part of a continuum, and never sharp binaries. We see this in Saravana Bhavan’s in the Gulf and Singapore, or the Hyderabadi Biryani places on the weekend.

Mumbai, the city of aspirations
Saturates the Air
Ever changing, mutating cartographies
The despair to survive
Etched on to the skylines of hope
The animal spirits of capitalism
Breeds circulatory flows of migrants
Keeps hopes fresh
And despair alive.

#mumbai

#spokenword

I have been talking and thinking about loss, pain, and failure recently and the manner we process it has an important bearing on how we experience life. As an impact driven entrepreneurial hack, failures have been frequent and fast leading to questions about where are you going?

The only certainty is uncertainty and the notion of stability which the previous generation took for granted is now past fast. Unstable can be reframed as being on the move, and mobility is a frame of reference and lens rather than the curated resume that hiring managers look for.

Well impact is determined in outcomes and not in years as the social contract has evolved. We are all on a platform where human talent is service on demand to the purveyors of power and capital.

A friend who is in HR recently equipped, why have you changed jobs?

Well, it is a function of the opportunities generated and the impact one wishes to imagine.

Well, most HR functions can be replaced by algorithms. Rain making is an art.

There is new white space to create each day.

ESG Reporting follows a rich tradition of compliance related discourses over the decades. Environmental and Social Risk has been around for forty years. A few professionals who can be repurposed for the just transition era:

– EHS Manager to Sustainability Lead
– Process Engineer to Carbon Assessor
-Safety Engineer to Sustainability Risk Professional
– Company Secretary to ESG Disclosure Professional
– HR Manager to People Positive Professional
– Finance Manager to Integrated Reporting Professional

A lot of the data sits within the organization itself. Not every paradigm does not need a ‘paradigm shift’ (a term borrowed from Thomas Kuhn’s STS Classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions).

History and Cultures are important to map ‘transitions’, no one knows period categories than historians. Culture is downstream of history. Transparency and Trust key to ESG Performance is a function of operating cultures.

#sustainability #ESG #hr#compliance#culture

The culture of learning, deeply and meaningfully should be a given as in the information economy most work is knowledge work, so why is L&D even a function. It should be a prerequisite for professionals in consulting, tech, and finance where the ‘job’ itself is to add value.

In some life, i would like to be a historian of the Indian Ocean and speak in Arabic, Farsi, Bahasa, Kutchchi and Tamizh.

The S dimension of the ESG is more than Human Capital , DEI , BHR and Community Affairs which are the sub components of a poorly quantitative matrix of the risk trifecta. The Social category is about us, which includes the employees as sustainability is about quality of life rooted in the epistemic foundations of ecological justice.

The posh literary crowd snigger at Chetan Bhagat, seem to miss the point. He is a cultural phenomenon. Most writers struggle to pay bills being so called literary; he maintains a mini media empire.

I have read the Harvard Business Review since 2004 from Muscat to Mumbai via Singapore, Dubai, and Delhi. Fortunate to have academic parents who never shied from spending money behind books and magazines. Our wealth is in our library at home in Mumbai residence.

Lucky to have found bookstores like Border and Kinokuniya in the Gulf, Bahrisons in Delhi to Thambi Magazine Stall at Holland Village in Singapore who stock up on HBR.

I have never managed to attend business school due to monetary constraints but have been an entrepreneur since I was in college writing and building stuff. HBR for eighteen years has been my Business School each month.

After being unable to find a bookstore in Mumbai which stocks up on HBR since August, I ordered a hard copy (better format for learning) on the Harvard Business Publishing Website for the first time, paying 2.5x of the retail price in Singapore. Well, it reached me in four days at home, right in time for the reading weekend.

Learning compounds each day, and it is an investment that I never shy away from as a consultant, entrepreneur and para-academic.

The purpose of a moonshot activity is not the outcome, but the output of the steep learning curve that comes out of it. Yes, the pain of failure does hurt, but learning would have never happened without the attempt.