The S in ESG is not measured apart from accident and harassment incident statistics, yet it is the ballast which holds the ship intact in the midst of a storm. It is the plumbing and the wiring, ensuring trust and dignity, the ethos of sustainability itself.
Disclosure is accountability and compliance, dignity is core of doing business done the right way. The notion of psychological safety in a age of neoliberal precarity is critical to creative work in the era of AI. The social pillar is tied to psychological safety, which is achieved through diginity and trust.- the soul of FPIC.
The problem and opportunity with FPIC especially for forest based carbon credits and renewable mandates is the gap in understanding between the elites of local communities, the federal power structures and the international banks. Politics which is often erased from the reports is exactly what is needed.
For the South Asian Man in the diaspora, the barber shop and its ‘thanda thanda cool cool champee’ or head message in Hindi-Urdu-Bangla is therapy, from the quotidian druggery.
The banal jokes cracked over loud 90’s Kumar Shanu, or the latest Anirudh anthem is a few moments of a lightness of being.
For the semi literate south Asian Barber, from Madras, Rangoon or Sadda Panjab the employment is an opportunity to earn in a foreign currency and remit money. The subaltern here is a micro entrepreneurial artist, making money for the shop owner, while keeping in mind the money he needs to support himself in Malaysia, remit money to build a house in the village and also keeping the resources to renew his next permit.
To keep the spark of joy alive in this strategic calculus is indeed resistance.
The core values of sustainability remain the sams in any crisis, which is to lend dignity to the vulnerable in your communities of practice and in turn incubate/ foster trust. ESG is a flurry of KPI, but that amalgamation of indicators does not necessarily add up as a vector summation into Trust. Trust is a relational thing, it needs less calculation and more conversations.
The future of resilience, sustainability and impact is simpler than we think. It needs a willingness to be decent.
Consulting buying behaviour is culturally contextual and need based, and the lens is often compliance and risk management in the Sustainability services space. The client whether a bank or a manufacturing firm needs solutions in the essential services approach, which adds to the alpha rather than one more report. LLMs don’t offer original solutions, only regurgitate the present.
Su Vaat Che/Daruun/Wagid Zain/Badhiya, Zohran Bhai
The win is a play book of digital global working class politics, where the subaltern sphere was mobilised, through the digital realm through a language of the underdog, a language of hope- something similar to the Yes We Can, the Obama moment which eclipsed many others in the dreary long shadow of the War on Terror.
Campaigning in Spanish, Urdu, Bangla, and Arabic especially was a brave move, calling for dignity in a global moment where the right is marching ahead. The campaigning was about possibilities, rather than delivery. The Obama play book was refreshed for the Gen Z era, where costs of living have skyrocketed and with AI eating away while collar jobs, a vast majority of the educated majority being pushed into precarious gig work, which offers survival but no future. The Gen Z protests have an organic rationale as when the youth see no hope for a better life, and influencers flaunt Dubai bling lifestyles, the frustration can result in a Mamdani at best and Farage at worst.
Retail politics seems to speak to the needs of the subaltern. The need for welfare, or social redistribution is there from CDC vouchers in wealthy Singapore to cash transfers in Maharashtra in the form of Ladki Bahin Yogna. So the rent freeze and the free bus rides have examples from all over the world.
Kejriwal was successful in Delhi, but niche experiments don’t scale well as can be read from the AAP example. The Obama presidency was a case study which taught the centrist way.
The Khoja Entrepreneurial nature was evident in the campaign, and Mamdani at 34 has a few decades left in politics. The start up called Zohran has clearly raised Series A Funding.
Whether he is able to deliver an ROI which is greater than the pitch deck, needs more than creative communication.
Cultural politics as a contested space, placing an alternative conceptual framework through this festival – what the elders left us. The act of remembering through reimagining and research.
Loss is not only material in the post truth world, where the flux is a feature and not a bug, as naïveté suggests. As flux is a feature in capitalism as chaos is an ingrained trait, finding an anchoring in this precarious platform era is a challenge, and it not in narratives of resilience or learning where the anchoring imbues itself, it is in the things which matter to us, as anomie and alienation is real, and meaning itself is the fuel to restoration. The glitz is hollow, as the shimmer stays for a while.
Every time someone sounds a pre emptive obituary of the professional services space due to AI, i have a counter proposition, with the gig-fication of the white collar workforce, there would be an increase of the use of professional services firms, where the size would be smaller and more specialist.
Change Thinker 