For a better world

A World Marketing Summit was recently organised in New Delhi. Supposed to be an initiative backed by Philip Kotler, a globally acclaimed professor of Marketing from the US, the underlying theme of the summit hinged around the objective of creating “a better world through marketing”. It could not have been timed better. We are deeply mired in an era driven by commerce. Everything is commerce and commerce is everything. It is this preeminence of commerce that probably would have made the people behind the idea of the Marketing Summit think about the changed role of marketing. Marketing, interestingly, is a creation of commerce. It is also a very potent tool of commerce. Naturally, then, too much of commerce would have led to the thinking that it is the time to change the goal of marketing. But can it create a better world? A big question and perhaps a very difficult one to answer is: Isn’t the very idea of creating a better world through marketing an antithesis to the purpose of marketing as it is commonly understood and practiced? But the idea certainly merits consideration. Marketing has given many things to this world. One view is that marketing has given God to this world. For the atheists as well as the agnostics, the very idea of God is a creation of marketing. That, however, is for the non-believers. Coming to the believers, marketing gave man to this world. Had it not been for Satan’s design in the guise of a serpent to coax Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, man would still have been in heaven, enjoying the fruits of the Garden of Eden. That apart, marketing has certainly changed lives and lifestyles, tastes and preferences, perceptions and perspectives, ideas and attitudes and most significantly, consumption patterns. Converting needs into wants, marketing has flared desires and aspirations, wishes and dreams. So, that was what marketing could do and what it has done. But as we the humankind come of age, a realisation dawns that marketing could have done something more. Rather, something else. It is this that needs to be pondered over. What does marketing need to do? How it needs to change the world? The answer would come from our reflection, an introspection to find out what the next goal of marketing needs to be. The answer certainly would come from within. There is need to change this world from commerce driven to conscience driven. In Freudian terms, transform the world from Id and Ego driven to Super Ego driven. From want driven to need driven. From impulse driven to reason driven. From the so called realism to idealism. From the apparently right approach to an appropriately righteous approach. There is need to change from consumption orientation to redemption orientation. And for this, the marketing process must now change its basic objective. Marketing was aimed at increasing sales volumes through creating wants and desires. It has to change its role to sell values now. There is need to redefine and reorient marketing. From creating consumption needs to arousing higher order needs. The aim should be to make people believe in the ultimate goodness of humanity where integrity and honesty become the fashion and greed and consumption are relegated to back seat.

Technology is not enough

There is a very interesting observation in an Organisation Behaviour text that says — you can take the man out of the Stone Age, but you cannot take Stone Age out of the man. To many, this may appear a bit hazy, but for those who have the eye to observe it is a rather pithy comment. Going by technological advancement, it is true that mankind has come a long way since the time of the Stone Age. Those technological advancements have been largely effective in changing the lifestyle of human beings and the way they meet the external environmental demands. However, the fact is that we have hardly changed from within (our internal environment), that is the way we think. So, the assertion that human nature has remained fairly stable over all those ages is quite valid. This is precisely what Philosopher J Krishnamurthy observed some five decades ago.

He said that technologically, man has advanced incredibly, yet he remains as he has been for thousands of years — fighting, greedy, envious, burdened with great sorrow. His discourse on existence was based on what he found in the world — utter chaos, disorder, violence, extreme forms of brutality, riots ending up in war. If this does not make sense, let us examine what is happening, whether in the most poor and underdeveloped countries, or the most rich and highly developed countries. Ethiopia and United States have been facing indiscriminate violence. Throughout their existence, human beings have been violent. The twenty first century seems to be no better as far as human aggression and meanness is concerned. Why it is so may not be easy to understand because violence and aggression seem to be learnt predispositions. They are largely acquired rather than innate. Where do we learn these from? Is it ingrained in the evolutionary cycle which emphasises struggle for existence, or it is picked up gradually as we grow up and develop. The fact is that violence and aggression do persist. We need to ponder over why we are so violent. May be, we need to realise that our aggression is a result of our assumption that our pains and problems arise due to other people and they need to be punished. Or it can be that we want to corner everything for ourselves and sharing of resources is an unacceptable proposition. The emotions of fear, hate, and rage take the better of us.

Is there a way out from this Morass that we are sinking into? There certainly should be a way for the sake of larger interests of humanity. And that way is to create a Psychological Revolution. The technological revolution is not going to change humanity. It seems that we have defined change wrongly. If only technological change could bring about the desired transformation in human attitude, things would have been much better. But it has not and most human actions are still driven by envy, greed, hatred, ego and other such negative attributes. The problems in this world are more out of psychological disorientation rather than any genuine reasons. There is need to bring about a psychological reorientation in the basic thinking process so that rather than being driven by negativities, human beings are influenced by positive thoughts. Bringing about this psychological change is certainly a Herculean task. It is so because calls for a concerted and sustained effort. We must go from a mechanical life driven by a programmed thought pattern to the psychological revolution that brings a responsive and empathetic life. And this is possible.

Why leaders tend to fail

This is an old story dating back to the year 1976, when the term of the lower house of the Indian Parliament was extended by one year. I was sitting in the house of an elected Member of Parliament (MP) discussing something not quite political. It was during this discussion that an aide of the parliamentarian entered the living room where we were chatting and informed him that some people from his constituency were waiting in the lounge to see him. The MP though known for his literary leanings and poet-like humility rather curtly told his aide, “Let those people wait”. The five years of his tenure he owed to them, but the sixth year was a grace given to him by the leader of the house. The answer certainly had an element of haughtiness and surprised me, given the fact that the MP was known for his sweet tongue. And the first thought that came to my mind was that this pride may become a cause of his undoing. The results of the next parliamentary elections did prove this, and with a bang. He lost and his party was wiped out from large parts of the country. Any conclusion? Well, yes. It only reaffirmed the age-old wisdom that pride comes before a fall. Leaders realise this only after their fall. However, the question why leaders fail is not easy to answer. But that they do fail, and most of the time it is sooner than later, as history suggests. Many theorists have tried to find out the answer and typing the question “Why leaders fail” may give hundreds of results on the internet. Some reasons are as simple as failure to communicate while others are complex ones like the fault of self-leadership. But these hardly sound convincing. The one widely agreed upon reason is that the leaders fail when they stop taking feedback and start assuming things on the basis of their whims that get endorsed by the yes men who have been allowed to surround them. These sycophants are perhaps the greatest threat to a leader’s survival because they are only concerned about their own survival. If leaders allow feedback to come to them they would be able to understand what people want and will continue for long.They need to be in tune with peoples’ aspirations. This, however, needs a humble mind and a responsive heart. Allowing the critics to show them the reality is the way to effective and lasting leadership. A cue can be drawn from a very famous couplet from the mystic poet Saint Kabir whose golden lesson on the subject is paraphrased here — ‘let the critics be around you by giving them all facilities, as they cleanse our mind without using soap and water’. Listening to the critics helps the leaders in realising their weaknesses. But the sense of invincibility developed due to the ego and reinforced by the sycophants and the yes men make a leader turn blind to his weaknesses. This is more so in the case of charismatic leaders. These leaders gain popularity due to some uncanny attribute of their personality that creates an illusion that their status is invulnerable. But charisma is transient and can wane easily. You cannot fool all the people all the time. Thus, there may be many reasons why leaders fail, yet the most important one is to remember that pride comes before a fall.

Google-isation of knowledge

A very senior retired bureaucrat once requested me to review his book. After going through the book, which was a decent account of the socio-political scenario during the long tenure the author had served in several positions in the State and Central Governments, I came across a factual error. That was the only lapse in the voluminous book. Out of curiosity, I asked him where he got that information from. His answer was that it was from the Google. It would be futile to argue that everything posted on the search engine is wrong. But certainly, everything given there is not right either. And that’s what needs to be understood. In today’s age of easy access to astronomically large volume of information, authenticity is the first casualty. There is an old saying — little knowledge is dangerous. Well, we now realise that more knowledge has become even more dangerous because what we consider knowledge in common parlance these days is not knowledge in the right sense of the term. It is just information and this information can be both misinformation and disinformation depending on the intention of the post. It is against this backdrop that we need to think about a recent research finding in the UK on internet searches for serious health conditions commissioned by Perkbox Medical. It has been found that the searches on the net for serious health conditions have risen manifold in the last few years. Curiosity is obviously not bad. But what is happening is that access to information is giving a wrong sense of empowerment. In searches for medical conditions, people get to know the ailments, their etiology and symptoms and their treatment also. The problem is that this makes them think that they can substitute the doctor. Many go for self-medication, many buy anxiety in the process and many turn into hypochondriacs. In fact, hypochondriasis is a major problem these days as any one carefully observing outpatient departments in hospital can find out. In India, which is still a developing country where healthcare facilities are still not as streamlined, this tendency creates a fertile ground for quackery. As a result, even sales persons at local pharmacies have the temerity to overrule the doctor’s advice. This is not the case with just medicine. In areas other than heath, too, such situations have become prevalent. Students in teaching institutions have started considering the internet as substitute for teachers and are not keen to attend classes. In specialised subjects like Psychology where the dividing line between so called common sense and scientific conclusion is thin, this can lead to a lot of confusion. With such easy access to information, everyone considers himself/herself to be a psychologist. So it has become a major problem these days as street level generalists are replacing experts in a big way and this leads to a lot of misplaced assumptions. Francis Bacon opined that knowledge is power, but hardly did he realise that a time will come when information will become knowledge. More so, he could not figure out there will be a social media monster that would change opinions, create opinions and even replace scientific knowledge with whims and fancies. We have, thus, come to a state where Goebbelsian hypotheses is pushing truth to the back seat. It is no longer about repeating a lie often. It is just about posting a lie on the net and the rest will follow.

Waiting for the last straw

There is an old proverb — it’s the last straw that breaks the camel’s back. In the case of climate change, it seems as if we are waiting for that last straw. Some recent incidents are grim pointers to the threats of the Apocalypse which appears to be not very far if the present conditions continue. The California fire may by now have allayed whatever doubts the US President might have had about the impact of climate change. And why California fire? US is now witnessing more frequent incidents of natural disasters suggesting that Mother Nature’s ire is getting severe. It won’t be just the warming. The melting of Arctic glaciers would raise the ocean levels. It is some kind of a double whammy. The writing on the wall is clear. A global catastrophe is lurking around the corner. Over 10,000 years, the temperature of mother earth has remained more or less the same. But since the 19th Century, the temperature has risen one degree. Looking at the rate at which carbon emissions are polluting the atmosphere, we may soon get another half a degree increase. That perhaps would be the threshold level. A further rise of another half a degree and the catastrophe is there proving to be the proverbial “last straw”. Any further rise would create irreversible impact.

It can be very easily understood by the simple lesson that we learnt in Physics classrooms in school about the concept of the elastic limit and the plastic limit. Though we are still within the elastic limit, we are stretching Mother Earth to the plastic limit breaking which would hit us and rather badly. That perhaps would be a very heavy price to pay for our so called development. While the issue has been common knowledge for the past five decades, the actions are not up to the desired levels. While it will be affecting the whole world, we in India need to pad up and take guard. If the climate degradation in Delhi is any indication, we are soon going to achieve a state where the national capital region will be unliveable. People are already suffering from chronic lung diseases. If the recent UN report on environment is to be believed, India is one of the most vulnerable countries to face the wrath of climate change.

That tropical countries are naturally vulnerable is one reason.  But we are also the most callous people on popular concerns and this is the bigger reason. Consider some pointers — the elephant menace in Jharkhand, monkeys going astray in UP, the rising incidents of wild animals entering human habitats in the most unexpected of the regions, and then, erratic climate. These are not just stray incidents. There are strong reasons. Deforestation in the name of development is not leading to sustainable development. The rise in the frequency of natural disasters in the country is in some way related to the damage that is being done to the nature. What can we do? The simplest way in which we can reduce the damage to our climate is by changing lifestyle. We have acquired a highly consumption-oriented lifestyle driven by the vulgar consumerism promoted by marketers. We need to cut on wasteful consumption. Other things of course are to be taken care of at higher levels. But imagine the impact on climate if 1.3 billon people cut wasteful consumption. The mantra is “Cut consumption for redemption”.