Max has a romantic evening with his Collective 'I'

On valentine's day my friends and I decided to have a romantic evening with Peter Senge! He's an MIT professor and the author of the book "The 5th Discipline". I must say that it was unlike any valentine evening I've had. It was a valentine evening between me and the Collective 'I'.

The topic was titled, “Collective Wisdom for Profound Innovation and Change”. Peter spent the entire one-hour of his talk defining what this topic meant and why it was chosen. The most profound words from Peter were his sticky one-liners. A few samples include, “Average market price of coffee is equal to half the cost of growing coffee” in reference to fair trade efforts in growing coffee, “Average pound of food in America travels 2000 miles” in reference to sustainability of globalization, “$500 billion is spent on subsidizing agriculture in the US and Europe” in reference to unsustainable agriculture practices, “An average American consumes 1 ton of extracted natural resources per person per day and 10-15% of it is discarded or wasted (not recyclable) to support their lifestyle”, in reference to the change we need to make in our present consumerism and my personal favorite “We dig holes in the ground and burn stuff” in reference to our current economic practices to manufacturing products.

Peter basically explained the 3 aspects of the topic, viz. Collective wisdom, Profound Innovation and Profound Change and I’ll try my best to highlight them here.

1. Collective wisdom: “What does collective wisdom mean?” was the question posed to the audience. There were a number of varied answers to the question. His explanation started with the statement that the natives have a philosophy of 7 generations. That includes you, your parents, grandparents and great grandparents and their combined knowledge becomes your collective wisdom. They would say that pay attention on what it means to be alive and you will be in the company of seven generations. Peter’s point is that in today’s business world, we spend too much time on the ‘here’ and ‘now’ whereas we should be mobilizing the creative wisdom of each one of us. He gave another example of a statement that a group of world leaders came up with sometime after Gandhi’s death, “It is not an era of individual leaders; there’s not enough of them.” We need that critical mass of collective wisdom and leaders if we are to be sustainable organizations, teams or societies.

2. Profound Innovation: The origin of the Indo-European word “leader” comes from ‘Lith’, which means ‘to step across the threshold’ and it is typically associated with death. Another meaning comes from the French word ‘Le Coeur’, which means ‘the heart’. You need the heart to lead, to innovate and to create a positive impact. Peter brings in the aspect of sustainability at this point and talks about what it takes to make a profound impact. But before that he asked everyone what sustainability meant. Following a number of right answers to the question, he then asked everyone “For what?” We all want to be sustainable in our actions and decisions. But for what? “To become a human being”, was his response; sustainability is a need or reliability in order to become a human being over the course of time. The natives say that you are born a body and become a human being over your lifetime. And the South Africans have a philosophy that we become a human being in relationship to other human beings. Our profound impact comes from our relationships to other human or nature; our relationship to our team and not our individual successes or needs.

3. Profound Change: Change comes with its share of challenges, which is equivalent to being ‘not easy’. What is the change that is required in today’s world? This is where he shows everyone a simple chart with 6 graphs showing the reducing price of wheat, soybean, corn and three other agri-based products from 1950 onwards to 2000. A sample picture is shown here and you can see how low the prices had gone over 3 decades. The question put forth was, “thinking from the perspective of a whole system, how can we possibly support the farmers with such an economic system?” This means that we would have to continue subsidizing the cost of production in our farms. And this also means that, this drives increase in consumerism over time. The one interesting statement he made was that if we have to fight terrorism then we should change the way we do agriculture. People, who cannot support their life as farmers, leave their homes to move to urban centers and eventually you have large slums in big cities. And then the people who grow rich off this system, put money into charities to pay for the aftereffects of this system of globalization. A change is required in this system. Many corporations are taking up this challenge. For example, Costco is piloting a project to look at the totality of the food value chain and have established that three things need to happen and this includes transparency, giving face to who grew it and most importantly, a critical mass of benevolent and ethical demand i.e. people who care.
(picture source: http://burnickblog.sovereignsociety.com/global_markets/index.html)

He concluded by saying that we are born into relationships and if our standard of living is dependent on driving you to poverty then we cannot survive or be sustainable for too long. “You can’t buy Relationships, you can only give Relatedness”.

Spring is here

So, it's been a month since school got back into session. So far so good!! Yeah...I don't want to spend the next few sentences expressing my emotions about how I feel about this. But let's not digress. This is a new semester all over and exciting times to find the many intersections between the different courses, readings, assignments, and talks.

Last semester (Fall) was a huge high for me in this respect. This time we have classes in Law & Ethics. I'm particularly excited about this class only because the curriculum is so diverse from basic law to environmental to ethics issues and human psychology, and the readings are particularly from some of my favorite authors. Then we have an Entrepreneurship course that is focused on ventures in the green, environmental areas like wind, solar, biomass, natural foods, etc. What is of particular interest is that the 1st part of this will be focused on environmental economics. Then we move on to Computer Info. Systems. Everything from how to organize your projects to how to setup a e-commerce website is what we will be learning and putting together for our team projects. Awesome!! Finally my personal challenge, Finance. Need I say anything more. It is definitely the most important class since every investor in the world, social or not will look at these to check the sanity in my ideas (wish they would just trust me). Anyways..so I need to know their language in order to converse with them!!

Well...I'll end here with an 'e'ntersectional thought. When you go out there today into the world, whether you are an entrepreneur or an engineer or a doctor or a designer; doesn't matter, make sure that you follow your 'Tropism'.

Tropism - Take a potted plant and place it anywhere in your room. You will find that the plant or its flowers will start growing in the direction of the sunlight. This affinity of the plant to wards the light is generally defined as tropism. So, find your tropism; find that activity or aspect of life that draws you to it because it provides you with an avenue to growth.