My thoughts, mixed randomly - 2

While I have abandoned the translation thing, I thought I would share something other thought that occurred to me while at ISB and is still with me.

My question was: How long would firms try to outdo themselves and analyst forecasts, quarter after quarter. And in this mad rush what exactly are they achieving or ending up doing. For me most of the business (and even human) world grows by exploiting nature. There are very few businesses that don't draw from nature. Human beings, as individuals are less potent than they are when they are organized into societies and further into focused institutions called business organizations.

Till a certain extent one can draw from the nature without really impacting the overall picture but as the exploitation crosses a certain limit, there will be impact, small but slowly growing into a devastating one. Once the damage is done, it is difficult to comment whether it can be reversed to any extent. Government, an institution that has been established by society to manage the common activities of the human society surely takes advantage of the authority and keeps on imposing taxes as a price for exploiting nature. But what is government made of? Nothing but other human beings; would these guys in government think differently than those in business? I doubt. They to respond to the situation and react in a way that at least doesn't harm them if not benefit them.

Nature, which we are exploiting without even blinking for a second, is slowly but surely undergoing significant change, definitely a damaging one. For an individual, life is normally in harmony with nature but organized business distorts the harmony and separates the individual from nature and in a certain takes away the sensitivity to Nature and the natural balance.

In our attempt to prove that Markets are perfect and that we can value anything intelligently, we are bothered about discounting the future cash flows and more about the underlying assumptions. And as far as I know, none of the analysts or financial modeling experts consider sustainability or impact of nature while determining terminal value unless the effect is substantial and is well known at that time.

We keep coming up different fads but I really don't see the conviction and belief to take decisions that have very little impact in the short term but have great impact in the future. Somehow we seem to be too selfish and don't care much about what happens after 20-30 years forget about 100-200 years or a 1000 years.

The ad on oil conservation in which the boy comes up with the idea of setting up a cycle repair shop when he grows is a nice depiction of our day to day behavior. We keep acting as if someone else has to come and tell us what to do. This is true even for the top men leading countries and corporations, they too are expecting to be told. If we don't tell ourselves what to do, surely nature will come up with another tsunami or a drought or a hurricane or something far more devastating and unexpected to give the message.

There is nothing wrong in leading a happy life but acting aggressively with Nature is not the right way to happiness.

May be on the extreme side but nevertheless with some truth in it, Stacy Blackman rightly says Did B-Schools Create the Financial Crisis?. Click on link to read more.

My closing thought is this - may be it is time for us to think and decide if what we were trying to do in the last few years in the name of different ideologies is correct or is there are a need to fundamentally change our approach towards the connection between life, business, nature and society and factor that into the day to day life.