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.

The biggest need of human race (as of now)

Of all the species that ever appeared on Earth, human beings are the most interesting ones. Apart from eating food, sleeping, fulfilling other similar bio-needs, procreating, growing old and finally dying, they also indulge themselves in many forms of activities that would so funny if viewed from the activities of an animal (blogging is one such thing, both writing and reading). Despite our seemingly unlimited shortcomings, we seemed to have successfully survived for quite a long period even while destroying nature and other species. We have been overloading and overusing many of the natural resources and call it development.

One of the biggest problems since last few years has been our aggression and over focus on economic development. Everyone in the world wants to grow not just at the normal pace but at a pace greater than everyone else (including me). We are ready to do anything to achieve this. As long as no one spots the mess we are creating, it's fine and we can boast our great achievements but when things go wrong we blame it on others - government should have taken care of it, rich people are to be blamed, USA/China are to be blamed, religion is surely the biggest culprit and so on and so forth. If there is a God and if he is watching us from the top (for that matter from any direction), he must be having hell a lot of fun. He must have forgotten counting our mistakes and misdeeds as much as our righteous behavior. He must be wondering how the hell is this possible, I never meant all this to happen.

Coming to a serious note, when I started writing this post, all I wanted to say is that it is time for a new religion. It has been quite sometime a messiah has appeared on Earth and taught us how to use our complex faculties and still be happy. None of the religions appear to be able to answer/solve the questions of the different types of experts and different categories of people we got divided into currently. While the oldest of the teachings are still relevant and are still meaningful if understood, we seemed to have stopped understanding simple things in life. We need a religion which uses complex formula and rituals to keep us busy throughout the time without having to do anything with nature or other people.

We seemed to have forgotten living life and seemed to be driven by things that we don't understand anymore, which are not primary to our nature.

Oh God, if you are truly watching me write this silly blogpost, please don't take this as an expression of frustration over the financial crisis or my angst about the serial bombings of Indian Mujaheddin (what is so Indian about this outfit and why Indian? any patriotic reason or is it like Unilever calling itself Hindustan Level limited, only God knows), sorry God for the digression, but please take this as a sincere prayer to you to send us a Messiah who can give us a religion that will be the most modern,is not controversial, needs no sacrifices except self-sacrifice, doesn't need large donations (or land), doesn't allow any unnatural killings (direct or indirect) except for natural needs (please don't treat this as an exhaustive list and pardon me if I excluded any other important covenants) and as I believe you know everything, I hope you will surely do a perfect job (unlike me, so many grammatical errors in this post itself) and save the human species (otherwise of all other species) from early extinction - I remain, Humbly waiting for your action, a tiny speck on a tiny speck called by us as Earth.