Chapter 8 - Ethics & Business
Day 17
Now in an NGO, this is even more difficult. Do you know why? Because you do not pay them but you expect them to do the work. When you are not paying and they have to work, they are their own bosses.
Nobody can tell them what they should be doing or how they should go about achieving their goals. You can only give broad guidelines. But what really makes a person work?
Whether it has been a flood or a tsunami situation, I only get the reports later. I do not even have to tell them that they have to go and work there.
People come with such a high level of motivation. They get together and say, "Hey there has been a disaster, we have to immediately rush to help out."
And so when there was a disaster in Surat, about 5 lakh people volunteered just like that. No governmental machinery could match the work that these volunteers did together.
And what makes all these good people come together and work so hard for a cause is just a sense of commitment, the compassion they carry in their heart.
They are people who bring in the human touch. If we lose this human touch in business, I do not think any business can sustain for too long.
To bring out that human touch should be a priority in today's stressful world. Ethics in business will bring about trust, will bring about productivity, and will ultimately make the business grow better.
Today, if you see the daily newspapers and the television channels, you are bombarded with negative news all the time and people only get more and more depressed.
We need to bring people out of
such depression as depression will not help business at all. We need to encourage all those who have practised business ethically to share their experience with others so that such models become popular.
I would like to share with you an interesting event that we faced. Our international centre in the outskirts of Bangalore is surrounded by villages - there are about 20 villages in the vicinity.
A few years ago, I gathered the villagers, all unemployed youths - about 500 of them. And I called the Minister for small scale Industries and asked him to present to the villagers all the various schemes they could avail of.
So here was a government with money and schemes at their disposal, and on the other side, there were people who were unemployed. As I saw it, why not bring them together and let them work, to see if they could do something in coordination.
When the Minister presented all the projects that they had on hand and assured the gathering that they would be paid for the work they did, and that they were willing to provide the resources the villagers would need to develop their ideas.
These 500 youths remained negative about how each one of those ideas would not work, how none of those projects would actually take off. Finally, what they wanted was a government job.
Some wanted jobs in the police and some wanted jobs as drivers or conductors. It was so amazing to see such a low level of motivation in people to take up a business opportunity and work towards it.
Their complete lack of interest in working hard to get where they want. If people are poor in the world today, I say it is to some extent because of their lethargy.
Because either they want to make easy money or they just want to live on charity. In the end, the same youngsters started the Youth Leadership Training Programme, we got them to do some exercises and breathing and meditation.
I tell you, that very group came up with ideas, they started their own businesses and became entrepreneurs. Many of them are doing so well today that they could run charities of their own, in just five years.
For unemployed youth to become good businessmen in five years is very tough. But it is possible and it has happened only because of that motivation, that inspiration they found within themselves.
They could finally get up and get moving with a commitment to doing something to improve their lives, rather than pointing fingers at the government.
We need to undertake more of these motivational and inspirational programmes, whether in Ethiopia or Kenya or India or Nepal. I believe our youth do need such de-stressing, de-lethargising programmes.
And I would like you all to please consider this - if you all get together once or twice a year to spread the message among people in your area, in your community, in your circle of acquaintances and friends.
That you can run a business perfectly ethically and still bring prosperity and progress to society. That would build and boost morale for so many businesses, small and big, around the world.
In the absence of ethics, politics would be clogged with corruption, business with greed and religion with terrorism. We need to work towards eliminating these negative outcomes, and to do that, we need to focus on values. So as I see it, there are three things we need to do :
• Spiritualise politics
• Socialise business - Business will have to take on social responsibility, those in business will need to care for the society)
• Secularise religion - We need to adopt these long term goals, and nurture the long term vision needed to fulfill them.
Values and ethics will provide that vision. It is mostly greed and economic reasons that make people stray from their innate values.
If we can reassure people in society that we are here to support them, to help them live by their value. I think we will have a more beautiful world, a more free world, and not just a free world, but a fair world
