Good Morning!
Lets get one things clear. I am not here to sermonize about what
business ought to do, nor am I here to harangue, humiliate, or to
expose any one.
My purpose for being here is
to meet a fundamental need of mine and to learn about what you need
and then see how meeting your needs would affect my welfare.
I am needing protection
and needing to protect my family members. I would be surprised if
you don’t have this as one of your paramount needs as well.
We want to protect ourselves and our families from poverty, sickness,
illiteracy, violence, deprivation, perversity, and even societal
ridicule.
So to meet this need we all
get up to go to work, we go to our offices, factories, businesses
and establishments to earn money so we are better able to offer
protection to ourselves and to our families.
Are we in agreement so far? Let’s now suspend
this train of thought and take another one.
What’s the difference between mother breast-feeding
a child and servant bottle-feeding her master’s child? Both
are satisfying hunger. So we can say both are satisfiers of a need.
But do are they equal in value to the child and her family?
Let’s examine it a bit closely: Bottle feeding
will satisfy the need for subsistence, but breast feeding will simultaneously
satisfy the needs for subsistence, protection, affection, understanding,
participation, leisure, identity and freedom.
Each society adopts
different methods for the satisfaction of the same fundamental needs.
"We may go so far as to say that one of the aspects that define
a culture is its choice of satisfiers.” So clearly it’s
more rewarding to use strategies that satisfy more than one need.
In fact, would it not be great if one strategy can meet all our
needs? What would that strategy look like?
I guess that strategy
would be called “mutual understanding and education”.
In other words everyone engaged in finding out what we all want
and then everyone engaged in figuring out how to get that.
So, coming back
to our work, we are told to follow orders, to sell products, to
reduce costs, and to increase profitability. In doing so we will
deserve our salary that may be used to meet my need for protection.
And with that salary comes the possibility that we can have more
of what we've always wanted (safe, healthy, and attractive communities
and environments) and less of what they never wanted (violence,
fear, abuse, pollution, injustice, etc.).
But are our salaries providing more of what we want and less of what
we don’t want? Some will say yes, a few will say no and most
will say sometimes. So if our salaries are not meeting our needs what
is that called?
I and other like-minded people call it poverty.
Rather than poverty just being defined as being below
a certain income threshold, the Chilean economist, Max-Neef argues,
"any fundamental human need that is not adequately satisfied
reveals a human poverty."
So anytime our hard earned salaries do not help us
get the satisfiers that meet any of our needs, we experience a type
of poverty.
He then suggests, "Each poverty generates pathologies".
Based on such an analysis, Max-Neef believes the US is among the poorest
countries in the world.
Thinking that all of our economic goods will fulfill
our basic needs fools us. No wonder that once the elusive economic
dream and prosperity is captured, so many people discover their lives
are empty and meaningless.
If this is true, then I don’t get it. We work
hard to get our needs met and only to find that the richer we get
the more poverty we experience.
This creates conditions for entrenching an alienating
society engaged in a productivity race lacking any sense at all. Life,
then, is placed at the service of goods, rather than goods at the
service of life. The question of the quality of life is overshadowed
by our obsession to increase productivity. This helps to explain the
great sense of disappointment and alienation felt by so many people
who have worked hard and succeeded in achieving their financial dreams.
Now let’s suspend that thought here for the
moment and I want to share another major learning of mine.
For the last number of years I have been working
and training my self to work as a mediator; a person who helps others
resolve conflicts. In my work I discovered that there are only two
basic reasons why we have conflicts. One is our need for autonomy
is not met and the other our need for interdependence is not met.
So what do these words mean to us? Autonomy is a
person’s ability to decide what his wants are and then develop
strategies for satisfying his wants and interdependence is to understand
the wants of others and recognize the relationship that exists between
the satisfaction of others wants and one’s own welfare. We can
only eliminate conflict if we are committed to both these ends simultaneously.
So if you sell a product in the market
say antibiotics your need for economic welfare is being met and so
is the ill consumers’ need for regaining good health is being
met. Now say the consumer does not use the antibiotic safely and creates
a drug resistant bacterium because of this misuse. Then his need for
protection from harmful bacteria is not being met and nor is yours
for enriching the consumers welfare. So you both experience poverty
and at the same time get into a conflict. That’s double jeopardy.
But there is no conflict when everyone
benefits. Since everyone shares basic needs, it is more likely to
get broad support, especially if there are grassroots societal discussions
about basic needs and how they can be met.
Businesses can facilitate such discussions. I see that as our fundamental
responsibility. I see business having the resources, energy, intelligence,
and above all an over riding sense of survival that says “the
only way I can survive and thrive is to understand what the consumers
real needs are and then not only develop products that will meet those
needs but also ensure they are sold and used in harmony with our values
of welfare for others.”
As I see it we are really in the
business of making and pushing goods that are created in cultures
very different from ours and these goods may not be meeting our
real needs.
If we engage in a meaningful dialogue with no prejudices
such as those that tell us that “our public is stupid and people
will buy anything”, will we find more stability, order and respect
in society. Hear these words again: Stability, order and respect in
society. Is not that an environment every business wants to invest
in?
Those who hold tight to power and money (which may
be seen as an attempt to assure security and other basic needs) will
have strong incentives to consider relaxing their grip.
They will recognize that we will never become sustainable
unless we design a society that meets the fundamental needs of every
person. If we do not, those in need will do whatever needed to survive,
whether it's stealing and committing violent acts or destroying our
forests, or adulterating our milk and water. They have little choice.
As we see that every one of us affects our tiny Spaceship
Earth and that there are economic and social opportunities for businesses
and communities based on conditions for sustainability, there will
be powerful forces for a sustainable society in which every person's
basic needs are met. This is perhaps the most important conversation
of our time.
I don’t see business as an aggressive push
for market share; I define business as enriching oneself while seeking
ways to enrich others. Aggression is a byproduct of scarcity, of living
in ‘khasara’. Anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret
Mead have shown that non-aggressive societies existed in the past
where each member played the role of interdependence of the type I
defined above. We are conditioned to believe that man is a beast and
must be manipulated and controlled so we run our businesses in that
manner: control employees and manipulate customers.
Do we have a model to follow? All the discussions
about consumer rights and business ethics for the last 50 years have
come from the USA that traditionally runs on the premise that adversarial
and competitive positions elevate humans to perform to their best.
So corporate responsibility is limited to maximizing owner’s
profits and stock value while remaining within the confines of the
law. These adversarial positions lead to a winner-take-all end result
or a “with us or against us” partnering.
We are not
taught any other model except the competitive/adversarial one.
What we are not taught is that not far from here
we had a modern society, which used three kinds of bricks in their
homes depending whether it was a toilet or a bedroom, or a wall. They
had by our standards, water and drainage systems that we don’t
have. They had granaries for storing food and public baths for rest
and recreation. The revised population estimation of this city, called
Moenjedaro, is 130,000 people. What we are not taught is that we have
found no weapons in these classic ruins. When everyone’s needs
are met weapons are obsolete. They are then rendered useless. They
did not need consumer protection councils or protection from big business.
They did not need police or armies. For 800 years they carried trade
all the way up to Mesopotamia and it was peaceful, sustainable and
life serving
We have our history in front of us. We can either
learn to crush others so we may get some of our needs met or we can
work towards understanding and dialogue and get all our needs met.
What is more responsible?
