And now, for something completely different...

This post is going to be boring as all hell for 95% of you but for the 5% who might care about the work I'm currently doing or who are into the social impact scene themselves, I'm hoping this sparks a bit of a debate. 

Anand, an old friend of mine, sent me this message a few weeks ago:

"I am very happy that you are taking this route, and wish you the best of luck. I was inspired by the Bottom of the Pyramid course I took at business school, though my dedication waned and I did not end up traveling with the group overseas. Recently, I have picked up my own local and international service and have been faced with very important questions. The primary one being: How do you measure the effect of good done through programs such as yours or through volunteer organizations such as mine?

To answer this I have driven myself to look at metrics - man hours served, money raised, membership, etc - but am still unsure what lasting good any of these do without long lasting accountability.  

I recently attended a talk regarding the availability of water in developing nations. One of the most shocking facts was that after modality of water delivery were made available, the donating organizations wiped their hands clean. This lead to defunct systems of delivery being scattered around villages and countrysides.  

I would love to hear your thoughts on social change and long term accountability."

He's brought up 2 very pertinent issues plaguing organizations operating in the social space: measuring social impact and long term operational sustainability.

Firstly, as far as I've seen, there is no silver bullet for measuring the good you're doing. This is a field of work that has long been dominated by the NGO / foundation sector that has been loathe to apply concepts from the business world such as performance analysis. It's probably the recent influx of smarter-than-thou MBA shitheads like myself as well as the new focus on social enterprises (and social businesses) that has spurred a greater focus on operational maximization.

The problem, of course, is that there are very few established metrics for what constitutes "doing a good job" in this field. Think about it. In a traditional corporation, if a manager doesn't meet his easily-quantifiable growth targets, the CEO or the board would have his head. A socially-focused organization, on the other hand, has long been given a pat on the back just for trying. It's like when I played league football when I was 8. Sure, I scored an own goal, but hey, I was learning so it's OK.

When it comes to NGOs and foundations, I really don't have a good answer for this. There's never been a mentality in these organizations about maximizing the effectiveness of the money being used. You raise funds, you do your thang, you run out, you try and raise more funds. Maybe I'm oversimplifying it or maybe things have changed - please enlighten me if so.

I think that's a critical failing of that model when compared to a social enterprise or a hybrid social business. The way I see it is that when you actually have to apply a revenue model and a cost model to how you operate, you've automatically inherited at the very least a set of financial metrics you can use to determine how you're doing.

Let's take the example of a social enterprise / business that sells a solar panel - light bulb combo package to provide simple lighting to communities that are off the grid. A simple measure of units sold is a good start. Add a further layer by subtracting the costs of materials, production and installation from that and you come up with numbers for profit - profit that can ultimately translate to growing the business and extending your reach. So if you're making a profit, hey good job, gold star etc. If you're in the red, you're doing a shit job and your mother will never love you.

Of course, all metrics in the social space will ultimately boil down to "how many people/animals/trees have you helped?". In my above example, there's an easy translation from number of units sold. I think I could end my workday happy saying that x number of people pushed a switch today and lo, there was light where before there was none.

It's not quite so clear cut in the case where your product is a service, such as in Anand's organization. Again, in terms of how it could work in an NGO / foundation -type scenario, I'm clueless. In an enterprise model, however, I would adopt the model used by the consulting industry where your "billed revenue" over the cost of paying your indentured servants offers a simple metric for how you're doing (in financial terms, at least). In terms of the actual social impact, I think it then becomes very context-specific as to what your service is.

An illustrative example is an enterprise that goes into poor and underserved communities to provide them with cheap eye screenings (this is an existing, tried and tested business model). The prices are low but enough to generate enough revenue to cover the staff and equipment costs (and then some). A well-trained technician can make a pretty good gander at a person's prescription using little more than a set of stock lenses and an optical test chart (that thing with the bunch of letters on it that spell out bad words). Your social impact then becomes how many people you have helped who, prior to this, may have been living with impaired vision sans the means to diagnose and correct it.

It might sound like I'm being unfair to the NGO model of operation but while I do recognize the need for organizations such as these, I genuinely do believe that the future of social impact lies in applying business models to the BoP, as in social enterprises and social businesses. By applying a cost / revenue structure to your organization, I think you also address the issues of sustainability and long term accountability.

In Anand's example, I suspect a major reason that the donating organizations washed their hands of the project is that the funding simply wasn't there. Or if it was, they had moved on and wanted to use it elsewhere. Or the funding organization itself had directives for where it wanted its money to be used. Had there been a sustainable revenue model applied to the problem at hand, there would have been more of an imperative and incentive to continue operations in the markets you were already in and more importantly, you could have freed yourself of the shackles of being reliant on external funding. Independent sustainability is the key and you just can't guarantee that if you have to depend on somebody else.

Honestly, I am just making this up as I go along, as are 90% of the people / organizations in this sphere. At this point, I'm not even sure I answered Anand's questions and I think I went onto a couple of unintended tangents as well. I would like this to turn into a bit of a debate but I'm not sure if the 3 readers I have are up to it. But it was a nice exercise to make myself think through the issues as well. I just hope this doesn't end up being me shouting into the void.

Not every post on here is going to be a novel

This song is lodged deep into my brain and I'm finding myself singing to it pretty much all day right now. It's featuring one of my favourite DJs, Martin Solveig, and Martina Sorbara from Dragonette who I fell in love with after she did the vocals on Basement Jaxx's Take Me Back To Your House a few years back.

Not to mention the video itself is pretty nifty. Lots of continuous shots - I think I counted barely 3 or 4 cutaways during the indoor scenes. The amount of choreography and practice that must have gone into this is staggering. Especially since you don't normally see DJs getting their hands dirty by getting into the scenes themselves. Solveig's always been a better sport than most about that though.

The Bombay Blasts

People have been asking what it was like to have been here during the blasts one week ago. I don't know if everyone's expecting a tale of drama and suspense where I learned about the preciousness of life and more importantly, myself.

Frankly speaking though, and this might sound a bit callous (but I certainly don't mean it that way), the incident had very little effect on my life. I live in a suburb of Bombay and the blasts took place in the centre of the city, about a 30 minute journey from where I stand. When it happened, I was already home. In fact, I probably would not have known it had happened if not for a friend from the US leaving me a message to check if I was safe. A few confused minutes later, I was up to speed on what was going on a few miles away.

Now I'm not saying what happened isn't a huge tragedy and I feel for those who lost someone in the attack last week, but it seems like it had very little effect on Bombay as a whole. This is the city that endured a brutal attack in 2008 with 164 deaths and countless more injuries. The streets were a little quieter on the night of last week's bombings but by the next day, everybody was headed back to work (my own boss decided to be a little more cautious and asked us all to work from home). Nobody even seems to mention the bombings any more. There are a few more police checkpoints downtown but besides that, nobody seems to be batting an eye. It's a resilient city, no doubt. 

I don't mean to pontificate about something I know absolutely nothing about (although I do quite enjoy doing just that) but maybe the silver lining on this very dark cloud is that the power to strike fear into the hearts of Mumbaikars is diminishing, and with it, the effectiveness of terrorism as a means to an end. 

So there you have it. I suppose I wish I had a more exciting account of the events to offer up here but it's probably for the best that I don't.

Travel - the seductive siren that will lead to my swift death

I've been bitten by the travel bug lately and there's significant swelling. Perhaps it's because I'm in a new environment right now so my travel pumps have been primed, so to speak. I am spending more and more time online looking up places I can visit, what times of year to go, how much it's going to cost, what kinds of exotic diseases I'm eligible to get etc. etc.

So where should I go? I should note that at this point, I am leaving the cost consideration for later because that's just going to kill my drive too early on in the process. My next job after I finish up here in Bombay in September is going to be in Hamburg so I expect I will be making lots of small trips within Europe just to see friends (other cities in Germany are a no-brainer but also on the cards are Austria, Belgium, Holland and the UK). Besides all the small trips I plan to make within Europe, I do want to make a couple of bigger trips further out.

Awfully colourful for a

continent that just

discovered ink

6 years ago

First up: Latin America. It's hard to believe that I've never set foot there at all. And it's almost inexcusable now that I have several close friends from the MBA programme who could show me the local flavours in several countries on that continent. The only downside would be that once I actually step foot in their countries, I'll have to stop making jokes about their lack of electricity and sanitation and civilization.

That's a high price to pay.

I've also long been considering a serious hiking trek - Kilimanjaro comes to mind. Not to ascend the peak, mind you, but something more manageable like a base camp trek. At some point in my life I'd like to do an Everest base camp trek (and pop over to Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan while I'm at it) and I think something lower key like Kilimanjaro will let me figure out if I would ever make it back alive. But even a Kilimanjaro trip will require me to get back into shape, which would actually be great motivation for me to do exactly that. Also, it would be a safe, comfortable environment to help me find out if I'm the type of person that would kill and eat his companions if he got stranded with no foreseeable hope of rescue.

My mockup of the kidney
chastity belt (patent pending)

I also would love to traverse the Silk Route by train some day but I imagine that will be a 3 to 4 month trip to fully appreciate all the stops along the way. Also, I was talking about a trip like this to a friend today and she mentioned she had heard of 2 people having their kidneys stolen while on the trans-Siberian railway. So I'm hoping that by the time I'm ready to make this trip, Science has invented a "chastity belt" of sorts to keep my kidneys firmly inside me (new business idea?).

And then there are a hundred other things that I'd love to do that are kind of rattling around in the back of my engorged skull such as an Outback trek through Australia, a visit to New Zealand's famous sheep sex farms, a journey through some of Africa's less murdery lands, a stay in a Mongolian village and a cruise over Arctic waters. 

All these plans assume, of course, that I become a hojillionaire in the next few years to be able to afford all these journeys while I'm young, able-bodied and family-less. In my next post, I'll detail my fool-proof plan for winning the lottery.

I came to a spork in the road...

I figured I should write about what I'm currently up to here in Bombay so this is my best effort at it. It will probably help to preface it with a little background though.

I am a bit of an idealist. I think the world is a really shitty place for 90% of its population and through absolutely no effort of my own, I've had excessively fantastic opportunities available to me throughout my life that most of the rest of the world will never experience. Maybe it's just guilt that's driving me here - but I do feel that perhaps I should be doing something that helps improve the lives of the worst off, lest I be reborn as a mentally-challenged cockroach in my next life.

Some people who probably don't think my bulldozer
designs are improving their lives

An engineer by trade, my old job involved designing construction vehicles such as bulldozers. I wouldn't really consider that as something that made a huge impact on making the world a better place for people. Some may argue that that's not necessarily true and there may be some merit to that.

Nonetheless, I've always thought I could be doing something that felt more fulfilling in this regard. During the start of my MBA program last year, the school held a workshop called The Bottom of the Pyramid. This is a concept popularized by C.K. Prahalad a few years ago about the tremendous profit potential in serving the needs of the lower rungs of the economic ladder. The session itself was an eye-opening look into how one can apply business concepts to improve the lives of those who need it most. It was at that point that I began to think that making a career out of social impact was a practical possibility. 

Myself and Prof Yunus - he may be
accomplished but I'm handsome

Fast forward a few months and I got a chance to hear a keynote speech at an annual social responsibility forum organized by my business school. The speaker was Hans Reitz, a serial entrepreneur who has moved into the social sphere. He's an inspirational creative speaker who spoke on the concept of social business, coined by Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus. In a nutshell, this describes a philosophy in which business concepts are applied to address social problems plaguing our world. An important distinction here is that any profits made by social businesses are reinvested into the company to grow and maximize its social impact rather than for an investor or owner to get returns on. It's an intriguing concept and while there are several successful examples of this model, it remains to be seen if it will obtain widespread acceptance (that's a discussion for an entirely different time - I actually find this to be a really intriguing topic of discussion and will probably bring it up quite a bit on here).

In February this year, while dejectedly looking for jobs and praying for a swift death, I thought back to Hans' speech and looked up his firm that he had mentioned during his keynote address. This is a consultancy focusing on fostering the growth of social businesses. It does this by working with entrepreneurs, corporate partners, foundations and academic institutions to take social business ideas from conception to implementation. I casually submitted an application not thinking that it would lead anywhere given that I've been a cold, robotic engineer all my life.

A couple of months passed and I forgot entirely that I had even applied and then one fine day I got word that they were still looking for people to work out of the brand new Bombay office. Long story short, now I'm sitting in the sweltering heat of Bombay, working pro bono for a few months to help the office get on its feet. And Hans is now my boss.

As mentioned, it's a volunteer position for me to really get a taste of this kind of work. It's a radical departure from my own background obviously and so a lot of people are surprised that I'm doing this in the first place. For me, this is really also a test for me to see if I have the actual balls (or cojones) to go into an industry that can never promise to pay well and typically has its base in countries that tend to be very different from the comfy developed places I'm used to. It's easy to say that I have a passion for making the world a better place but it's much harder to walk the walk.

These few months may help me figure that out and I'll go into details of this in the near future but as a spoiler, I guess I can say that in practical terms, it's difficult for me to see this going much further (at least as it stands right now with me desperately needing to earn a paycheck sometime soon).

I think this serves as a good explanation as to why I'm all the way over here to all those who have been asking. I've been here for over 2 weeks now so I've got a few initial impressions to share, which I'll go into in future posts.

Undefined. And maybe that's just how I like it.

After several experiments with blogs, I've decided that not really having a concrete idea about what I want to do with this blog is the best way to go. Otherwise, I just get hung up on a myriad of details. Maybe the real value to me is just writing about what I feel like writing about at that point in time. Worrying about whether it fits into some kind of arbitrary theme that I've assigned to it seems counter-productive.

So for now, this blog is about what I'm doing, where I am, where I'm going, what is currently amusing me and basically anything related to those topics. I'm going through a particularly transformational couple of years in my life and it's cathartic for me to think it all out and document it.

Hopefully this also serves as a creative outlet so people stop telling me that I post way too much on Facebook. To some degree, I also hope this helps me hone my long-form writing style into something crisper and more entertaining. Or maybe this is just going to be a self-indulgent jerkfest for me while I continue to pretend that I live a life worth writing about.

Let's all find out...together.