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Response from Sunil Mittal

Mr. Sunil Mittal, Chairman and CEO of Bharti Group and Bharti Airtel, was kind enough to respond regarding the article on his father.
 
Whenever I visited Senator Mittal in India, I would also visit Sunil and his wife Nyna. They hosted me so graciously. I remember when Sunil accompanied his father at the Moscow Conference, hosted by President Gorbachev at the Kremlin. Senator Mittal made a memorable speech at the closing ceremony. Many eminent leaders at the Moscow Conference were impressed with young Sunil, recognizing in him the qualities of a diplomat and a leader. 

To me, Sunil is the model case of the remarkable generational transition from parent to child. I would like to commend him for the approach he has taken to his business practices and laud his outstanding success. Sunil has proven the advantages of a truly global vision—we must now encourage the next generation of emerging leaders to follow the example he has set. 

I am pleased to introduce his response here.
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Dear Akio,

Thank you for forwarding me the beautifully written piece. I really enjoyed reading it and laughed at the piece on my father.

I am reminded of an event. Once a Japanese team of two engineers from Suzuki Motor Co. had come to impart training to my staff on portable generators. I per chance visited the workshop and stood in a corner when I noticed the team leader going over and over again on some point and I sensed the confusion amongst the trainer and trainee.… Continue reading

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Young Business Leaders: The Missing Link in World Peace

 

By Rinaldo Brutoco, Founding President of the World Business Academy

Youth have a unique ability to serve as peacekeepers between Muslim and Western communities, but the missing link among youth has been their recognition of the possibility of creating an improved human condition for both Muslim and Western nations through increased commerce. Young people have the energy and the drive for entrepreneurial engagement, so it is likely they will be the most effective peacekeepers through commerce.

Young people also have far more to gain from peace than their elders do, and far more to lose from war. Totally apart from the fact that youth constitute a disproportionate number of the casualties of war, war is not good for any youth, ever.

The youth caught up in the Israeli-Palestine conflict can see that if the conflict continues on its present course, they will be caught in a grim lifetime of grinding poverty stretching decades into the future. Young people can see that their lives will be better in peace than war. Peace provides the opportunity for commerce. Without peace, a community cannot create meaningful jobs; young people cannot easily nurture their new families; and the grinding cycle of poverty rolls on infinitely into the future.

Violence has taken a toll on both the Palestinian and Israeli economies, but the contrast between the economies of the West Bank and Gaza highlights the opportunities for economic development that come with an improved security situation.

The West Bank’s economy is improving, thanks to Prime Minister Sala Fayyad, an American-educated reformer; a clamp-down by Palestinian security forces that prompted Israel to remove many of the checkpoints that had cut off movement and trade; and the Obama Administration’s more effective, highly targeted, quiet diplomacy.… Continue reading

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Why Did McDonald’s Go the Moon? There Are No Financial Deposits in the Spiritual World

Read in Japanese.

By Akio Matsumura

In September of 1973 I was working down to the last moment to arrange the Japanese Parliamentary Study Mission to Asian Countries on Population and Development headed by former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi. It was hosted by the International Planned Parenthood Federation in London and the UN Population Fund in New York. General Draper called me from Washington to tell me that Mr. McDonald would be joining the mission and would be arriving the following day in Tokyo from the U.S. I was to meet with him and explain the program for the trip. I didn’t know who Mr. McDonald was, so I asked a Japanese friend who he might be. He said, “Oh yes, a McDonald hamburger restaurant just opened at Ginza, so he might be the owner of the McDonald restaurant company.”

The next day we met and ate lunch at the Hilton Hotel in Akasaka. He was an older gentleman, with white hair, so I asked him at the beginning of lunch, “Mr. McDonald, when you were 31, like I am now, what did you dream of being?” He told me, “Akio when I was your age I was so interested in the universe, and spacecrafts. My dream was that one day man would go to the Moon. And Akio, when we first landed on the Moon in 1969, many of my company’s products went there.” His face was glowing with pride–he was telling me the story as a grandfather would to his grandson.… Continue reading

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Response from Akio Matsumura

Dear Chris,
I would like to respond to your article titled “Changing Ethics in Business.”
I think this is a wonderful and timely article that provides a moral appeal to the current business leaders, and speaks to basic human principles.
Twelve U.S. Senators and sixteen U.S. Congressmen including Senator Al Gore, Senator Clairborne Pell, Congressman Hamilton, among many others, attended the Parliamentary Earth Summit Conference at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, co-sponsored by the Brazilian Congress. The photograph of the children from Rio’s favelas speaking from the balcony at Parliament asks us what we have accomplished of our resolutions since then. Let us reflect on what we discussed at that historic event in regard to tackling the global environmental issues we would face in the 21st century. Senator Al Gore, one of the leading environmental legislators in the US Congress at the time and a member of the Global Forum Executive Committee, gave the keynote address and set the tone with a spiritual appeal unusual for a politician. He inquired, “People all over the world feel themselves part of a single global family. Why then are spiritual leaders not joining parliamentarians in this dialog?” Mr. Stephan Schmidheiny, Chairman of the Business Council for Sustainable Development said that the true sustainable development ultimately comes down to ethical, moral and spiritual considerations—we must all become care-takers, working to safeguard the interests of future humans and the interests of the other species with which we share the planet.
These fundamental appeals remind us that we still must tackle these pressing issues of human survival in the 21st century.
… Continue reading
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Changing ethics in business

As I’ve written, Wall Street is in need of change. Business practices in general need a new outlook: one from an ethical and cultural standpoint. The world is changing and the foundations of business are being shaken. One large issue, among others, is the decided ignorance of the cultural and spiritual dimension, and not only in the short term for profits. Large firms and corporations must truly integrate other cultures’ ideas into their plans, as well as cater to their different needs. The goal in business now is unlimited growth. The world is seeing the very impossibility of such an idea right now. An organism cannot grow outside its own means without it dying. Businesses are now consuming the the means they live by if they prey on people. Greed is the goal for achieving growth, which is not sustainable.

At the Parliament Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 children from the favelas (slums) of Rio shared their stories of scrambling for food every day. One girl said how she had to steal food to share it with her younger brother. Not only is the system ignoring our children, the future, but they still have the kind heart to share the little they do have. Businesses have something to learn from the very people they benefit by exploiting: the children, the poor, the homeless. Greed only gets you so far. To really survive you must share and link what you have together. Then you can enjoy what you have for much longer and without the exploitation of so many.… Continue reading

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Beyond Wall Street: Our Ecological Debt


Welcome to Unhappy Earth Overshoot Day! Today is a milestone, and an unfortunate one at that. Today, September 23, we have already used up our natural resources for the year, in order to live within the biocapacity of the planet. The New Economics Foundation, nef, has calculated our ecological footprint on the Earth and where our sustainable use of natural resources would lie relevant to our year calendar. 1987 was the first year we were to consume our resources before the end of the year, and we have been encroaching quickly further into the year as time passes.

Although Wall Street is in shambles (or doesn’t even exist!) and soon the U.S. government and public will be after bailing them out, this is just a smaller piece of a larger system, which clearly is in dire need of a patch. Our system of investments, hyperconsumption, and flexible labor are coming to an end, whether we like it or not. The system doesn’t work any more on its own, and that will just be emphasized more as China and India grow and continue to exploit the very system the US prided its own growth on. There are Limits to Growth, as has been known at least in academic circles for 35 years, and we are pushing those limits right now. Each year that we ignore our ecological debt to the planet is another year we will have to pay it back, and sooner rather than later.

So does the system really need a patch?… Continue reading