Bholaram & Sons is a small one dish eatery in the by lanes of Ujjain, India that has survived continuously from 1924. There are many reviews of the restaurant( if we can call it one!). The list of fortune 500 companies is well known to undergo changes all the time. One study indicated that 90% of the firms that made it to the list in 1955 do not exist today. "In 2020, the average lifespan of a company on Standard and Poor's 500 Index was just over 21 years, compared with 32 years in 1965. There is a clear long-term trend of declining corporate longevity with regards to companies on the S&P 500 Index, with this expected to fall even further throughout the 2020s"D.Clark. This is after professional strategic management, business continuity planning, product and process innovation and so many more strategies, not to mention doing the right thing of considering all the stake holders.
Bholaram & Sons has been serving only Poori (fried wheat bread) and Sabji ( vegetable curry) from 1924. Everyone in town knows the address. There are so many reviews on YouTube, TripAdvisor and other spaces on the web. Is there a secret for business longevity? Why do monoliths die or fade away? Many explain the phenomenon with Schumpeter's 'creative destruction' as the raison d'être. The number of variations or innovations in Poori and Sabji over the last century are just too many to count. It is interesting that despite of all the innovations around the same product, this eatery thrives.
Most companies understand sustainability as the sustainability of the firm/business, whereas sustainability of mankind goes far beyond keeping stake holders happy. Customer satisfaction or delight is limited by the knowledge and previous experience of the consumer and is a function of the expectations. Similarly employee engagement and retention, shareholder value, superlative supplier relationships are all limited concepts because they are measured on the basis of some comparison with other businesses.
The new normal post covid19 world calls for 'wholesome business' and hopefully educated customers who choose to do business only with wholesome firms. The role of business in society, the relationships between business and society, business and politics/governance, business and customers is not ideal today from any standpoint. Business, which is blinkered on profits, is exerting undue influence on every aspect of our lives. Undue influence is a understatement, however, I could not find a stronger expression. This is making mankind and earth unsustainable in the long run.
Wholesome business is that which goes beyond triple bottom line and stakeholders into the domain of wholesomeness. Wholesome is not only about health and wellness, it is also about wellbeing of mind and spirit, respect for the law, ethical thought and behavior, and sustainability of mankind and the universe.
Customer satisfaction is not enough, businesses need to provide products and services that are not harmful to the health and wellness of the individual and the world. Customers prefer whitest of paper, does that permit using chlorine that will inundate farms beyond the paper factory? How fair is it to provide 500% of recommended daily intake of sugar in a 200ml drink?
Similarly, just take home salary is not a good measure of a wholesome employer. It should cover aspects like work-life balance, terminal and retirement benefits, wholesome working conditions.
Even shareholders are not sharks, dividend and market capitalization ( really speculative notional value most times) need to be expanded to include other wholesome indices of the wholesome use of investment.
Just my thoughts on the necessary post covid changes needed in business. I am a romantic, which is essential to be a disruptive innovator :) and be rarely understood!
The change in mind-set this calls for is great, however, every start up gives me hope. The number of social enterprises is increasing everyday and that is a good sign. When will we have a global corporation that is a social enterprise?
Anyone interested in expanding this idea into a journal article or think such a potential exists please do write in.
As always, your comments are what I eagerly look forward to.
Dear Professor,
ReplyDeleteThanks for recalling and sharing this with me.
Very Interesting concept...
" Wholesome Business through Welfare for All"
It would be interesting to know what position does" Profit" occupies in their Business Decision Making Process.
Also interesting to make quantitative comparison between "wholesome business" and "non-wholesome business(subject to conceptual, nomenclatural and grammatical corrections) in terms of "Profit" as a matter of "Research Interest"
Also would be interested in knowing what "fundamentally" drives their business.
My dear Sudhakar,
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your blog. Wholesomeness is an interesting concept, be it in food, entertainment or as you suggest, even in business. But what would it take to conceive of a new wholesome business in the post-Covid world or even make an existing unwholesome business wholesome? I am not sure that there will be a magical change of heart among corporates and other institutions triggered by all the suffering and deaths caused by Covid-19. If that had indeed happened, we would not have the level of vaccine inequity that we are witnessing in the world today which is endangering health everywhere.
Your example of Bholaram & Sons seems to suggest that Mom & Pop shops are more likely to sustain and survive as wholesome entities. That goes against the tendency all over the world, including India, to go in for larger enterprises that can dominate markets. Small is Beautiful has been replaced by Big is Bountiful.
Further, the recent thrust in India has been on formalisation of the economy for purposes of tax compliance. It is easy to see that informal enterprises are not tax dodgers but valuable providers of jobs and decentralised production. Unless we are willing to re-think the underlying paradigm of our economic policies, the dream of wholesome enterprises may remain just that - a dream.
Sir, thanks for sharing this article. It makes lots of sense.
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