Strategic Goals and Values

We avow solemnly at the outset that the Foundation does not know of and would not engage in any strategy or operation that is not built upon the tenets of total integrity, legality, and transparency. Accordingly, the Foundation and all its personnel would be totally honest, truthful, and transparent in its endeavors, communications, operations, projects, and relationships at all times.

Mission

Our strategic goals and values stem from our mission.  In their broadest scope, our strategic goals are consistent with the United Nation’s seventeen Sustainability Development Goals which address issues related to clean energy, climate resiliency, economic growth, hunger, poverty, health, education, equality, peace, and justice.

However, given our distinctive competencies, the Foundation would work tirelessly and incessantly to make progress on the following United Nation’s Social Development Goals in the order of Foundation’s weighted preference:

  • UN SDG 3: Health and Wellness, Sanitation, Freedom from Pollution
  • UN SDG 13: Climate resiliency
  • UN SDG 8: Economic growth through responsible corporate profitability
  • UN SDG 4: Quality Education with increased focus on sustainability
  • UN SDG 6: Clean Water, Rainwater harvesting, Dedicated technologies
  • UN SDG 7: Clean Energy with focus on affordability
  • UN SDG 1 & 2: Eradication of Poverty and Hunger, Obviating community resettlements
  • UN SDG 14 & 15: Life on land and below water

Furthermore, the Foundation team believes that the largest share of environmental deterioration emanates from emissions caused by business operations.  As such, it is essential that business strategies be formulated to facilitate pro-environment and pro-social responsibility products, services, and policies. The following Strategies are part of the core and distinctive competencies of the Foundation that serve this objective:

Competitive Strategies Based on Triple Bottom Line Paradigm

These strategies, when judiciously implemented, result in simultaneous improvements in profit, planet, and people, thus making environmental and social improvements in policies, products and services a desirable part of the profit-based strategies.

Mass Customization Strategies

By treating environmental and pro-social responsibility features as product customization and differentiation priorities, products and services can be improved significantly at low/affordable prices. The promise of mass customization strategies is to bring about extreme customization and personalization of products at mass production (low/affordable) prices.

Customer Priorities Integration

In all activities and projects that the Foundation undertakes individually or in partnership, due consideration is given to price, agility (delivery speed), and customer service once the environmental performance and total quality have been built into the products, services and policies at the highest required levels.

Strategic Approaches

Presented below are selected strategic approaches that the Foundation has in its competitive arsenal as instruments of its core and distinctive competencies. The focus of these strategies is to influence the behavior of businesses – the largest producer of pollutants and GHG emissions without encroaching on profits. This core competency germinates from the Chairman’s over 30 years of service in business schools of high repute in the United States. The goal is to transform the role of business form polluter to savior of environment. 

The Foundation’s fundamental reason for existence is to develop sustainable strategies and enduring pragmatic solutions for the myriad environmental and human health challenges that plague the planet. These include, but go well beyond, the wayward changes in climate, depleting water resources, disappearing rich biological diversity and food insecurity. Superimposed on these challenges is the need to reshape or modify these strategies by embracing innovative technologies and evolving adaptive practices that deal with the environmental changes in sync with the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Foundation is razor-focused on serving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): SDG 2: Zero hunger, SDG 3: Good Health & well-being, SDG 6: Clean Water and Sanitation, SDG 13: Climate Action, SDG 15: Life on land and SDG 17 Partnerships for gaols among others.

It should be pointed out that in Foundation’s experience and wisdom, the environmental challenges cannot be mitigated with any degree of efficacy or sufficiency unless the major polluter and environmental destroyer is brought in control with the fierce urgency of now, to borrow a phrase from Dr. King. We believe that the GHG emissions caused by businesses collectively are at the root of major environmental impairment and pollution. Hence, there is dire need to control the business operations such that they produce minimum GGH emissions and pollutants. The business executives of today, especially in rapidly developing economies, pose a significant hurdle in accomplishing this task as they believe that minimizing GHG emissions comes at the expense of significant erosion of profits.  The Foundation has distinctive competency in formulation of such strategies that integrate the profit, environment and social objectives in  a synergistic manner using certain out of box strategies. 

VANQUISHING THE COMPETITION WITH SOCIO-ENVIRONMENTAL STICK

From the business perspective, beating the competition is equivalent to delighting the customer. Based on the operations strategy literature, a customer will buy a company’s product if it has higher value (in what matters to customer) or has a lower price or both. Generally, the value embedded in a product is known in marketing parlance as product differentiation. The customer priorities that comprise product differentiation are: quality, customization level, delivery speed, and customer service, especially after sales. 21st century customer has added two more priorities to this list which may become an existential threat for the company if ignored. These are environmental quality and social responsibility embedded in the company’s products, services, policies, strategies, and operations. To delight the customer, all these priorities must be served to the customer at the highest level possible. However, these priorities drive the product/service prices to an exorbitant level. The strategic challenge for the business is to develop dynamically evolving capabilities that maximize the product differentiation compared to the competitors while holding the price at low/affordable levels.

            Described below are several innovative strategies drawn from the distinctive competency toolbox of the Foundation that would meet the strategic challenge described above head on. 

OUT OF BOX STRATEGIC SOLUTIONS

There are two components of the business strategy that could provide a “winning formula” to delight the customer. Fortunately, the Foundation has a distinctive competency and designing and deploying the strategies to maximize business profits and growth.

1. Do More with Less

We have earlier pointed out the Foundation’s strategies are designed to provide maximum differentiation/customization at the least price. This means we aim at providing services that maximize quality, specifically, environmental quality, of our deliverables at the least expense of resources. Following a resource prudent approach, the Foundation strives to develop solution oriented, trans-disciplinary, participatory, and hands-on projects that address salient socio-environmental challenges.  The Foundation strongly believes in the synergistic influence of collaborative approaches that maximize the socio-environmental impact at the grassroots level using a variety of competent partnerships with individuals and entities that have the desired credentials. 

2. Mass Customization

This incongruous (mass and customization) strategy is designed to explore the modularity of products and services to maximize the environmental performance of the products at low-cost/affordable prices that are consistent with mass production prices. These are very suitable for India where large masses need a product that carries high environmental performance. 

3. Triple Bottom Line Paradigm

There is an unsubstantiated prevailing notion among a significant proportion of business executives, especially in India: Improving the environmental and social performance of products and services would result in significant erosion of profits. The Foundation, however, has the knowledge of hundreds of cases and business models that currently exist in advanced economies, that show that any environmental or socially responsible improvements in products, services, policies, strategies, and operations are, in fact, synergistic with improvement in profits. Such improvements, however, need to be market-analyzed beforehand and implemented judiciously; possibly, incrementally. The Foundation has a core competency in designing Triple Bottom Line based, also called, Planet, People, and Profit strategies or simply Triple P or PPP strategies.

Notably, this is in line with the Prime Minister Modi’s P3 proposal at the World Economic Forum’s Davos Agenda 2022, where he emphasized the need and urgency for us “becoming Pro-Planet People for a sustainable future”.   

4. Professional Development and Capability Enhancement

The Foundation believes that we are well past the opportune time in India to modernize strategic, planning, and operational tools in line with the latest available methodologies and technologies to improve the environmental sustainability and social responsibility. This is also true for supply chains greening and management issues. There is too much inefficiency and wastage in supply chains and manufacturing and an excessive degree of compromise in environmental performance of companies and products. The Foundation plans to launch two major initiatives directed towards full-fledged, exhaustive training, education and professional development programs that will bring the knowledge- and management-base of executives and educators in line with the latest available resources.  Supply chain managers desperately need modern, mathematical algorithms to optimize supply chains surplus while minimizing he resources expended. These initiatives would seek to prepare all stakeholders including policy makers, teachers/educators, students/youths, and corporate executives for employing the systemically optimized methodologies and algorithms to bring about substantial improvements in the state of supply chains surplus and sustainability of environment. Environmentally sensitive and informed citizen will also have an opportunity to develop focused thinking that serves the planet besides taking environmentally responsible decisions at work as well as in personal lives. 

5. Social Media Strategies

The Foundation believes that a well-planned and well-organized use of social media with its national and international counsellors (as well as their cohorts) would be immensely helpful in creating a platform for exchange of information that can move the environmental cause forward rapidly. The information exchanged with experts and other recipients would help generate out-of-box solutions for environmental problems and more importantly, could prove to be a source for resources needed to further the causes espoused by the Foundation. An electronic magazine on advancement of environment and pandemics, and human wellness issues to apprise the readers of the latest developments in the world is also on the planning anvil. 

6. Student Internships and Doctoral Candidates

The Foundation seeks to fund several internship positions and doctoral candidates from leading institutions of higher learning. The Foundation believes that young interns from ranking institutions bring extraordinary energy, flexibility, and openness to pursue new avenues of progress. Ditto for doctoral candidates with an additional feature that they bring an incredible depth of research and data on dedicated subjects.

7. Use of Thinktanks

Major projects that need large underpinning of knowledge, research, brainstorming among well-informed alternate thought processes and extensive datamining to generate a reliable, pragmatic, and effective solutions roadmaps for huge, out-of-control environmental problems will benefit from creation of a dedicated thinktank specific to each problem or issue.  The thinktank will comprise of global experts in that area who will convene for a predetermined period and frequency.  White Paper generated after the coordinator of the thinktank has created a solution roadmap for the express purpose, will be sent to businesses and Government for comments and future suggestions/actions. An example of such a project would be e-waste management which is a raging environmental problem that qualifies for the title, “Fierce Urgency of Now” coined by Martin Luther King Jr. 

8. Annual Conference

The Foundation intends to organize annual conferences and seminars and symposia to enable dissemination of the latest issues, solutions, methodologies, and technological advances in the field of planet environment and human wellness. We laso plan to sponsor global information dissemination forus like TED etc. to further collect, process and disseminate useful information. These events will also provide opportunities to cerate powerful networking groups dedicated to various elements of environmental problems.

More? Stay Tuned!!

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