Archives for August 2010

During my first few days at Harvard Kennedy School, I’ve been meeting incredible people from all over the world who have held roles throughout the government, public, and private sector.

A highlight of orientation week was learning from others about innovations in various regions such as Latin America and East Africa and thinking about how I could translate them to other countries such as India. This sparked different ideas such as creating a portal of meaningful innovations from various countries and how organizations in other countries can learn from them across health, energy, agriculture, and water domains.

At the same time, I chatted with others over dinner about how we can tap into the social gaming phenomenon for social good, such as a Farmville that is actually doing good for farms across the world and appealing to the mass segment for gamers.

Just some new ideas to start off a great year at the Kennedy school…

The business game is changing in a profound way. Recently, I met John Hagel from the Center for the Edge, who discusses his radical proposition that management practices and institutions themselves are broken.

According to the Center for the Edge, asset profitability for US firms has fallen more than 75% in the last 40 years. John Hagel’s book, Power of Pull, builds on the concept that this changing landscape requires organizations to embrace informal and dynamic interactions. Push tools, such as static structures and defined relationships, fall short as problems become fuzzier making pull tools, such as dynamic platforms and ecosystems, much more useful.

The Western definition of innovation has been product and technology focused, wheares institutional innovation, which has been happening in emerging markets has remained invisible to Western executives.

For my own personal life this got me thinking about trends I see in my daily life:

• Personal  vs. Professional Connectivity: Today, I live in a world where Facebook and Twitter are checked almost as much as my email and I am using social media to connect to professionals in more informal ways.
• Talent migration: I’m seeing more and more of my friends and colleagues leaving their ‘cog’ jobs for more creative opportunities across the world at social enterprises, foundations, and startups.
• Companies struggling to keep passionate workers: The most passionate people about work tend to do the best. Self employed people are twice as likely to be passionate about their work than those who work at firms. Large corporations are realizing they need to shift their mindsets in order to retain the best talent.

I get this question a lot. People wonder why I’m fascinated by the food and agriculture space (former I-banker/Wharton student becomes agrarian..ok I kind of get it). But my answer is simple: Food is part of me and part of all of us.

As an MIT Legatum fellow, I spent this past year incubating ideas in the agricultural space. But I’m not ONLY interested in agriculture.  I am passionate about women’s health, innovation in education,  and sustainability. When launching any idea, you need to start somewhere. By focusing on agriculture, I’m thinking about how to bring sustainable food on dinner tables, raise farmer incomes to send children to school, and reduce the depletion of natural resources.

On a personal level, I believe in the sustainable agriculture movement, a closed loop process which is a self sustaining system in which waste is converted back into input. On a global level, I am energized by its high ranging impact: According to the World Bank Agriculture Plan, “GDP growth originating in agriculture is about four times more effective in raising incomes of extremely poor people than GDP growth originating from other sectors.”

Those are my reasons on a high level, but there are plenty more. Bill Gates said it best: “Poor farmers are not a problem to be solved. They are the solution. The best answer for a world that is fighting hunger and poverty and trying to feed a growing population”