Spring & Sustainability

Was I crazy or what, to register for five courses for the spring term? Was my mind frozen in the winter when I was registering for the spring? These were the thoughts that overcame me as I landed back in Chicago after a great but short (only 2.5 weeks) and hectic trip to India, and had to hit the ground running immediately to catch up on the material, as I already missed one week of classes.

Even as I tried to recover from the jet lag and handle the ton of course work in that week, the time for the case competition by the Aspen Institute arrived, and then there was no time to even rest for a moment.

As the competition opened on Friday morning, we had mixed feelings as we read the case assigned. It was on the Tata Group from India which provided me a little familiarity, while the expected solution to the case seemed to be very open-ended and challenging. We were asked to recommend a ten-year sustainability strategy for the Tata Group taking into consideration its corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities in the past 100 years and the now changing global business conditions and social & economic trends.

It was a great brain-storming activity for more than two days, starting from understanding what exactly is sustainability and what our recommendations for the strategy must be that the Tata Group should adopt. It was also a great fun working on the team with people from diverse backgrounds. Before coming to Kellogg, Chris worked on the Capitol Hill as Press Secretary to a US Congresswoman, Jose Ochoa worked at Chicago Hope Academy, Rajiv had a semiconductor technology industry background, and I came with academic research credentials.

Well, what is sustainability? As we learnt many things ourselves the first time, the term was used by the Brundtland Commission which coined what has become the most often-quoted definition of sustainable development "as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."

As the case expected us to read through a ton of material and dig through several video, printed, and online resources on CSR, and what the Tata Group has specifically been trying to achieve in the past several decades, it was one enlightening weekend.

I will post later more on the strategy we proposed and the recommended implementation process for the next ten years. While the 1st round at Kellogg is done in this week, the final round (if we are selected, will be end of this month); so can't reveal much until then.

Postscript: As I started writing this, we just got the email today that our team won the first place (out of 16 or so teams) at Kellogg !!!!!! That calls for a celebration.