DailyPost 1715
BUSINESS WITH CONSCIENCE
As it has been made to believe that the purpose of business is only maximization of profit. *In also underlies a feeling, that it can be done in any manner possible, as long as it does not come in direct contravention of law. Saurabh Mukherjea has been talking about the quality of promoters of Indian companies over and over again. He is convinced of the fact that a clean and able management is a must for the company, in which an intelligent investor should invest. He has a great fancy for those business differentiators, which help in transforming a company into an enduring business entity. Certainly, it has not happened because of crash commercialization which we have been talking about endlessly in this country. It seems that a large majority of Indian businesses have lost the difference between profit and profiteering. Profiteering cannot be translated into business by any stretch of imagination.
If conscience is an integral part of human existence, can businesses which rule our life, end to end, be devoid of it? Our life journey navigates between products, services, guidance and experience, mostly provided by business companies, is it not then rational to expect conscience in business. If our life is unsettled in a variety of areas, lack of conscience in those business sectors certainly play a critical role, insurance being one of them. Different companies and connected agencies in that ecosystem create functional cartels, with the only aim to exploit the customer. If you know of a discrepancy in your product or service and you are sure it will never be known to anybody, will you rectify it or not? Conscience is first reflected in the lack of transparency and it slowly shrouds everything.
Though it is not the right time to discuss conscience in health services, suffice to say the services provided by the govt on one hand and profit maximization by corporate hospitals on the other, at times gives doctors a bad name, though they have nothing much to do with the business model of big hospitals. The conscience of the pharmaceuticals companies could be debated even beyond the cows come home. The generic drugs reality explains the story. Will conscience not surface even when business conducted is directly connected to life and death. Unfortunate, as it may sound, it gets degraded to *black marketeering* of the type we saw recently in hospitals, with *oxygen and drugs and without any doubt there were any number of dubious stakeholders in this well-organized mafia type operations.
Unknown to the common man and even beyond the purview of the well informed, data enabled companies are dealing with personal or even business transactional data of all of us, for crash profit maximization, way beyond what we can even imagine of. The data protection war cry globally can barely touch the tip of the iceberg. The pricing and services of the IT sector is another story. But for hardware the price of everything remains unknown, software to licenses and lo and behold, even the human resource shopped. The whole sector was missing even in its CSR avatar, when the city which gave them everything, was gasping for breath. Govt. largesse they have enjoyed to the fullest, Electronics City is one example.
WE HAVE DEVELOPED BUSINESS WITHOUT TRUST. THIS BUSINESS MODEL DUMPS US PRECISELY WHEN WE REQUIRE IT THE MOST.