Reinventing The Future: Small Is Beautiful
"There is wisdom in smallness if only on account of the smallness and patchiness
of human knowledge." ~ from "Small is Beautiful - Economics as if people mattered" by E F Schumacher.The financial meltdown has thrown up serious doubts about the sustainability of large corporations. Large investment banks are practically ungovernable and unmanageable - given the size, complexity and diversity of their operations. There is a serious move afoot to break them down into smaller, focused and manageable organizations.
In a different industry, Ford was able to become more agile and come back to profits faster than other major US automakers after shedding its unwieldy acquisitions of Jaguar and Land Rover.
These trends indicate that E F Schumacher's seminal work - 'Small is Beautiful,' published in 1973 - may finally be an idea whose time has come. Inspired by Gandhi and Buddhism, Schumacher outlined several important ideas:
Centralization is mainly an idea of order; decentralization one of freedom.
Ever bigger machines, entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress; they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands re-organizing science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and the beautiful.
Small-scale operations, no matter how numerous, are typically less harmful to the natural environment; their impact does not overwhelm the recuperative forces of nature.
It is possible to re-direct technology back to the real needs of humankind, and to the actual size of man. Man is small. Small is beautiful. To seek gigantism is to seek self-destruction.
In line with the Gandhian model of humanizing and localizing work, Schumacher lay down four propositions:
1. Workplaces should be created where people live now, rather than forcing urban migration
2. Workplaces must be cheap enough to be created in large numbers without high capital requirements
3. Production methods must be relatively simple in order to reduce skill levels not just in production but also in organization, supply chain management and marketing.
4. Production should be mainly from local materials and for local use.
With much better levels of connectivity - physical and electronic - the environment is ripe for distributed, localized production. Local production, using local materials, is ecologically sustainable, and appropriate to the needs of the 'real' needs of a customer.
As an example, Dr. Vijaya Venkat, a Professor of Dietetics and Nutrition, told us that the best diet for the human body is food that is local and seasonal. While we may be able to import fruits and vegetables from anywhere in the world, it is neither environmentally friendly nor healthy. The same principle applies to almost all our daily items of consumption.
We all have a role to play in supporting businesses that pursue small-scale production and distribution. We can look for - and shop at - retail outlets that are run in an eco-friendly and efficient manner.
In a country like India, small organizations are definitely going to be the major employers and the main engine for our development and growth. The quicker we recognize this and tune our policies to supporting this movement, the better off we'll be as a country. Gandhi was well ahead of his time, but his ideas seem to be increasingly relevant to today's time.
This is our opportunity to reinvent the future - more sustainable, organic and wholesome. Do share your thoughts and insights on smallness in this era when big business and growth are widely accepted as the only engine of growth.
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