Business to the Buddha

Tag: ecosystem

  • Interdependent co-arising in Ecosystem







    As I have been writing a lot about interdependent co-arising, I came across this video and thought to share it without delay on my blog.

    If you can understand this video you can understand the concept of Buddhism on interdependent co-arising. Please watch this small <5 min video a wonderful experiment. According to the description of the video – When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the United States after being absent nearly 70 years, the most remarkable “trophic cascade” occurred. What is a trophic cascade and how exactly do wolves change rivers?

    “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” – John Muir

    An interesting way to explain interdependence. Hope we learn this sooner rather than later that ecology has to be balanced, political, social and religious ideas should also be balanced because perhaps nothing is perfect! I think therefore Mahavir used the concept of Syadvada (doctorine of postulation) and the Buddha middle path.

    Source – Youtube channel Sustainable Human http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYv_csqWJTSfQK3vOZDJKQw

  • Business of religion!*







    The first message we heard in the class of Brand Management of Professor Ram Kumar, was “It is an eco-system…”. An entangled, closely knit or perhaps confusingly mingled ‘Eco-system’. Econ-system of brands, products, product variants (variants are very confusing, no doubt) and bombardment of marketing messages (communication). Here everyone wants to say that our product is the best using different channels and different language. Hum! it sounds very common, right? So common that we overlook it.

    In another class of Marketing we were asked which is the oldest business in the world, still running successfully? I (when I say ‘I’, literally I) responded ‘religion’. Every religious institution says our religion is better (perhaps the best) than others and is the only path for salvation. Walmart, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Tata or Reliance might exist, or not, for 1000 years but for sure we will (and had) many religion for 1000’s of years and we will have them in future too. Why? Because – religious institution sells itself on emotions. Even without learning any Marketing concept, religious institutions learnt that emotions should be hit directly to let people decide emotionally and justify rationally.

    Let us talk about the channels they use. It is similar to what we learn in distribution channel or managing supply chain. ‘Retail store’ of Religion or distribution channels are found everywhere, and finances? Well there is no limit to it (find it for yourself – a recent News in an Indian Newspaper The Hindu or Google search for $ with any major religion of the world…). Every religion has a source of income this source of income germinates from the EMOTION we talked earlier about. Yet there is a lot to learn from religious institutions, learning the administration, Marketing and distribution channel and much more, is not that true?

    Personally, I am a strong believer that religion plays an important role in building and binding society. Religion is a path wherein you have to follow the traffic rules. If you do not follow the rules you are likely to meet with an accident. What is the question of saying rules of left hand drive better than right hand drive? The rules are there to avoid accidents and make the journey safer and easier. When I say ‘firm believer’ I mean the rules taught by the religion, and not the comparison of one to the other.

    Well, not only for business but also for being righteous person we can learn a lot from religion!

    * Conditioned applied – Thoughts presented here are my own and learnt from different sources, I do not intend to hurt any sentiment or question any religion.

  • Evolution







    I was wondering about evolution – how, what and when? I asked myself a question – when do we call something has evolved? The answer which came to my mind was –well, when the whole category of the group (species) grows from something old to new, that time we call this movement as evolution.

    If only one entity of a taxonomic group evolves – we may call development as an anomaly. Therefore, an evolution relates to the whole group. Here, it is worth considering that evolution relates to whole group not one entity in a group. We say that whole mobile industry has evolved. This evolution, for example, has been two-level evolution, first, handsets and second, services.

    What point I am making is, the growth in any aspect of a category happens supporting the growth in other related category as well. An ecosystem of the surrounding evolves with evolution of one category. The Buddha said once – whole humanity and the world has enlightened the day I was enlightened. This statement is a very subtle statement, which means a different thing for a different type of category.
    Let us take another example, of sports. First 100 m sprint world record was of 11.6 sec in 1896, current world record stands at 9.58 sec. The whole concept of competition has evolved for 100 m sprint. The product, the arena and the processes e.g. shoes, tracks, clothes, coaches and techniques etc. Technology which was not related to sports earlier has now been very efficiently used to track who is the winner by the photo finish technique. Well, let’s see the business side of this – did Nike exist in 1896? Did Puma exist in 1896? No!

    Effectively, whole ecosystem has evolved in this example. This happens everywhere. In last century many industries have come into existence and many have grown from where those were 100 years back.

    In nutshell, evolution relates to the whole group of a taxonomy. Additionally, everything evolves and the evolution of one particular product results in evolution of all associated services or products.