Electric Vehicle: To go or not to go for it?

By mid-2026, our Maruti Estilo Zen will be fifteen years old, and the registration will expire. It was bought in 2011 by exchanging a 12-year-old car, guess which one? Another Maruti Zen! When I mention Estilo in my class, students say, what? The car has run 48,000 km in 14.5 years, that’s 3.3K km per year. ChatGPT says, “That’s extremely low usage.” And, it is in excellent shape.  Now, I have two options: to renew registration for five more years or to go for a new car. And, if it is a new car, should I go for an Electric, an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE), or a hybrid model?

I checked in our apartment parking lot; we have 0 electric or hybrid cars, many electric two-wheelers, and a total of 40 cars. Maybe all of us living here are late adopters. So, I checked the Manipal Hospital parking lot, which is within walking distance from my place. It had 3 Battery EVs (BEV), 3 hybrids, and a total of 40 cars. In 2025, BEVs accounted for around 5% (up from 2.6% in 2024) and hybrids another 2-3% of the cars sold in India. Fast charging stations may be quite limited once you leave the city. Overall, the adoption is growing but low.

In the US, the Big Three, Ford, Volkswagen, and GM, have scaled back their EV strategy recently. Ford has taken a huge write-off of $19.2 billion. GM’s charge on reassessment of EVs is lesser $1.6 billion. One sector where car-related anxieties get amplified is rentals. In the US, Hertz went public in 2021 after emerging from bankruptcy. In the same year, it made a pivot to electric and made a bulk purchase of 100,000 Teslas – estimated to cost around $4.2 billion. In just two years, range anxiety, charging station paucity, and unfamiliarity all had a combined effect of customers not opting for EVs and resulting in higher-than-expected collisions and damages. Hertz declared in its 10-K filings that it would “significantly reduce the size” of its global EV fleet. It finally took half a billion in write-downs and disposal losses by end of 2024.

On the regulatory front, on December 16, 2025 EU moved away from its 2035 100% EV mandate to allow for a 90% reduction in CO₂ emissions by 2035, which creates a 10% 'flexibility gap' for highly efficient hybrids and combustion engines. The EU was following the footsteps of the Trump administration, rolling back the “EV mandate” in early December. US automakers are now required to meet an average of 34.5 mpg (miles per gallon) across their model fleet by 2031, a dramatic drop from the average of 50.4 mpg 2013 mandate proposed by the Biden administration.

In India, the EV policy favours BEVs. FAME II subsidies apply to BEVs, not to hybrids. Tata and Mahindra have taken the BEV-only route so far, while Maruti and Toyota are pushing for hybrids. The 2023 IIT Kanpur study and the 2025 International Council on Clean Transportation report on life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions indicate that HEVs may be at least comparable if not better than BEVs in the Indian context. Such studies are region-specific, where “cradle-to-grave” analysis consists of vehicle manufacturing, usage, maintenance, recycling of components, and finally, disposal. The “well-to-wheel” analysis includes oil extraction, feedstock cultivation, transportation, refining, fuel production, blending, and supply. IIT Kanpur study considers India’s electricity generation mix from thermal, nuclear, solar, wind, and hydropower plants in different regions. Why do Indian policies favour BEVs?

One thing I learnt from the Epstein saga is to follow the funding sources. Epstein donated money to Harvard, MIT, Clinton-related entities, etc., and, in turn, received money from Leslie Wexner (Victoria’s Secret), billionaire Leon Black, etc. Could India’s EV policy be influenced by the big corporations? Yes, it is possible. During the 2024 Lok Sabha Polls, Tata Group-backed Trust donated ₹757 crore to the BJP and ₹77 crore to the Congress. Who knows how favours get returned? Or, could it be a bias due to the "Make in India" initiative, favouring Tatas and Mahindras against Suzuki and Toyota? The IIT Kanpur study was supported by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), Japan. Could there be a bias in this study towards hybrid due to the sponsorship? Yes, it is possible.

Currently applicable (2022-27), the Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency-II (CAFE-II) norms require an average efficiency of ~113 g CO₂/km. That is 48 miles per gallon (mpg), which is roughly where US norms were before being relaxed this month to 34.5 mpg, corresponding to 158 g CO₂/km. Maruti’s R C Bhargav may have a point when he said last month, “The norms of CAFE, as they have been framed, actually favour bigger cars. As weight decreases, the norms become less and less favourable for smaller cars.”  The smallest Tata car (Tiago 1.2, 1050 kg) weighs 25% more than WagonR (850 kg). Mahindra discontinued the compact car of a similar size (KUV100 NXT, 1085 kg). For Tata Motors, compact cars account for 16% of its passenger car sales. Small cars is a shrinking market in India, while SUVs is a growing market. It is in the interest of Tata Motors and Mahindra to sell us the dream of SUVs.

I drive occasionally. I purchase all groceries by walking around, use a cycle for going to the Metro station, bank, post office, and anything within a 2-3 km radius. Taking the car out to a nearby restaurant is problematic because finding a parking space is a challenge. My maximum mileage may have come from commuting to the IIM campus. In the coming year, the metro line to IIMB may become operational, and my car usage may reduce further. I travelled to Kallianpur (near Udupi) and Gokarna this month for holidays by train and bus. I take the KIAL bus to commute to and from the airport many times. I don’t see any reason for buying an SUV. I feel it is too big to maneuver, less efficient than a compact, too cumbersome to find a parking space, especially if you don’t have a driver. And, BEV is not suitable when the usage is infrequent. Unlike an IC engine, a battery degrades even when parked.

In short, my best bet is to renew the registration for Estilo for five more years. If that doesn’t work out for some reason, I will go for a compact IC car or wait for a compact hybrid like Maruti Fronx due in 2026. Is it possible that I was convinced of the answer to begin with and went looking for data to support it? Yes, that is possible😊

A reflection on 2025 through management of innovation, design thinking, and mindfulness lens

This is my reflection on the year that has gone by through the lens of three areas of my work: management of technology and innovation, design thinking, and mindfulness.

India is just waking up in deep-tech; it takes ten years: 2025 was the year of tariff and trade wars. In India, various industries were impacted due to the trade war. For example, Textiles and apparel, logistics, automotives, pharma, IT services, and more. Markets have bounced back since then. However, the uncertainty remains high. I was really impressed by China’s response. Nelson Wang, Vice Chairman of RimPac and Asian Studies, mentioned in an interview, “China has been preparing for this situation for ten years.” (5:30) Over the last decade, China reduced its dependence on the US export from 20% to 11.5%. It controlled rare earth magnates, and it was in a dominant position in the Nexperia crisis. It has made strategic investments in key technologies like batteries and EVs, AI, semiconductors, telecom, renewables, space tech, and biotech. Fighting against the century of humiliation that began with the defeat in the first Opium War (1939-42) remains the central theme in CCP ideology. China has demonstrated strategic foresight and execution in tackling American imperialism. China’s R&D budget is 2.7% of GDP while India’s is 0.66% of GDP. And China’s GDP (USD 19.4 trillion) is almost five times India’s GDP (USD 4.1 trillion). India is just waking up. For the first time, Indian government has allocated ₹10,000 crore deep-tech Fund of funds in Union 2025 budget and RDI scheme has earmarked ₹20,000 crore in FY25-26 for deep-tech sectors. Several VCs, including Celesta Capital, Accel, Blume Ventures, Premji Invest have created an India Deep Tech Alliance with a USD 1 billion commitment. Like Wang said, it takes ten years. Let’s hope the focus remains unwavering. A couple of 2025 bright spots: Pixxel launched a satellite constellation doing hyperspectral imaging at 5-metre resolution with 150+ bands and ePlane signed an MoU reportedly worth $1B to supply 788 VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) air-ambulances.

The year of stampedes and a case for design thinking: I started conducting design thinking workshops for Social Entrepreneurship students at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Mumbai in 2011. That time, IT services companies in Bangalore said empathy was not relevant to them as their customers are far off in the US and Europe, and agile implementation was more important than rapid prototyping. Things changed during Vishal Sikka’s tenure as Infosys CEO (2014-17). In a short time, Design Thinking became a buzzword. I was a beneficiary and did many workshops across the country. All along, I knew that anything fashionable fades after some time. However, to my surprise, DT didn’t fade away. I continued to do workshops. 2025 convinced me that DT won’t be going away anytime soon. This year, India witnessed 9 stampedes in public places, costing over 100 lives. The year began with two stampedes in January: the Tirupati temple (6) and the Maha Kumbh (30). Then New Delhi railway station (18), Goa temple (6), RCB stadium (11), Jagannath Puri temple (3), Hardwar temple (6), Vijay rally in Karur (41), and finally Andhra temple (9) last month. The chaos and vandalism at the Messi event in Kolkata this month didn’t result in any casualty but 17 people got injured. It shows how poor we are in designing stampede-proof public places and crowd management solutions. I remain committed to studying, teaching, and applying design thinking to solve complex social problems.

Mindfulness research enters toddlerhood, and mental health becomes a fundamental right: Mindfulness traces its roots to Buddha’s teachings. However, secular forms of mindfulness emerged in the late 19^th and early 20^th century in Burma (now Myanmar) from the Theravada tradition and in Japan from the Mahayana-Zen tradition. Given various dimensions of mindfulness, such as religious vs secular, seated vs on-the-go, goal-centric vs journey-centric, group vs individual, therapeutic vs soteriological, it is not surprising that there are several ways to be mindful. Neuroscience of mindfulness as a discipline emerged in 21^st century when the brain imaging techniques became more accessible for the researchers and subjects became available after the adoption of clinical intervention programs such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Goenka’s Vipassana. It is generally believed that the neuroscience of mindfulness is in its infancy. 2025 marks the publication of one of the first major meta-studies on mindfulness. The paper is titled “The mindful brain: A systematic review of the neural correlates of trait mindfulness” by authors from MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and West Chester University, Pennsylvania. It assesses 68 correlational studies across various forms of MRI and EEG. It identified some consistent results and many gaps in understanding. In my opinion, this year marks the neuroscience of mindfulness going from infancy to toddlerhood.

IITs and Kota-like factories have witnessed several student suicides in the past decade. India’s Parliament passed Mental Healthcare Act, 2017, which guarantees the right to access mental healthcare. However, the implementation remained poor. In the July 2025 Sukdeb Saha vs Andhra Pradesh case, the Supreme Court found systemic gaps in how institutions handle student stress and mental health. In the verdict, the Supreme Court declared mental health as an integral part of the constitutional right to life (Article 21) and issued binding guidelines to protect and promote psychological well-being in educational settings. Let’s hope the needle moves.

Founder and CEO Madhav Krishna on three key turning points in the journey of Vahan, India’s largest blue collar recruitment platform

By the time I started my course “Strategic management of technology and innovation” in September at IIM Bangalore, generative AI had come down from the peak of the hype cycle. It had been a couple of months since the MIT Media Lab report was out, highlighting that ninety-five percent of genAI investments are seeing no business returns. I started looking for a concrete use case where genAI is making a difference in India today, and I wasn’t optimistic in my search. That’s when I came across Madhav’s interview on YouTube. Madhav Krishna is the Founder and CEO of Vahan, India’s largest blue-collar worker recruitment platform. Vahan enables over 40,000 placements per month. The Vahan team is proud to have Airtel as a strategic investor, and it was part of the 2019 cohort of the Y-Combinator accelerator program. Through YC, Madhav met Vinod Khosla, and now Khosla Ventures is one of the investors. Through Khosla Ventures, Madhav met Sam Altman, and now OpenAI is a strategic partner.

In this current scale-up phase of Vahan, Madhav must have been very busy. However, he graciously agreed to come and talk to the students in my class (On September 25). Madhav shared three turning points in Vahan’s journey.  Here is a summary:

1. Moving from offering vitamins to painkillers: Madhav started programming at the age of 12, did an MS in AI from Columbia University, worked at E-commerce and Edtech companies for 7-8 years before returning to India with an ambition of making a real impact on society. Vahan was started in 2016 with a voice bot offering for learning to speak English. Anybody with a feature-phone could call Lakshmi, the virtual teaching assistant, and practice speaking English and get feedback. Then, Vahan created verticalized training programs to train the sales force and drivers, etc. They got paid pilots from Uber and FMCG companies. However, pilots didn’t get converted into contracts. That’s when Madhav and team realized that while spoken English is a nice problem to solve for blue-collar workers, the burning problem is finding a job. It is the difference between a vitamin and a painkiller. Vahan decided to go for the painkiller and pivoted to the recruitment space.
   


2. Aligning with the dominant business model: India has 600 million blue-collar workers. 200-250 million are in Agriculture and related areas. And the rest are in construction, logistics, retail, etc. Recruitment of blue-collar workers is a highly unorganized market, and hiring is done mostly by thousands of local agencies, especially in tier-2-3 towns. Vahan was able to repurpose the technology built for skilling towards lead generation. Initial customers started paying on a per-lead basis. However, this business model received pushback from the market. In India, hiring services don’t get paid on a per-lead basis, especially for blue-collar jobs where the churn rate is high. You get paid on a per-hire basis. The Vahan team tried pushing a pay-per-lead model. Lead generation is where they have more control. Moreover, in the pay-per-hire model, payment happens after 30/60 days to rule out the place-and-churn tactics. However, after a year and a half of fighting, Vahan finally embraced the dominant pay-per-hire model. Zomato, their lead customer, agreed to send the recruitment dashboard daily. Initially, not every customer was willing to put effort into preparing and sharing recruitment data in real-time. Vahan guys had to chase them. But over time, the process got automated. Now, Vahan gets live data from almost all customers. Madhav says, “Generally, it is not a good idea to fight a dominant business model, especially in markets like India.”


3. Solving high-value problems in a low-trust society: With the pay-per-hire model, Vahan started scaling. However, they realized that the efficiency of the product was low. From the set of candidates Vahan recommended, only a small number got hired. Given the hiring requirements of these companies, this was puzzling. Vahan decided to probe further. Ultimately, they realized that the root problem was a lack of trust. In India, especially in the blue-collar segment, hiring happens through referrals. It is a very human-driven discovery process, either through friends, family, cousins, etc., or through local recruitment agencies. These are typically solo entrepreneurs with a small team. And they will be on the phone all day making calls. Most high-value expenditure in India, like opening a bank account, buying insurance, a loan, a car, or a home sale, etc., happens through humans, not digitally. In fact, 60-70% of customers of Zerodha, one of the leading stock brokering platforms, are brokers, not retailers. Vahan tried personifying the bots, but that didn’t work. Eventually, they decided to build a platform for recruiters, and that worked. Today, Vahan has a network of 2000 recruiters who use the platform, access demand data, match candidates, and track the progress of the hiring process. Recently, Vahan re-introduced their original offering, a voice-bot, in a new avatar. The bot talks to candidates, asks basic questions, qualifies them, and answers FAQs. It currently supports English and Hindi, and Vahan is planning to extend the support to at least eight more Indian languages and their dialects. This voice-bot has increased recruiters’ productivity. Madhav feels that in low-trust societies like India, it will be human plus AI play for some time. AI will automate the repetitive tasks, but humans will play an important role.

As Vahan scales, it will need to grow its recruitment network and offer more value-added services to recruiters, recruiting agencies, and blue-collar workers. Personally, it was a great learning experience, and I am sure the same was true for students. I wish Madhav and Vahan the very best in their future endeavours.

Remembering Ganesh Prabhu, a friend and collaborator

It has been a year since Ganesh departed. It was as if Ganesh had negotiated the details of the departure time. His course was over, and the grades had been submitted. Ganesh liked to work out details. He would call me to check if I am available on a date ten months later. Initially, I would double-check with him if the year is correct. Slowly, I got used to it. My calendar would have a huge empty space followed by some slots that are blocked for a program with Ganesh. 

Ganesh's detail orientation stands out while talking to his old friends. Utkarsh Majumdar and Jose P. D. are two of them. They were neighbors in the IIM Ahmedabad hostel during FPM days. Jose continued to be his neighbor even at IIMB. Both of them collaborated with Ganesh through executive education programs, some of them lasting multiple decades. Ganesh would have worked out the program details, so it was easy to run those programs, they recall. For Jose, Ganesh was the go-to man to clarify any institute policy or regulation. And Ganesh would approach Utkarsh to check if a particular answer was correct, even though Ganesh had set the exam paper. 

Ganesh and I would meet often in the Staff Canteen, either for breakfast or lunch. For breakfast, he would come on his signature Ather 450. I asked him why he didn't walk from his house; it is such a green campus. He said "Naah" with such conviction, I didn't dare to ask that question again. Once, he seemed excited as we were approaching the canteen. I asked him if there was anything special. Ganesh said, it is Saturday, there will be masala dosa. He was fond of guessing the items during the executive program's special lunches. "There will be mutton biryani," he would declare much before arriving at MDC, "or Malabar fish curry." 

Ganesh would carry a serious face with his thick mustache ninety percent of the time. And, once in a while, he would burst out laughing, mostly at his own joke. I wouldn't have been able to guess that he was the prank master in the Ahmedabad hostel. Apparently, he went walking around dressed like a sardar and many people didn't recognize him. Ganesh was a big fan of Govinda during college days. It is not clear if he got any company for Govinda movies. At least once, he had pulled reluctant Utkarsh into watching one. 

Ganesh, Jose, and Rishikesha T. Krishnan joined IIMB together in 1996. Next term, in early 1997, Rishi and Ganesh offered an open executive program, Creating Successful New Products (CSNP). It was a big hit. The program led the duo to first study the challenges in product development in the Indian industry, and then they focused on the software product development. The study outcome was first published as a set of challenges faced by the Indian industry and later as a set of lessons from six cases in the software industry. Interestingly, many of the six software products studied in the paper twenty-five years ago still exist in some form. For example, Infosys BANCS2000 (now called Finacle), Ramco's Marshal ERP, and even the niche Urdu word processor from Concept Software are still around.  Subsequently, Ganesh ended up leading the CSNP program and ran with it till last year. I started participating as a co-teacher in the program in 2014, and we did one in November 2024; it was our last program together. 

Ganesh told me once that when he joined IIMB, he didn't enjoy teaching. But he liked research. And pretty soon, he got a paper in the Academy of Management Review, one of the most prestigious journals in management literature. This work was done in collaboration with Gerard (Gerry) George, who was at that time at Syracuse University, and the paper explored the role of Developmental Financial Institutions (DFIs) as catalysts of entrepreneurship in emerging economies like India. "What I really loved about Ganesh was his 'self-starter' spirit," recalls Gerry. Ganesh took the initiative to reach out via email (in 1998) when Gerry was an assistant professor to work on a project involving Development Financial Institutions (DFIs). They met at the Academy three years after they started working together! "Now we advise the new generation to network and build relationships before projects, but our relationship was built on getting projects done first, even before we met in person. I haven’t had a coauthor like Ganesh in thirty years! A person who delivered diligently on a terrific collaboration based on trust and competence," remembers Gerry. Looks like he didn't pursue this line of research. But this AMR paper isn't Ganesh's most cited paper; "Social entrepreneurship leadership," published a year earlier (1999), has three times more citations. This was way before social entrepreneurship became fashionable in India.  

By the time my interaction with Ganesh began in 2014-15, his research enthusiasm had come down, and he was enjoying teaching. At least that is what he told me. Ganesh's signature course for PGP was New Product Development. This is where he started using short video cases. In fact, he uploaded his entire NPD course on Vimeo much before the MOOC and IIMBx started. I borrowed some of the video cases from him. When I showed interest in the Zipline drone video, he would tell me how he uses it from timestamps 2 minutes to 9 minutes. If you ask him why, he would have a detailed reasoning ready. He also taught qualitative research for the FPM students for multiple decades. Ganesh was part of the doctoral committees of a couple of dozen students. Some of these relationships might have started from this course on qualitative research. Jaykumar, who had Ganesh in his FPM committee, remembers that his research direction emerged while discussing his qualitative research course paper with Ganesh. 

Ganesh was the placement chair three times. Perhaps this is where he built his intuition on career advice for MBA aspirants. We were discussing non-research writing, and he knew I blogged regularly. Ganesh said he doesn't write blogs. And then he added, "But I answer questions on Quora." And then he sheepishly added, "I have forty-eight thousand followers." I looked at him in disbelief. I find giving career advice very challenging. So, my admiration for Ganesh grew multifold. He was clearly a career influencer. 

Design Thinking took us to places like IIM Visakhapatnam and the Indian Oil Corporation in Delhi. This is when I discovered that Ganesh and I live in two different time zones while being in the same city. Ganesh used to start the two-day program, and I would start from the third session. Participants would ask me questions like, "I am a left-brain person, can I learn design thinking?" I realized that Ganesh had covered left-brain-right-brain stuff earlier. I carried a strong belief that the creative thinking-right-brain and analytical thinking-left-brain classification is a myth created by folk psychology. I attended Ganesh's sessions to understand his perspective. It prompted me to study this topic further and write a blog on it.  

Utkarsh remembers Ganesh as a deals man. He would keep track of who is offering the best deal in the town. I wanted to buy a laptop a few years ago. And Ganesh immediately had the top 3 suggestions ready with trade-offs associated with each of them. He was fond of Ather e-scooters. I used to call him first-day first-show Ather fan. He had 3 Ather scooters. And he had bought some of them on the day of launch. For most people, e-scooters are a recent phenomenon. Ganesh owned e-scooters since 2005. But he used to ride the scooter only inside the campus. Utkarsh asked me if I ever sat with him on his scooter. I hadn't. Apparently, Ganesh never crossed 40km/hr, causing irritation to everybody riding with him and driving around him. Ganesh could talk about the EVs for a long time. So I decided to interview him and uploaded it on YouTube. Even when Ola Electric had a fifty percent market share, Ganesh would tell me, "It will not succeed." He was plugged into the EV owners' network.  When someone asked him for advice on buying an e-scooter, he said, "Buy anything other than Ola." I used to marvel at his intuition.

As I was talking to Ganesh's friends for this article, the most surprising find for me was his passion for Hindustani Classical music. Like Rishi-Utkarsh-Jose, Vidyanand Jha was Ganesh's FPM batchmate at IIM Ahmedabad. But his association with Ganesh goes back even further. They both did an MBA at the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA). Vidyanand remembers they both attending all night classical music concerts, starting at the back row and then slowly moving toward the front as the night proceeded. Vidyanand wrote a poem on Ganesh in his condolence note.  

I had health issues last year. Stomach infections, weight loss, insomnia, etc. It resulted in my withdrawing from a course I was scheduled to teach in the June term. It was the first time for me. Ganesh was my sounding board. We had a program scheduled a couple of months later. I checked with him whether we should cancel that too. He was confident we would do it, and we did. He kept nudging me to take a second opinion. I eventually did, and the second doctor suggested that I didn't need any medication. And that's what I did, and slowly things came back to normalcy. Ganesh had this great gift of helping. We will miss him. May time grant Ganesh’s family the strength to move forward, carrying his presence in quieter ways. 

Acknowledgments:

Appreciate the inputs from Rishi, Vidyanand, Utkarsh, Jose, Jaykumar, and Kajoli. 

The seven-day weekend and Ricardo Semler’s loaded gun

My initial reaction after reading Ricardo Semler’s “The Seven-Day Weekend” (SDW) was disbelief. “How is this possible?” That was twenty years ago. Even today, it feels as though the story came from some other planet. The book created such a deep impression that I ended up leaving my job in 2006 and became self-employed. I have remained so till now and am not likely to change it anytime soon. My consulting and teaching assignments in the last two decades took me to several organizations over three continents. I didn’t see any trace of the workers’ democracy depicted in SDW anywhere. I mentioned SDW in a blog in 2008, and then forgot about it. However, my personal lifestyle became close to SDW: it may involve working on a Sunday, a hike on a Monday, reading a novel on a Tuesday, etc.

A few months ago, I started preparing a presentation for the board of a cooperative hospital in Mumbai. My study took me from a member cooperative to a worker cooperative and then to workers’ democracy, and then I remembered Ricardo Semler and pulled out SDW from the bookshelf. Holding the book in my hand itself created such vibes as if I were meeting an old friend. I created a short case on Semco and discussed it in my class last month as an example of organizational innovation. Most students dismissed it as nice but impractical stuff. What’s so special about a seven-day weekend? Is workers’ democracy as esoteric as it sounds?

After taking over the family business from his father, Ricardo Semler turned São Paulo-based Semco (erstwhile Semler & Company) into an on-the-job democracy by relinquishing control and letting everyone question the existing rules. While questioning dress code, work timings, and the necessity to work from office may not sound like such a big deal today, letting employees decide their boss, salaries, new products, and so-called strategic decisions such as acquisitions and factory closures looks surprising even today. Ricardo gets called only when needed. That is why he spends time feeding the ducks in a pond on a Monday.

Ricardo defines Semco more by what it is not than what it is. “Semco has no official structure. It has no organizational chart. There’s no business plan or company strategy – no two-year or five-year plan, no goal or mission statement, no long-term budget. The company often does not have a fixed CEO. There are no vice presidents or chief officers for information technology or operations. There’s no human resources department. There are no career plans or job descriptions. No one approves reports or expense accounts. Supervision or monitoring of workers is rare indeed. Most importantly, success is not measured only in profit and growth.” Despite this amoebic structure, democratic control, and the Brazilian economy’s rollercoaster ride, Semco grew much better than its peers. When SDW was published in 2003, Semco businesses operated in areas such as marine pumps and industrial mixers, cooling towers for commercial properties, property management for commercial customers and hospitals, airports, hotels, and huge factories, environmental site remediation, risk management, incubation of hitech ventures, outsourcing of HR, and inventory control. Most companies are not publicly listed.

Dissent is the bedrock of Ricardo’s world. As an extreme example, he tells us the story of Marly dos Reise Leite during a period when she had grown cantankerous and a pain in the neck for everyone around her. She complained constantly about her situation and quickly got into personal fights with her director of operations at Semco Johnson Controls. He could have easily fired her, but that would have meant a lot of explaining to the employees. Finally, even her colleagues began to find her disruptive. While there was pressure to fire her, the leadership felt, “If she wants to quit, that’s up to her, but we can’t fire her for dissent.” So, they did what they always did when there was dissent: nothing. After a few job changes within Semco businesses, Marly eventually settled down. Her complaining subsided and eventually stopped. In fact, she recommended Semco to her 23-year-old daughter, who joined ERM, another Semco business. “To date, I don’t know what changed in her,” Ricardo admits.

Ricardo explains the situation using a loaded gun analogy, “The system at Semco does not allow me to impose my will on the company, even if I wanted to. Sure, I’m the main shareholder, so I always have a loaded gun in a drawer and the right to fire it. Worker self-management can’t stop me. But I know that there is only one bullet in that gun, and if I fire it off in a fit of pique, I’ll get one shot. One shot at overriding a popular decision, after which I’ll be disarmed. I’ll have lost everything I have worked for. People will know that democracy at Semco was fleeting, insincere, and unreliable. That’s too high a price to pay.”

Transparency is the oxygen of democracy. At Semco, shop floor workers, machinists, clerks, and cleaning people get invited to the all-hands meeting held once a month. If cleaning staff are to make informed voting decisions and raise concerns, they need to understand the financials. Semco went at length to simplify the books and got the simplified format validated by Walter Barelli, who at that time led the Inter-union department of study of economics and statistics. Based on the simplified format, an instruction guide with cartoons was prepared. The union at Semco conducted training sessions based on the cartoon booklet. And soon the quality of interactions improved during the all-hands meetings.

The most critical test of self-management came in the early 1990s when the Brazilian government enacted several emergency plans that wreaked havoc on the economy. Semco lost many contracts and couldn’t meet payroll for two consecutive months. Banks failed, and times were desperate. Workers gathered at company meetings in the cafeteria. Many took turns at a microphone for long, arguing over the fate of Semco – the same cafeteria where many had collectively interviewed their CEO, and machine tool operators had shouted technical questions to gauge their future boss’s knowledge.

They tried everything they could think of to avert layoffs and closures – they’d left machines to sell spare parts on the road, had severed contracts with maintenance, cleaning, and even security providers to take those jobs on themselves, they’d driven company trucks in shifts, and had taken turns doing kitchen duty. The employee committee studied the numbers carefully and concluded that there was just enough money left in the till for a generous severance package. The workers in the cafeteria voted. They shut down the factory. Two hundred souls lost their jobs. They elected to distribute the remaining cash between them.  Throughout this process, Ricardo opposed closing the plant. But in the end, workers’ self-interest won – they chose a course of action that they knew best for themselves. “Employees must be reassured that self-interest is their foremost priority, one they must take care not to replace with company or other interests,” says Ricardo in SDW.

While studying management of innovation, I came across workers’ democracy employed while managing the production process. For example, Toyota’s idea management system enables 95% of the shop-floor workers to contribute and implement over two million ideas every year. Through the TQM movement, this kaizen process was deployed in India, especially in the manufacturing sector. In the Internet era, organizations ' Employee Stock Option Plan (ESOP) is common, and some organizations also have the twenty percent rule, or the right to experiment, for example, at 3M, Google, etc. However, idea management systems, ESOPs, or the right to experiment don’t translate into employee participation in making key decisions. Such decisions are made by a small team in leadership positions behind closed doors. Of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Perhaps I have not looked hard enough. So, I went looking for some examples exhibiting workplace democracy.

I realized a better place to look for is worker cooperatives. Cooperatives come in different flavours – worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, producer (or farmer) cooperatives, etc. India has had a long history of cooperatives, mostly of consumer (or user or member) type and producer type. A couple of thousand cooperative banks in India belong to the consumer cooperative category, while a couple of lakh village dairy cooperatives would belong to the producer type. The hospital I visited earlier this year is a consumer cooperative, and its staff had almost no say in its operations or strategy. The Amul brand is owned by Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), the most successful dairy cooperative in India, with over 3.6 million milk producers as co-owners.

Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) is a trade union that governs a network of cooperatives, including worker, consumer, and producer types across several states in India. SEWA has nearly two million workers as members which are divided into (a) home-based workers, (b) vendors/hawkers, (c) manual labourers, and (d) service providers/producers. SEWA cooperatives are likely to be worker-centric and involve a lot of community education programs.

Outside India, Spain, Italy, and France each have 20, 10, and 3 thousand employee-owned firms.  Industrial Commons movement (Molly Hemstreet’s TED talk in April 2025) exhibits a growing interest in creating employee-owned community-centric firms in the US. Uruguay has over 700 worker cooperatives. In short, workers’ democracy exists across the world in pockets as a feeble movement.

Apart from cooperatives, there are noteworthy self-managed organizations as well. Dutch home care organization Buurtzorg, with 14,000 employees, consists of over 900 self-managed teams with nurse autonomy. Buurtzorg has no middle management. Haier, the world’s number one home appliance player, with 70,000 people, recently broke its organizational structure into over 4000 self-organizing micro-businesses. For the past twenty years, they have been developing a model known as RenDanHeYi. Haier CEO Zhang Ruimin says, “With the RenDanHeYi model, we move away from being something like an empire (with *the traditional closed pyramid*) to be more like a rainforest (with *an open networked platform*). Every empire will eventually collapse. A rainforest, on the other hand, can be sustained.”

Workplace democracy, like Semco, is certainly not mainstream. But it is not as uncommon as it sounds. And, Ricardo may be right. You can’t have both: the joy of a seven-day weekend and the luxury of firing a loaded gun. When you are under pressure to deliver quarter-on-quarter results, it is extremely difficult to resist the temptation of the loaded gun. It is as if you are constantly under a line of fire, and you pass on the pressure by executing the “my way or highway” dictum. This behaviour gets extended in the family setting as well. Seven-day weekenders remain a minority. At least for now.

Sources:

1. Ricardo Semler, “The seven-day weekend: A better to work in the 21^st century,” Arrow Books, 2003
2. Dr. Vrajlal Sapovadia and Akash Patel, “What works for workers’ cooperatives? An empirical research on success and failures of Indian Workers’ Cooperatives”, Jan 2013. Sapovadia, Vrajlal K., and Patel, Akash, What Works for Workers' Cooperatives? An Empirical Research on Success & Failure of Indian Workers' Cooperatives (January 15, 2013). Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2214563
3. Fathi Fakhfakh, Nathalie Magne, Thiabult Mirabel, Virginie Perotin, “Employee-owned firms in France,” Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership, July 19, 2023
4. Frank Martela and Sharda Nandram, “Buurtzorg: scaling up an organization with hundreds of self‑managing teams but no middle managers,” Journal of Organization Design, January 2025.

At 91, dad asks, “Why isn’t anybody protesting?”

Baba turned 91 last week. I went to Mumbai from Bangalore to wish him and to perform our quarterly ritual of taking both to the family physician. This time dad fared better than mom. Her blockages in leg arteries are worsening, making it difficult for her to sleep. However, I am accustomed to situations where we ask, “How will they manage by themselves?” And yet they do, valuing their independence more than anything else.

Baba doesn’t do much these days. He is mostly on his bed, occasionally getting up to eat and visit the toilet. He ventures out once in a few months for a haircut, or to visit the doctor or his brother, or sister. He is still addicted to the newspaper, though – Loksatta if he is in Mumbai and The Hindu if he is in Bangalore with us. He also reads two magazines with a socialist leaning – Sadhana and Maha Anubhav. After he is done with reading the news, he has asked me many times, “Why is nobody protesting?” I don’t know the answer. I can only ask, “Why am I not protesting?”

Baba tells me that he has seen the rise of fascism in India since the 60s, before I was born. He worked at the Indian Cotton Mills Federation, perhaps the NASSCOM of textile industry, influencing the policy makers on behalf of the industry. He feels that the murder of Krishna Desai, a Communist Party leader, the then MLA, and a leader of mill workers’ union in 1970 was a turning point in the rise of fascism in Maharashtra. Three Shiv Sena party members were convicted and spent seven years in prison. Baba feels that a few textile oligarchs funded the assassination, and the then Congress Chief Minister Vasantrao Naik made money in the process. Barely three weeks after Desai’s death, Shiva Sena founder Bal Thackeray has said, “We must not miss a single opportunity to massacre communists wherever we find them."¹

The rise of fascism had its reflection in society. Vijay Tendulkar wrote the now-famous play “Ghashiram Kotwal” (1972) on the corrupt police chief of Pune serving the corrupt chief secretary Nana Phadanavis during the Peshwa dynasty in the 18^th century. I watched Ghashiram and read George Orwell’s Ninteen Eighty-Four while in school. Bombay gang wars also had their share of representation in the newspapers. I was in the 6^th grade when Dawood Ibrahim’s brother Shabir Kaskar was killed by Manya Surve at a petrol pump near our flat in Prabhadevi in 1981. Next year, Surve was killed in a police encounter, also remembered as Bombay’s first encounter killing. It provided masala to two Bollywood films – Amitabh starrer Agneepath and Shootout at Wadala. One of my school classmates joined the Rama Naik gang and one became a police inspector. I was too shy, skinny, and underweight to go towards either of the paths. However, I became aware of the brutal power of “the system,” which included mafia as a core element and the doctrine of “winning at any cost”. I was not convinced that protests could make a dent in such a powerful system.

As I flew from Buffalo, New York, to Bombay (now Mumbai) via perhaps Heathrow in December 1992, I watched the demolition of Babri Masjid telecast all over. I didn’t know that it would go down in history as the event that broke the secular backbone of India. When I landed in Bombay, the city was standstill and still burning. Riots that followed within a month changed the city forever. A few years later, our friend Iqbal narrated to us in Buffalo how his family literally ran from their house in Worli, not too far from our place.

But the event that saddened Baba the most was the assassination of Narendra Dabholkar in 2013. Our last name sake, he was a social activist, rationalist, and writer involved in the eradication of superstition in Maharashtra. Baba could visualize then how “the system” is going to capture India. Dabholkar’s assassination would be followed by Pansare (2015), Kalburgi (2015), and Gauri Lankesh (2017). CBI called these murders “a pre-planned act of terror”. Last year, eleven years later, two shooters got life imprisonment while the masterminds remain at large. People protested for some time and then stopped. I didn’t join any protests, didn’t even consider it. Why not? What were my biases?

I strongly felt that to navigate a crazy system, brute force doesn’t work. Shouting out can be detrimental. It is a miracle that Julian Assange survived five years in jail. What appealed to me the most is what I wrote about more than a decade ago in the backdrop of Anna Hazare-Kiran Bedi protests – the wisdom from “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest” – the first step is to be invisible. This is what Rana Ayyub did for eight months, God only knows how, before she could write Gujrat Files. And, unfortunately, this is what Hemant Karkare, the then head of Mumbai Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) couldn’t do as he began exposing the perpetrators of 2008 Malgaon bomb blasts. He was crushed by “the system” on the same day as 26/11 attacks and in a sophisticated manner, putting the blame on Pakistani terrorists².

My lack of enthusiasm for protests has another side. Protests assume (mostly, not always) that the world is “fixable”, like how we fix a car or a broken hip bone. What if it is more like cloud-fixing as opposed to clock-fixing? Mindfulness suggests that “fixing” the world can be a dangerous addiction. It is just an expression of the innate desire to mould the world to feel secure in an inherently insecure world. Sustained narrative to fix the world calcifies the belief that the world exists independent of me. What if it is not? If everything is indeed interconnected, and hence Sunya as Nagarjuna suggests, then seeing the sunyata (emptiness) must be primary. Without this insight, I carry hatred/anger against the bad world, sometimes deeply buried within. The society appears to be like a plumbing system to be fixed when things don’t flow in a desired way. And, insight can’t be engineered, either by protests or by force or by meditation, at least not yet.

My lack of belief in the power of protests has begun to shift recently. Protests against the ongoing wars, the proxy-war against Russia and the Israel-Palestine war looked pale initially and easily suppressible. However, in the past year or so the power of protests has surprised me. I also found the work done by Whitney Webb (One nation under blackmail vol 1 & 2), Lina Khan (Amazon’s antitrust paradox), and Francesca Albanese (From economy of occupation to economy of genocide) totally impressive in exposing the nexus between oligarchs, politicians, intelligence, and organized crime. I also admire the work of Indian YouTubers like Shyam Meera Singh, Kavya Karnatac, Mohak Mangal, Kunal Kamra, and Sheeba Fehmi in raising awareness on various aspects of the Deep State in India.

In March 1993, a few months after the Babri debacle, Vijay Tendulkar wrote a short fictional piece on Ghashiram Kotwal. In his dream, while traveling in Deccan Queen, Tendulkar meets Ghashiram in jeans and T-shirt. Ghashiram shows him his diary which, like Epstein’s black book, contains the names of top politicians and industrialists in India and beyond and tells him, “The entire democracy in this country is standing on the black money, top class weapons, and unpatriotic people like me. The Ghashiram in your play is running the country.” Two decades later Ghashiram’s clout has grown stronger. In 2025, India is ranked 151^st out of 180 countries in World press freedom index ranking.

Sources:

1.  “Nativism in a metropolis: The Shiv Sena in Bombay”, Dipankar Gupta, Manohar, 1982, pg 159.

2. "Who killed Karkare? The real face of terrorism in India," S. M. Mushrif, Former I.G. Police, Maharashtra, Pharos Media, 2023  

Image source: oneindia.com

Assessing journey-centric mindfulness against McMindfulness criticism

 

I have been teaching Journey-centric mindfulness (JCM) over the past decade. My book “Mindfulness: connecting with the real you” was published half a decade ago in 2019. Yesterday I conducted a mindfulness workshop at home for free, as I have done for the past seven years. Last month, I wrote my key takeaways from Ronald Purser’s critique, “McMindfuless: How mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality”. How does journey-centric mindfulness (JCM) fare when assessed through the lens of McMindfulness criticism? That is what I will explore in this article. For a more detailed treatment of this assessment, please refer to our paper, “A critical review of journey-centric mindfulness” which was presented at the International Research Conference on Mindfulness at IIM Bodh Gaya last year (IRCM-2024).

Journey-centric mindfulness: JCM is a journey (process) of learning to see clearly despite biased thinking anytime anywhere (even on the go). JCM is a lifelong journey without any destination. What is it that we are learning to see clearly? Primarily, three characteristics of existence (Pali: tilakkhanā, Sanskrit: trilakśanā): repetitive wasteful thinking (dukkha), impermanence (Pali: anicca, Sanskrit: anitya), and non-independence of self (Pali: anatta, Sanskrit: anatma). JCM is a secular form of mindfulness. It does not prescribe any belief system or practice as mandatory.

Now, let’s assess JCM McMindfulness lens, especially the three points from the criticism as presented in my earlier article.

Crisis is in the head: Purser is saying that large corporations like Google, Meta, (erstwhile) Twitter, and Apple are manipulating our attention. In his words, “Mindfulness has, like positive psychology, and the broader happiness industry, depoliticized and privatized stress. If we are unhappy about being unemployed, losing our health insurance, and seeing our children incur massive debt through college loan, it is our responsibility to learn to be more mindful.” JCM suggests that stress is a side-effect of repetitive, compulsive thinking that is largely wasteful. As we learn to see clearly the movement of thought, its wasteful nature, and its gullibility to social media, the movement of thought slows down. As a result, one may reduce one’s dependence on social media. JCM is primarily about seeing, not doing. JCM doesn’t say anything about what one should or should not do. In fact, it assumes “clarity is action”. One can be a social activist, a corporate executive, or a monk and be on a journey of learning to see clearly. JCM suggests that an action when one sees clearly is likely to be more appropriate than an action when one’s perception is distorted. Of course, nothing is guaranteed.

Tool for self-improvement: JCM assumes that mind is like weather - highly non-linear and deeply hierarchical. The weather analogy is borrowed from a neuroscientist Prof. Karl Friston of University College London¹. A small change can make a big difference. A small SMS can change the state of mind from peaceful to raging anger in a short time. Do we talk about a tool for weather improvement? No. Similarly, JCM assumes that self-improvement is a meaningless concept as far as the mind is concerned. Thus, doing mindfulness in order to reach a peaceful or blissful state is meaningless. Then why should we learn to see clearly?  To appreciate this, let’s ask - Why do we keep the windshield of our car clean? Is it to reach a destination? Or without a clean windshield, it is difficult to make appropriate decisions. Since JCM doesn’t subscribe to self-improvement, this aspect of McMindfulness criticism is not relevant to JCM.

Secular approach without wisdom: JCM is a secular approach. However, it is influenced by and borrows from Buddhist Vipassana as well as Nagarjuna’s Sunyata. The wisdom aspect is at the heart of JCM. Learning to see impermanence AND interconnectedness is emphasized. Anicca and anatta are crucial. Learning to see that absolute necessities are a meaningless concept is important. And the self is nothing but a collection of absolute necessities – body ownership, possessions, name, fame ownership, etc. Each has a role in life. But nothing is permanent, and nothing is context-independent. These insights don’t come easily, and even when they come, they are not easy to digest. Seeing self-deception clearly can make one uncomfortable or even angry. It may result in quitting the job. It can also make one peaceful. Since learning to see impermanence and Sunyata is at the heart of JCM, it is more like a secular approach with wisdom.

Since JCM doesn’t have a destination such as a stress-free life, higher productivity, or more profit, it is not sold to corporations. I do conduct some sessions as part of IIM Bangalore’s executive education program occasionally (twice this year so far).

In short, JCM stands tall when reviewed through the lens of McMindfulness criticism. It may not appeal to many, especially corporates, because it doesn’t promise anything. However, the shallowness of one’s life may motivate people to explore mindfulness. And, JCM can be practiced by grabbing moments in one’s busy schedule, even on the go. Why not give it a shot?

Notes:

1.       Mind is like weather: This analogy is explored by Prof. Karl Friston in the interview “Karl Friston: Neuroscience and the Free Energy Principle | Lex Fridman podcast #99” (39:15). Friston compares the attributes common between brain and weather – deeply structured, very non-linear, and rests upon non-equilibrium steady-state dynamics.