Nonprofit Leaders and Listening, co-authored with Mary Vradelis, Great Lakes Herald, September 2012, Vol. 6 Issue 2. Based on several case-studies, this article shows how nonprofit leaders use listening as an essential leadership skill to extend their influence and legislative power, in building consensus amongst their donors, political powers, constituents, volunteers and other stake holders. Business leaders can learn to extend their executive powers by adopting these listening skills as part of their communication repertoire.
Financing Rural Telemedicine: Bringing Healthcare to the Underserved, co-authored with former student Alanna Young, Great Lakes Herald, March 2011, Vol. 5 Issue 1. Remote rural areas in Pakistan, India, Uganda and Mozambique are getting connected to doctors in metropolitan cities by equipping midwives with mobile telephones and basic healthcare education provided by telemedicine service provides. Telemedicine programs have helped African governments to allocate scarce healthcare resources based on evidence of disease incidents from different regions.
Work-in-Progress
Jugaad: Creative Improvisation with Indian Ingenuity for Fast and Frugal Innovation
Using empirical examples of creative improvisation with Indian ingenuity, this article argues that jugaad cannot be defined because if it is defined it is no longer jugaad. However, there are key features by which anyone can be trained to recognize jugaad. The three Cs that can help identify jugaad in practice are Creativity, Context, Constraints, as it is an ingenuity based approach to creative problem solving in specific contexts with specific constraints. Much like Indian classical music, in which there are set ragas/melodies but each performer is expected to improvise and bring their own unique flavor to the same melody, jugaad too is recognizable in practice, but unique to the context and constraints for the creative solutions it offers.
The Double Edged Sword Of Jugaad
The developed countries are eager to learn and adopt the fast and frugal Indian creative improvisation process of innovation, while in India, the policy makers are being advised by the academics to move away from Jugaad to adopt more systemic approaches, like the developed countries, to speed up innovation. These opposing prescriptions come from partial understanding on both sides. Jugaad can be good and bad, depending on how it is practiced. The negatives of jugaad way of innovation is that it is hard to replicate, scale-up, and if often a band-aid temporary solution to the problem, leaving quality and safety challenges in the ad-hoc solutions provided by it. The positives of jugaad are that it is creative, it is fast and frugal and being focused on problem solving, it gets the job done. Recognizing and designing with this holistic approach can make jugaad a more useful practice on both sides of the globe.
Shivganga: Water Harvesting by the Tribals in Jhabua - co-authored with N Bhullar
Halma is a traditional tribal practice of asking the community to help solve a problem that an individual is unable to solve by themselves. When the water-shortages in their tribal belt caused even the subsistence agriculture a challenge, the tribals found a solution to their water problem with the Halma declared by Shivganga's Maheshji. They were mobilized into using their traditional practices of digging ponds and water-catchment ditches to give the gift of a 'green scarf for mother earth' which gradually led to a culture of harvesting rainwater in over 600 villages. Improvements in the water-table are the poor tribals gift to the city-dwellers who know how to use the water but have no skills to harvest it. Building on the basic human quality of altruism and promoting it through selfless service, the poor are enriching the lives of those who are economically better off than them.
Financing Rural Telemedicine: Bringing Healthcare to the Underserved, co-authored with former student Alanna Young, Great Lakes Herald, March 2011, Vol. 5 Issue 1. Remote rural areas in Pakistan, India, Uganda and Mozambique are getting connected to doctors in metropolitan cities by equipping midwives with mobile telephones and basic healthcare education provided by telemedicine service provides. Telemedicine programs have helped African governments to allocate scarce healthcare resources based on evidence of disease incidents from different regions.
Work-in-Progress
Jugaad: Creative Improvisation with Indian Ingenuity for Fast and Frugal Innovation
Using empirical examples of creative improvisation with Indian ingenuity, this article argues that jugaad cannot be defined because if it is defined it is no longer jugaad. However, there are key features by which anyone can be trained to recognize jugaad. The three Cs that can help identify jugaad in practice are Creativity, Context, Constraints, as it is an ingenuity based approach to creative problem solving in specific contexts with specific constraints. Much like Indian classical music, in which there are set ragas/melodies but each performer is expected to improvise and bring their own unique flavor to the same melody, jugaad too is recognizable in practice, but unique to the context and constraints for the creative solutions it offers.
The Double Edged Sword Of Jugaad
The developed countries are eager to learn and adopt the fast and frugal Indian creative improvisation process of innovation, while in India, the policy makers are being advised by the academics to move away from Jugaad to adopt more systemic approaches, like the developed countries, to speed up innovation. These opposing prescriptions come from partial understanding on both sides. Jugaad can be good and bad, depending on how it is practiced. The negatives of jugaad way of innovation is that it is hard to replicate, scale-up, and if often a band-aid temporary solution to the problem, leaving quality and safety challenges in the ad-hoc solutions provided by it. The positives of jugaad are that it is creative, it is fast and frugal and being focused on problem solving, it gets the job done. Recognizing and designing with this holistic approach can make jugaad a more useful practice on both sides of the globe.
Shivganga: Water Harvesting by the Tribals in Jhabua - co-authored with N Bhullar
Halma is a traditional tribal practice of asking the community to help solve a problem that an individual is unable to solve by themselves. When the water-shortages in their tribal belt caused even the subsistence agriculture a challenge, the tribals found a solution to their water problem with the Halma declared by Shivganga's Maheshji. They were mobilized into using their traditional practices of digging ponds and water-catchment ditches to give the gift of a 'green scarf for mother earth' which gradually led to a culture of harvesting rainwater in over 600 villages. Improvements in the water-table are the poor tribals gift to the city-dwellers who know how to use the water but have no skills to harvest it. Building on the basic human quality of altruism and promoting it through selfless service, the poor are enriching the lives of those who are economically better off than them.