The Discipline of Change

Change is the new greed.

About a year ago, greed was good with everyone. Then comes disaster and the only one who seems to have done alright in the past twelve months is Mr. Obama.

And what is Mr. Obama all about? Change of course. And hey presto, change is the new greed.

When greed was good money was, so to speak, the currency.

Money, get away.
Get a good job with good pay and you're okay.
Money, it's a gas.
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
New car, caviar, four star daydream,
Think I'll buy me a football team.

Money, get back.
I'm all right Jack keep your hands off of my stack.
Money, it's a hit.
Don't give me that do goody good bullshit.
I'm in the high-fidelity first class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear jet.
(excerpt from Money a number on the album Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd)

Now that change is the new mantra, the currency is earnestness. It is quite heartening how all our politicians this side of forty are suddenly in their mind harbingers of change.

So don’t be surprised as we have change all around us in a couple of months. Quite literally that is. On ubiquitous posters, wall paintings, TV, radio and press ads.

All of it funded, of course, by the abundant harvest of old greed even though the change is the new greed.

And change as the theme of the season will soon fall upon that other field, besides politics and advertising, that so depends on platitudes: management consultants and experts. What would you except after Satyam?

I am all for change. Really I am.

What makes me a cynical about the current brouhaha about change is that it is the page three types and the same old scoundrels in our country who are embracing it. This trivializes the theme and I am worried that this will delay the taking up this theme seriously by people who can make change happen.

Change is not an idea or even an objective. Change is a discipline.

When change is only used an empty slogan or a new peg to hang the same old platitudes on, it will swallow its users.

An embracing of real change over the past few decades has led to the China success story. In contrast the theme of change in Russia after the fall of communism has in a large measure been rhetorical and the negative results are clear.

Real change is a hard taskmaster. China has mounted the tiger of change (any allusion to Mr.Raju’s infamous tiger is unintentional) and if China gets off before the tiger is satiated it will be definitely be clawed badly if not eaten.

Change is the deepest theme of the evanescent world of Maya. Change is the dance of Shiva.

The makers of change start at the roots.

Mr. Obama started his campaign for change at the very roots of the political process. The roots of power in politics lay in your grass roots support.

There was a time when this support was built from where it should naturally be built. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the movement for India’s Independence are cases in point.

However most of current politics had got lazy, perhaps as most of current society.

This lead to politicians banked on inheriting the grass-root support of entrenched political parties and getting funds from entrenched special interest. The politics of the stagnant status quo naturally followed.

Mr. Obama started from the grass-roots. He and his team sweated in building a grass-roots army of volunteer neighbourhood to neighbourhood. Bringing into the political process individuals who otherwise would have remained clear of.

Mr. Obama and his team built most of his funding dollar by dollar through people donating in the tens of dollars.

There were of course many who donated in the thousands and even millions of dollars to Mr. Obama’s campaign.

But the strength of the ready army of small donors with no entrenched interest but that of change brought a better life for the many counterbalances and keeps in check the special interests of those who donated in the thousands and the millions.

This counterbalance is what gives Mr Obama and his administration the strength to stand up to the special interest of the status quo as he goes about delivering change.

But this is not the only reason why I back Mr. Obama to deliver on his promise of change. Not fully perhaps but substantially. It is because he and his team keep on, according to reports, hoeing the discipline of change after Nov. 4th 2008.

Consider this excerpt from an article by Joe Klein in Time titled “Barack Obama Promises New Destiny. Work Begins Today” about how Mr. Obama and his team set about the task of delivering change where the rubber meets the road:

Quietly, the Obama transition team reviewed every government agency "to find out which specific programs were working and which weren't." It was a terrifyingly brisk and comprehensive process, especially compared with the dust storm produced by the last Democratic President, Bill Clinton, during his chaotic transition period. "During Clinton's transition, you had all these people writing ad hoc papers about what to do at this agency or how to deal with that policy, but that was an extension of how Clinton's mind works," says one of the many Obama aides who is a veteran of the Clinton Administration. "Clinton had this great horizontal intelligence. He could pull an idea from a meeting he had in northern Italy and apply it to spreading broadband service through Iowa. It was amazing but not exactly efficient. Obama is more vertical. He pushes the process along, streamlines it. We had one 25-to-50-page policy paper for every agency."

The discipline of change is not just about the willingness to go the root and work long and tirelessly to make change happen root and branch.

It is also about nurturing the integrity that enables one to choose the steep and thorny route over the easy short-cut just because that way is right. Consider this excerpt from the same Joe Klein article:

In the midst of the transition, President Obama was faced with a telling policy choice: whether to declare a temporary sales-tax holiday. His economic advisers loved the idea. It would provide immediate consumer stimulus, a direct jolt that might unclog the commercial arteries. The money could be easily passed from the Federal Government to the states, which administer sales taxes. But Obama resisted and finally rejected the idea. "He thought it would provide a temporary benefit, that it had no substantial or lasting policy impact," a senior transition adviser told me. "I think he was remembering the campaign, when Hillary and McCain favored the gas-tax holiday, which he thought was frivolous, and he opposed it for that very reason — if we're going to spend money, let's spend it on investments that will make us stronger in the future."

Will Indian politics find its Obama?

I believe we will find ours within the next decade. I also believe it is not someone we heard of today in the national press.

He is perhaps in politics already. Perhaps a grass-roots worker of one of our main political party dreaming the dream that will bring change to India’s politics.

I also believe that an Obama is waiting to happen to the world of business.

As the old verities fall in the world of capitalism, the new paradigm is not going to come from the very experts who failed us in the first place.

It is going to come from a group of outsiders who will revisit global business from the roots up.

When that will happen it will be another manifestation of the discipline of change.

Breathe, breathe in the air.
Don't be afraid to care.
Leave but don't leave me.
Look around and choose your own ground.

Long you live and high you fly
And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be.

(excerpt from the song Breathe from the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon)