3 posts tagged “poverty”

Since India has been extremely kind to me—the people here are amazing—I owe it to this nation to bust a few stereotypes.
   First, the food. It is excellent and in two days I have had no problems with my tummy. ‘Delhi belly’ is a cruel stereotype that I was given by some friends prior to my departure, though I knew instinctively it was cobblers. The same rule applies here as everywhere else: if you are careful about what you stick in your mouth, you are fine. People do know that in rural areas things can be tougher. Nevertheless, I can make this conclusion: Indian food is fab and way better than expat Indian restaurants.
   Secondly, this is certainly not a backward country, and anyone who has read books such as The World Is Flat would know that. Here I am, surfing on wifi, and at speeds and with connectivity better than what I might find in other parts of the world, and that includes New Zealand. There is a rich–poor gap and that does mean some poverty but that also generates invention. I saw booksellers yesterday with used books alongside new ones; we should be copying some of the recycling efforts that Indians undertake every day.
   If your impression of an Indian car park is old colonial hand-me-downs, think again: the Daewoo Lacetti (Chevrolet Optra) is newer than what many countries sell, including Australia and New Zealand:

Chevrolet Optra facelift

Anita Roddick was an inspirational lady. Here are some quotations from her last interview in The Daily Telegraph.

On the US wealth divide
It’s a society that is absolutely separate, it’s a gated community living next door to a society that is impoverished, a gated community living next to ghetto—you see that all the time and it will happen here—the two poles of our society.
   Everything is here for the wealthy. You can hide your money away in tax havens, you can find ways of making more money.

The global credit crunch in the US
It's like that fresh flesh: I want it now, you know I can’t work for it, I can’t be an apprentice, I can’t look up to it. And people are living longer. The elderly don’t want kids in their home. Everybody’s staying at home and there’s not a work ethic that I’m seeing. There’s got to be more creative ways of finding jobs and getting skilled or finding jobs that are worthwhile and you don't have to be skilled for.

B-school
This notion that to be in business you've got to go to a business school: it’s crap. Because business schools only shape you to be a very efficient person working in a very traditional system—but the most exciting things are what’s being done untraditionally.

L’Oréal and the Body Shop
I’m thrilled with it, absolutely bloody thrilled with it. I think they’re going to do amazing things. I think they’ll be able to—with the research companies that they’ve bought—not the product companies—of completely eliminating animal testing in the future. It will not be part of the industry. Because they're doing cell culture testing—they’re making their own cells and their own skin. Every ingredient, every food product will be tested.
   For me it’s been a wonderful gift because a company that is a strong understanding brand bought it. The alternative was that a group of financiers would come in and asset strip it—they wouldn't give a toss for anything.

Outsourcing
We’re not a manufacturing country anymore. But I think you get people to understand the story behind what they buy—to make that one jump and say what's the real cost of something, if everybody got another 25pc for the garment they made then you wouldn’t get this big social dilemma.
   I remember going to a sweatshop area in Nicaragua, and it was quite a modern factory but there was no place to eat or have half an hour off. And the women were walking some 3 miles to work every day. And I walked back with them, and they were living in cardboard huts. One woman said to me, whatever you do tell them all that we want to do is move from slavery to poverty. They were forced to take contraceptive pills, they were thrown out if they had a grey hair and this is nothing compared to what goes on in Bangladesh.

The futility of “marketing”
We never had a marketing department for 20 odd years. Every year we were getting awards for our marketing, and we didn’t know what it was. The minute we brought in marketing as a traditional thinking—cover your trucks with messages, environment human rights etc, went out the door.
   We had an enormous amount of humour. I remember on Mother’s Day we had a message saying ‘God couldn't be everywhere so he created mothers’. We were doing really quirky things that got people engaged.

   There’s more on Dame Anita Roddick, DBE today in Lucire, along with a related op-ed from yours truly about her leadership.