A buzzing room of business students and professionals of all ages fell silent as a deep voice broke into a chant. Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev the keynote speaker for the "Tuck India Business Conference: Ideas From India" recited a traditional invocation before starting his speech on business management, which focused on the incorporation of Indian spirituality in personal success.
The conference a day-long event which took place at the Tuck School of Business on Friday featured three panels, including "Emerging Innovations in Healthcare Delivery," "Creating Value at the Base of the Pyramid" and "Bringing Indian Innovations to the World," in addition to Jaggi Vasudev's inaugural address.
"If you want success, you have two instruments at your disposal your body and your mind," Jaggi Vasudev said. "If you cannot manage your mind, how can you manage 1,000 people around you?"
Modern management is often misconceived as a compulsion to manage the external environment, Jaggi Vasudev said. Success is commonly defined as one's ability to "manage the outside," yet over the last 100 years the material comforts of this world have only increased as personal "well-being" has ebbed, according to Jaggi Vasudev. The fundamental goal of any business is human well-being, although the dominant international economic practices only allow very few people to be successful, he said.
The market economy currently governs all human behavior in an irreversible way, Jaggi Vasudev said.
Over the course of history, religious leaders lost their authority to military leaders, whose leadership declined over the past 70 to 90 years and transitioned to the current political leadership, Jaggi Vasudev said. Over the next 25 to 50 years, power will be transferred to economic and business leaders, according to Jaggi Vasudev.
Atul Sharma Tu'11, the conference co-chair, said the purpose of the conference was to bring "awareness about challenges and opportunities of emerging market" and to show audience members how the lower-cost solutions in these markets pertain to more developed countries, such as those in North America.
The first panel, which discussed emerging innovations in health care delivery, examined the current Indian health care model by concentrating on the case study of low-cost delivery for cataract surgery. In this model, doctors focus on performing the final surgery while "non-technical" workers, such as high school graduates, are trained to provide people with "lower levels" of health care advice, Sharma said.
"About 60 percent of the surgeries are done at a lower, subsidized cost of about $10 while the other 40 percent are the people from the public who pay the regular surgery cost," Sharma said. "They make a lot of margins on the 40 percent and the other 60 percent they deliver at cost."
Tuck marketing professor Praveen Kopalle the faculty advisor for the conference said India's ability to deliver health care on such a large scale and with such cost efficiency must be studied because it may lead to improvements in health care reform in the United States. Kopalle pointed to one example the Indian usage of technology to standardize and transmit information from computer to computer as a key ingredient to success in uniting the country's health care providers.
In the second panel, panelists Harish Bijoor, who runs a brand consulting firm based in Bangalore, and Robin Albing Tu'81, president of Albing International marketing, debated how to best reconcile the differences in demand and priority for products between those at the base of the economic pyramid and those at the top. Products that are successful at the top of the pyramid don't necessarily work at the bottom and vice versa, so "repackaging existing products to create some value from the bottom of the pyramid" is important in creating value, Sharma said.
Jaggi Vasudev compared the invisible forces of the market economy to a "stick" that remains a powerful instrument "as long as people are poor." People in developing countries such as India and China are becoming wealthier and are discovering their power as an individual, Jaggi Vasudev said.
"When a certain segment of the population becomes rich enough, they will despise the stick and go against the stick in every possible way," Jaggi Vasudev said. "In 10 to 15 years time, the effectiveness of the stick will go down and the internal strength of the people of India no matter how badly it is managed will work."
In terms of product innovation, multinational corporations are currently investing in products that are more "price-sensitive" to the country in which they are being developed, according to Sharma. These products are being integrated into markets in more developed countries, he said.
Products used in developed countries, such as ultrasound machines or stethoscopes, are expensive and impractical in developing countries so multinational companies are developing products specifically for use in these countries, Sharma said.
