Back to BASICS - Renton de Alwis:

Small is beautiful Is big better?

Lessons from history

The value we draw from learning history is what we must learn from it. Sadly though, there is very little learning we do from the annals of history, be it of the world, our own region or country.

History tells us how large and vast empires were built by leaders and peoples who sought to conquer others, to meet power and greed driven agenda. We have learnt of how these very empires could not be sustained for too long, faced decay and tumbled. We also learnt of an exception of an empire built by King Asoka of India, which through self-realisation by the emperor himself, was transformed to seeking the way of conquering minds with righteous ideas.

Thankfully today, it has left us with a lasting empire of Buddhist thought and practice. The empires built on the thoughts of Christ and of Islam are indeed no exceptions. Many wars were fought with weapons, in the name of religion. But most of it was to do with the organisations or institutions associated with religion and not with the words of wisdom or thought processes.

Sustainable models

What is important about small, self-motivated and sustainable models of governance of people or business is that they are all based on the premise of looking inwards at our own selves and not on using might and muscle. They were all based on sufficient social and economic principles of thriftiness, simplicity and good governance always shunning thoughts of excessive greed.

As we look around at the current state of our world, economies, institutions and organisational models and businesses, we see that they all predominantly portray the exact opposite.

Simple ways have been replaced with tentacle laying empire like networks of financial institutions, outfits for extracting natural resources and rapid movement of capital funds, all based on the principle of ‘Big is better’ and ‘Fast meets greed’. At most business schools we are taught of principles of economies of scale and volume discounts. Principles of self-sufficiency, conservation and the greater good often take a back-seat or form the elective list of courses.

Info-communication tools that can serve humankind well, to alleviate poverty and better distribute income are used by many for not so useful pursuits of shallow entertainment and/or for the promotion and sustenance of opulent lifestyles of useless consumption.

Bailouts

We saw what overgrown business conglomerates like American Insurance International (AIG) cost the US public in its recent failure. The US $ 85 billion bailout package is huge by any standard and is indicative of what can go wrong when management gets out of control due to the sheer size of an organisation and the resultant lack of checks and balances. This is also true of the US automotive industry and many of the other oversized financial sector ventures the world over that needed bailouts.

We have also forgotten the first energy crisis that hit our world in the 1970s when the OPEC embarked on an oil embargo. It was followed by another in 1979, when Iran imposed restrictions in the supply of oil.

On both occasions, after an initial knee-jerk reaction of thinking small, it was ‘back to business as usual’ when the oil prices stabilised. The current crisis associated with climate change and global warming is one where there is no way of going back on to being business as usual.

Two planets

In the words of the International Director of the World Wildlife Fund James Leape, “Most of us are propping up our current lifestyles, and our economic growth, by drawing - and increasingly overdrawing - on the ecological capital of other parts of the world ...If our demands on the planet continue to increase at the same rate, by the mid-2030s we would need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles”.

Schumacher in his 1973 book ‘Small is Beautiful’ said; “Perhaps we cannot raise the winds. But each of us can put up the sail, so that when the wind comes we can catch it”. In 1973, this was still possible. Today, we have no such luxury of choice. We must raise the winds ourselves.