Clean Homes, Dirty Streets

There is something peculiar about Indian Homes. Most Indian like to keep their homes spic 'n' span but generally the streets leading upto those homes have accumulation of filth. The waste-dunes can be seen mostly at street corners. So what does one conclude – Do Indian love cleanliness or are they are they fond of griminess? The truth is once they clean their home, they do not know what to do with the waste, since the municipal waste-bins are mostly non-existent, so they dump it outside their house (or may be it is convenient to do it that way!). The competition seems to be only limited to keeping own house clean and not getting together to keep the surroundings better. The municipal sweeper in turn dumps it around the street corner, where it keeps stinking till some festival or local elections are round-the-corner. Then upon the instructions of the local political leader, aspiring to woo some votes, the ever-elusive municipal lorry turns-up and does a ‘solstice-routine’, to again vanish in perpetuity.

There is one company though who turned this reproachful situation in to an economic and social opportunity. ITC launched sometime back the ‘WOW’ initiative. Read as ‘Wealth-Out-of-Waste’, the WOW or 'Wealth Out of Waste' is a project that aims to inculcate the habit of recycling among school children, housewives, corporate employees and the general public as well as industries and business enterprises and reduce at least 15-25% of the garbage load through source segregation. ITC started this as a pilot project in some cities, sometime back, where they gave separate bags for solid waste, kitchen waste etc. to each household. The ITC trucks would visit all these homes once a week and collect all the garbage bags. In turn the citizens besides disposing their garbage for free even got paid for the garbage that they gave to ITC. The company gained by saving considerable money on raw material for their ‘Paperboards and Specialty Papers Division’. Recently the company celebrated saving 25000 trees through the ‘WOW’ initiative. The WOW programme is today operational in Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore, Cochin, Bhadrachalam, Coimbatore & Madurai. Over 3 million citizens, 500,000 school children, 350 corporates, 1000 commercial establishments and about 200 industries support WOW. And, of course, in these cities the streets look as tidy as the homes. ‘WOW’ brought wealth to everyone.

The point is pretty simple. Community initiatives never happen without innovation and engagement. Where rules do not work, engagement can do wonders, literally.

Organizations many times face uphill task in ensuring their employees or employee groups like project teams do not become so self-centric or silo-wised that they fail to share their learning and knowledge. In turn many a times it is the same ‘clean self and dirt others’ phenomena among teams or groups resulting in dys-functionality and disagreements. In the long-run the company suffers. Innovative engagement of people to initiatives can help them collaborate rather than only compete. There was a classical case that I had read many years back in ‘California Management Review’, where one of the project teams spends 6-months and considerable resource in searching for an outside vendor. When they finally found one, instead of being delighted at their feat they were rather dismayed since they found that the same vendor had already worked with one of their other teams before. All the money and time spent on searching the vendor could have been saved. Failure of knowledge reuse and sharing is one such symptom. Many such problems happen in the organization because of competition without cooperation.

Google has this thing called ‘MOMA’, the company’s intranet that has so much information shared across the company that employees have insight into what's happening with the business and what's important. It also has something called ‘Snippets’. Every Monday, all the employees write an email that has five to seven bullet points on what they did the previous week. Being a search company, Google takes all the emails and make a giant Web page and index them. It allows the Google nerds to share what they know across the whole company, and it reduces duplication. Like ‘WOW’ it brings wealth to everyone – to the employees (since they get instant recognition for what they do), to the employee community (since it helps them to collaborate and reduce redundancy) and of course to the company.