Linked with The World Future Council.
Professor Prabhu Guptara (born 1949 in Delhi, India) is an authority on the impact of technology on globalization, on strategy, on knowledge management, on corporate social responsibility, on comparative and cross-cultural ethics, and on management and leadership issues Widely known as a speaker and broadcaster, he is or has been Chairman, Director or Board Member of various companies and organisations. As Executive Director, Organisation Development, at Wolfsberg – The Platform for Business and Executive Development (a subsidiary of UBS, one of the largest banks in the world), he is responsible for the Wolfsberg Think Tanks on a wide variety of market and global issues. A Freeman of the City of London, and of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, and Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development; he is Fellow: of the Institute of Directors, of the Royal Commonwealth Society, and of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts Commerce and Manufactures; and Member: Executive Board, IFB Institute of Management, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland; International Advisory Council, Development Alternatives, India; Member of the International Advisory Panel for the Tomorrow’s Global Company Report by Tomorrow’s Company, U.K. … (full text).
… He has written for Financial Times, The Guardian, and The Times, and enjoys being a judge for international competitions in the fields of fiction, poetry, and executive development. Prabhu is a Hindu follower of Jesus. He and his wife Philippa have four children and reside in Switzerland. ( full text).
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Prabhu Guptara – India and Switzerland
4 Videos: he interviews Michael Jackson, Chairman of Shaping Tomorrow, England, April 30, 2007: Part 1, 4.40 min; part 2, 2.36 min; part 3, 2.00 min; and part 4, 2.06 min.
His video: Conflicts of Interest, 7 min, February 01, 2005, (he talks about how the charging of interest exacerbates the difference between the rich and poor).
Future Event: Talking on « The World Financial System and the Institutionalisation of Greed », Thursday, October 9th 2008, 6pm, St Stephen’s Church, St Stephen’s Avenue, Bristol BS1 1EG, £5 pay at the door. Reserve place by email.
His Blog: Renaissance: Insights for Action in Today’s World.
His official website.
Professor Prabhu S. Guptara is Chairman of the Career Innovation Group, acting as a thought-leader for the Group and building links with individuals and organisations around the world. His role in Ci is one of the external activities he undertakes as Director of Executive and Organisational Development for the Wolfsberg Executive Development Centre, a subsidiary of UBS AG … (full text, see also the homepage of career innovation ci).
He says: … « Developments such as sub-prime crisis and growing defaults in loans and credit card repayments in the US are the result of jungle competition among the global financial giants. On the contrary, the situation in the Indian banking industry is largely healthy » … (full text).
He writes: We should not be surprised that India is now producing its own spokesman on the order of Tocqueville and Solzhenitsyn and Augustine. Colonialism is half-a-century behind us; it is now possible for an Indian scholar to appreciate the spiritual dynamics of Western civilization without feeling unpatriotic…. Having read most of Mangalwadi’s works, I believe he combines Tocqueville’s profound insights into American spirituality with the passion of a Solzhenitsyn to reform his own nation (in the right column).
His bio on IBR, on World Future Council, on naymz, on oikos; on european-futurists.org.
Find him and his publications on the different pages of his personal website (reports, articles, interviews, books, poems, video and audios, links … all in french, german and hindi); on wikipedia/works; on ; on Google Book-search; on Google Scholar-search; on Google Group-search.
His boook review of Timothy L. Alborn’s Conceiving Companies, Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England, Routledge Explorations in Economic History Series.
He says also: … A generation of people has grown up — particularly those who occupy high positions in politics, economics, the media and all the rest of it — who have no transcendent values, or, if they have transcendent values, they have no means of intellectually reconciling those transcendent values with the way they do business … and: I guess I started thinking about it (the bank UBS) when I was about 16. And the reason was that I was really facing the issue: How is it that a highly religious country like India is also at the same time so highly corrupt? And why is it that when people claim that we’ve had a massively beautiful, wonderful history in the past, which obviously we did, we are in such a mess at the present? And is there any relationship between the philosophies we followed in the past and the philosophies we are following at present? Everybody claims there is, but if there is, then clearly the philosophy had nothing to do with our success in the past and our failure at the moment. So where does all this fit together? And, of course, since I work for a business now and I worked for a bit of a business then, I was asking the question how does the fact that somebody’s highly spiritual relate or not relate to their business practices? … and: I come from a caste that has been business people for 2,300 years at least. And we are allowed by our religion, we are, in fact, encouraged by our religion, to charge whatever level of interest we want. And so, over the years, we have charged as much as 3,600 percent interest because the market will bear it. And we have reduced tens of thousands of people — tens of millions of people to slavery, virtual slavery, serfdom, over the years because they were not able to pay back the interest on loans that we gave them. So, clearly, it was possible to be highly religious in business, as most members of my caste are, but at the same time highly unethical, or at least highly unhuman or inhuman. So, « How do all these things fit together? » were questions that were bothering me, and that’s really why I started exploring them. In the world today, you can think of most people in the world falling into, I guess, two or three different categories. One, people who don’t see that their values — wherever their values may come from — have anything specific to do with their business practice. They’re just trying to follow good professional ethics. And I guess most people in the world fall into that category. They don’t really think about where those business ethics have come from or professional ethics have come from … (full interview text).
links:
Institute of International Business Relations IBR, Berlin;
4th European Futurists Conference Lucerne, Oct. 26-28, 2008;