Philip Kotler and Christian Sarkar talk about Happiness, Hope, and Human Rights.
Philip Kotler and Christian Sarkar talk about Happiness, Hope, and Human Rights as part of the World Happiness Fest.
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“…Brand Activism will be required reading, not only in business schools and by NGOs and campaigners, but by asset managers, owners, pension funds’ trustees and senior corporate executives worldwide.”
– Hazel Henderson, founder, Ethical Markets
“Kotler and Sarkar convincingly make the case as to why values-driven marketing requires taking the right actions too. Timely, progressive and ground-breaking, their how-to brand activism framework should be the go-to guide for marketers wanting to make a bigger difference with their brands.” – Kevin Lane Keller, E.B. Osborn Professor of Marketing, Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth
“Phil (and his colleague Sarkar) is at it again, continuing to up his game. This time he is aiming at helping society and the world in which we live. Corporate and governmental trust is at a crisis. This book is an essential roadmap of steps businesses and their leaders must partake.” – David Reibstein, William Stewart Woodside Professor Professor of Marketing, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Does business have an obligation to step up when government isn't doing its job?
What happens when businesses and their customers don’t share the same values? Or, for that matter, when employees of a company don’t share the same values as their executives? Welcome to the world of Brand Activism.
Companies no longer have a choice. If the gap between a business and its values and its customers or society and his other stakeholders is too large, business will inevitably suffer.
What can be done?
How do brands align their values with the values of their customers, their employees, and society at large? What is needed, now more than ever, is a mindset that views reality from the outside in.
Brand Activism consists of business efforts to promote, impede, or direct social, political, economic, and/or environmental reform or stasis with the desire to promote or impede improvements in society.
This brand activism is a natural evolution beyond the values-driven Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) programs that are, frankly, too slow.
Brand activism is driven by a fundamental concern for the biggest and most urgent problems facing society.
It gives life to what it means to be a “values-driven” company. You can’t be a values-driven company and disregard society – your employees, your customers, the communities you work in, and the world. The proof is in what you do, not what you say.
A warning: we should be clear in saying that activism doesn’t have to be progressive; it can be regressive as well.
The poster-child for regressive activism is Big Tobacco – the tobacco companies that for so many years denied the harm their products did to consumers, even when their own research revealed otherwise. They promoted the “virtues” of smoking in a way that actually hurt consumers. Companies that lobby our politicians for regressive policies are regressive brand activists.
On the progressive activism side, we see more and more companies seeking to have an impact on the biggest societal problems. These companies have a larger purpose than simple profit-seeking, and are increasingly seen as leaders in their industries.
Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action is about how progressive businesses are taking stands to create a better world.
“The world needs new lenses to understand growth and how humans and societies can thrive.” ~ Luis Gallardo
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World Happiness Fest
What are the barriers to happiness? How do we heal? How do we maximize our potential? How do we remember who we are? How can we be of service to the world? Join the World Happiness Fest, the largest forum of happiness and wellbeing in the world. Visit us at www.worldhappiness.foundation. We are realizing a world with freedom, consciousness, and happiness for all.
Philip Kotler:
This is Philip Kotler. I am happy to be part of a 20-minute session during the world Happiness Fest, March 17 to 22 2022. And my guest is Christian Sarkar and he, and I will discuss a number of things, including the work we do on what is called the wicked seven problems and their solutions. I want to start by introducing Christian and putting some questions to him, which I will also comment. I might say that Christian, you are a thinker 50, author, activist, and a city regenerator will explain that later, and an artist. How would you describe your level of happiness as a person?
Christian Sarkar:
I'd say I'm happy at a personal level, very unhappy at a global level. Let's put it that way, in terms of what's happening with the world. And so I try to make things a little better around me if I can. And then that's sort of, the challenge is how do you deal with a world where things aren't going exactly how you think they should. And I think we are going to talk about this, the individual happiness versus societal happiness that'll be something that we get into.
Philip Kotler:
Yes, we will get into that. And I love your distinction between being happy, but at the same time being unhappy for other reasons. So I don't know how to average happiness. But the next question is you are an artist and you know many artists. Are artists generally happy people? If not, why? In fact, should we discourage our children who want to become an artist?
Christian Sarkar:
Well, no, not at all. I think... Well, and this is a great question because the famous writer, or maybe not so famous, Walker Percy, who was a Southern writer, basically described the writer as a canary in the coal mine. And the artist is the canary in the coal mines. So if the artist starts feeling uneasy with society and what's going on in the world, then the rest of us should be worried too. And if the artist ends up belly up with his feet up in the cage-like the canary in the coal mine, then we need to get out of that coal mine. And I guess that's in a sense artists are the early warning system for society. They're sort of the monitors of what the future's going to look like.
Christian Sarkar:
And if you see art that's troubled, art that's disturbed maybe something's going on that we need to look into at another level. So I do feel that artists have, and in a way, you could also, what is the function of an artist in this time? Because when you have a time that's as difficult as ours, the artist who's interested in just painting happy thoughts is no longer an artist. In a sense, they've disqualified themselves. Because what have they done, they've become decorators and not really interpreters of our time. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's how I feel.
Philip Kotler:
Thank you. It's fascinating what you did say, and I'm going to, in fact, switch it to a few other professions. Can you think of a profession where most of its members are happy? Would you say that of doctors, lawyers, engineers, or are all professionals, unhappy people?
Christian Sarkar:
Well with COVID, there's been a lot of unhappiness all around and in a sense, you could say, and this is not easy to say, but I think it must be said that our profession is not resilient. And so you see what's happening with healthcare workers. Our healthcare system in the US especially is certainly not geared for public health. It's not geared to serve the public. And this is part of the problem of individual happiness versus public happiness or the common good. So you, as a rich person might be happy, and you might have good healthcare. But what does that matter if the rest of the world around you is falling apart and everybody else is getting COVID? So this is sort of the, you could call it Ayn Rand disease, which is the idea that a few people deserve everything.
Christian Sarkar:
And so this is the radical individualism that we've sort of fallen into. And so if you look at what's happening to professions like healthcare, the doctors, they're overworked. Yes, they're paid well some of them, but certainly not the essential workers, certainly not the nurses. And they are, we are basically abusing that profession to the point where people are leaving that profession at record levels. So something has to change, and it's not perhaps the profession itself, but the administration and the process by which we manage the work that's done in that profession.
Christian Sarkar:
And if you look at it in the US, especially. Especially when you compare, let's say to some of the other countries in the world that have healthcare as a human you see that the US really doesn't have healthcare that... It's targeted healthcare just for a few customers who can afford it. And everybody else you're on your own. I saw a meme the other day that said, if you're rich in the US, you get to keep your teeth. And that was a cartoon.
Philip Kotler:
Well, as a matter of fact, there are in my own experience, some professions that produce a lot of unhappy people. When you look at the law people, and I know many of them, they are ground down, they think so much of it is not about justice, not serving justice, but making an income in a very time consuming and unhappy way. So let's go to a big question is maximizing society's happiness, a worthwhile goal for society, because if it is, we got to work on all these people in different professions and pursuits and help them become happier. Or is that not a societal goal. Or let's say, is there a better societal go than just producing a society of happy people?
Christian Sarkar:
Well, it depends on what you define as happiness. I guess that's where we start. If happiness is the right to do what you love and learn and grow, that's one thing. If happiness is your happiness comes from the suffering of other people and making them unhappy, then that's another story. So I would say maximizing society's happiness could be used as a formula for very evil things. Because you could say that the... And this goes back to the greater good versus the common good, which are two different ways of looking at the same question.
Christian Sarkar:
And the question is, should we sacrifice for society? What are the individual liberties that we sacrifice for the greater good? So today, what's the big deal here? Masks, wearing masks in public. And this goes down to this point, that a lot of us in the US feel that we should not have to wear masks because it's a sacrifice that we don't want to make. Why? Because we value our individual liberty to make other people sick by coughing on them or not wearing our masks. So this is what we call liberty.
Christian Sarkar:
The greater good point would say that we need to do what's right for the majority of the people, therefore we should wear masks, because that way a majority of the people won't get sick if everybody has to wear masks. So you can use authoritarian ways to force people to wear their masks, throw them in jail if they're not wearing masks, arrest them if they're not wearing masks. So course we're doing none of those things, but that's the argument in a way of saying the greater good.
Christian Sarkar:
And by the way, this greater good was used by a lot of totalitarian states to say that more people will survive if we do this, therefore we need to do this. And so therefore you won't be needing your liberty or freedom anymore, and we're going to do something for the greater good. The common good is a little different. And this is where I think the common good is actually a more important way of looking at it, which says, we're all in this together. And it's not really one at the expense of the other, but we're all together in this boat. And we've got to make sure that we're all looking after each other.
Philip Kotler:
In other words, it's not a zero-sum game.
Christian Sarkar:
Yes.
Philip Kotler:
That's why I wrote the book Advancing the Common Good because exactly we need a standard to judge what makes societies move forward. But then suppose we are a society that's successful in creating a lot of happy people, is that your observation that happy people tend to be more conservative and accept conditions, social conditions, as they are. In fact, are happy people, less creative, and less activist in general. So maybe we don't want a stagnant society full of happy people.
Christian Sarkar:
Well, it goes, again, back to this definition of happiness. What kind of happiness are you looking for? You're looking for a lower birth rate, the death rate for babies being lower, the wellbeing of society, just the health of society. That's sort of a very basic measure of wellbeing. But of course, there are higher levels of well-being. So am I able to express myself, I able to learn things, am I living up to my full potential? Am I able to go to college if I want?
Christian Sarkar:
Am I able to learn things that I'm interested in, are there barriers that block me from doing that? If I want to go to college, is it free, or am I being charged exorbitant amount and basically prevented from going to college? So the pursuit of happiness, as we call it, is sort of chasing the bluebird of happiness. And that's another phrase basically from Walker Percy, where he says this American idea that we have to run around the place chasing this bluebird of happiness, that the minute we get to it. It's gone. So the happiness-
Philip Kotler:
[crosstalk 00:12:05] describes being happy.
Christian Sarkar:
So the pursuit of happiness is the happiness and not the actual acquisition of let's say the goal, which was, let's say the yacht or going to space or going to Mars. I mean, how happy is Elon Musk going to be on Mars?
Philip Kotler:
Well, let me ask you these. I just have a few more questions and I love your answers. If we developed a happiness pill in the laboratory to be taken once a day in the morning by everyone, would you vote for the pill to be developed and distributed?
Christian Sarkar:
No, of course not. Because I mean, the happiness pill already exists. I mean, in a sense, that's what people do when they get addicted to chemicals that give them extra dopamine or serotonin or oxytocin. All these hormones and chemicals keep you happy in the mind.
Philip Kotler:
So it exists already.
Christian Sarkar:
Yes. Those things exist. That's why people do drugs in some ways, because it's in a way to escape the harshness of life. Now, the question, and on one end, you have you penalize people for doing that. For taking some kind of drug that alters their state of consciousness so they feel happy. On the other side, you have billionaires who go to the rainforest and the Amazon to have ayahuasca experience, which is legal in those countries. And they go there, they spend a lot of money and they come back after again, having some mind altering experiences. Now I haven't had any of those experiences, but I find that gelato and chocolate does the job for me basically.
Philip Kotler:
They make you happy gelato and-
Christian Sarkar:
Happy enough. Happy enough.
Philip Kotler:
Let me ask you this. I have a few more questions-
Christian Sarkar:
But we need a reality pill, Phil. We need a reality pill.
Philip Kotler:
Yeah. A reality pill. Well, we do, let me tell you what it is. Because it's my next question. And it has to do with the metaverse, if we lived two lives or could, one in reality and the other in the metaverse and found out that we are happier in the metaverse. Won't more people withdraw from reality and can the metaverse be a very bad thing?
Christian Sarkar:
Of course it can.
Philip Kotler:
I mean that people lose touch with reality because it's not pleasurable enough.
Christian Sarkar:
Somebody once said that unexamined life is not worth living. That somebody I think was Socrates. And in a sense, I mean, you've got to think about this. Would you like to live in a world that was created by the nerds who basically never had a life, spent their lives playing Dungeons and Dragons and those kinds of board games. And now they've constructed a universe for you to experience, but these are the people who've never actually had lives themselves. They've never gone out there. They've never gone hiking. They've never…
Christian Sarkar:
So the natural world is so much more of a beautiful world to me than this artificial world that we're creating, which is a pale reductive version of reality that we're cheating ourselves. And this is what television... You could say, oh, the radio killed us. The television killed us. The internet killed us. And now the metaverse is going to kill our imagination. Of course, people will find ways to do things in these worlds. As we found internet gave us so many great things. So there will be things we learned from the metaverse, but is it a good idea to spend 12 hours a day immersed in this fake reality?
Philip Kotler:
Yeah. We're beginning to live with the screen in our life. But so this gets back to a fundamental question, that both of you and I are dealing with, and that is how about saying that the goal isn't happiness so much, but removing the sources of unhappiness. You and I are doing a project called the Wicked Seven.
Philip Kotler:
We got into that because we thought of different nightmares that might have... There's even a film now called Don't Look Up, which says that a comet is coming our way, it's going to destroy the earth. There are a lot of nightmares one could have, but we worked more carefully on what we call the seven really deep problems. And I want you to describe that work of ours, because the argument may be, let's reduce the agony that comes from hate from corruption and power and so on. Let's work on removing the sources of unhappiness and what is left is more happiness, that way.
Christian Sarkar:
Yeah. I mean, in a sense, if you, at the very base level, say, look, human beings deserve to live their lives without tyranny, without their... Basically let's say you're born into this paradise of the world, only to discover that somebody's killing it, that we've created artificial sort of social structures that create great inequality. Because children aren't born racist, they aren't born rich or poor. They certainly don't know the difference. It's just that once they start living in the world that we've constructed for them, all of a sudden these problems start happening. And the wicked seven for our viewers is basically a way of looking at the world's biggest problems and saying, well, why are they happening? And is there anything that can be done? And if it is, why aren't we doing it?
Christian Sarkar:
So, those seven wicked problems that we chose were after we did a lot of research. And by the way, Phil, I got the eighth one as well that keeps popping upright.
Philip Kotler:
Right. There may be a ninth as well.
Christian Sarkar:
I'll talk to that one.
Philip Kotler:
Okay.
Christian Sarkar:
But the seven wicked problems are the death of nature. So we're killing the planet in every way imaginable. So we've got to stop. How do we stop? That's what COP26 was supposed to be. John Kerry just said that we're not doing enough. All the things we talked about at COP26, even those things we aren't doing. So there's a problem. We're not able to execute on the promises that we make with each other. Second inequality. So there's gender inequality, there's social inequality, there's economic inequality, discrimination of all sorts. That's another wicked problem.
Christian Sarkar:
Hate and conflict. Now, at this point in our history, we find that we're using our cool internet, Facebook metaverse to do what. To create polarization and drive people against each other and manipulate them. So they start fighting over things they never thought about before. So hate and conflict is something... And this year 2022 is now being called the year of the coup. Because we are going to see coups happening all over. Not just Africa, we had a cool attempt in the United States, which we don't talk about. But if you look at the symptoms and the conditions and sort of the behavior of what defines a coup, we had a coup attempt in the US. So hate and conflict.
Christian Sarkar:
And then another wicked seven problems is power and corruption. The idea is that power is concentrated in the hands of a very few. And then these people use that power in corrupt ways to corrupt other processes that should give us more happiness but don't. Work in technology. It's a wicked problem because there's less and work, more and more technology. The digital divide is increasing every day. And we are creating a bigger gap between the haves and have nots in terms of how work is actually practiced. Health and livelihoods. As I mentioned earlier, the US has no real working healthcare system. And it's only if you have money that you're able to actually afford it to... And if you have no money well you're dead. And that's not exactly civilized behavior. And yet we accept this because we have bought into this Ayn Rand disease that is pervasive now across North America. But especially in the United States. And then the last one is population and migration.
Christian Sarkar:
One interesting thing here is, Phil, we talked about globalization is being something that would transform the world. Goods could flow back and forth, all this kind... But guess what didn't flow back and forth people. We allowed goods to flow freely, but not people, not ideas, just goods. So we made a mistake, a giant in the way we executed our globalization. Namely, we shifted all our manufacturing out of the US, out of Europe to the far east, and China, especially. And in some way destroyed our middle class.
Christian Sarkar:
Now, is that something that leads to more happiness when you're society doesn't have a middle class or has a middle class that isn't able to make a living or live better than its parents did. So I think that's where we killed the American dream beginning with the 80s when we started outsourcing our manufacturing and our services to India and our... So you could say, "Oh, you're being overdramatic. Shouldn't they also have a chance to participate in the global economy?”
Christian Sarkar:
Yes, they should. Everybody should have a chance to be part of this global economy, but it should be on an even, on a fair playing field. And if you look at the way Africa is being developed, if you look at the way China and India are being developed, it's not a fair playing field. And I think that's at the root of all of this. You can't have happiness without justice. And you can't have peace without justice. So in our book on brand activism, which is another book we worked on together, Phil, we said that justice is the strategy. If you have a company that follows justice as a strategy in everything, it does. Okay, you might not make as much money in an unfair world, but you will at least have, let's put it this way, a direction that cannot be altered.
Christian Sarkar:
So it's a very idealistic way of looking at things, but it's actually not. If you say economic justice, social justice, environmental justice, these three justices are part of our company's DNA. That's how you pursue justice at a societal... I mean, happiness at a societal level, at an individual level, it might be a little simpler. Well, I want my family to be fed. We want to have fun picnics on the weekend. We want reasonable working hours. We want good wages and we want healthcare and food and shelter and all those basic necessities.
Christian Sarkar:
So once you've got to that level, then maybe you want some entertainment and art. You want to be able to take a vacation. And these all things to societies actually in civilized countries at least have as part of their rights as a worker. In the US, we don't have those rights because for some reason, and I, again, the reason is Ayn Rand disease, which I'm just coining here for fun, but really I'm very serious about it.
Christian Sarkar:
And Mark Twain had a thing called sir Walter Scott disease. And that's where I'm pulling this idea from. And that idea was that the south was a noble place. The old south in the US was a noble place. And that the civil war destroyed that nobility and created the mess and the chaos of the new south. Well, guess what? We didn't destroy it enough because Walter Scott's disease has now turned into this Ayn Rand disease, which says that individuals take precedence. Rich individuals, in fact, take precedence over everything else.
Christian Sarkar:
And in a sense, this is just another way of saying colonialism is sort of the root of capitalism. And we never addressed the problems of that. And that's why we can't be happy as a society. So we need a truth and reconciliation committee just like South Africa had, to basically look at how did we get here. Instead of banning debate, which is what some of our politicians are doing, where they say, oh, we cannot talk about anything that might hurt or offend someone from now on in class or anywhere else.
Christian Sarkar:
Maybe we should say, let's bring all our worries and concerns and talk about them together so that we can look at how did we get to this point. And that's really what this wicked seven thing is doing. We're looking at a wicked problem that doesn't just happen. And it happens over time and the cause of it might be 200 years ago in history. And so that's sort of one way of saying the pursuit of happiness forces you to look back into time to see where did we start becoming... What's the root cause of our unhappiness today.
Philip Kotler:
Thank you so much for describing that. There's an ecology to happiness with so many issues that come up, you can't just look at it in and of itself. What are the sources, what are the big burdens that people feel and experience that prevent them from realizing their full and true selves? And so our work on the wicked seven and now maybe the wicked eight is where we have to concentrate. We have to make the world a better place for all people. Not for a few. I think we'll now have to end the short interview, which I enjoyed so much putting a set of questions to you. And I didn't give you any warnings. And you were very eloquent in sharing with us what will make the world a better place for all of us?
Christian Sarkar:
Well, one more thing, Phil, one more thing. Let me end with this idea that as machines take over how does a machine become... Should we be worried about the happiness of machines? If they become a little more conscious? And what's going to happen to us, to be happy, we have to be creative. And this is where I think the root of happiness for human beings is to become not a consumer, but a creator.
Philip Kotler:
A producer rather than a consumer.
Christian Sarkar:
Yeah, not even a producer, but a creator. Because a producer implies you're a robot producing stamping out machines. But a creator where you're creating something new, something that you yourself, and no one else could have done. I think that's where happiness, the future of happiness lies in creativity.
Philip Kotler:
Very good. Well, thank you so much, Christian Sarkar for not only answering these questions in a beautiful and eloquent way but for being my dear friend.
Christian Sarkar:
Thank you so much. Thanks.
Philip Kotler:
And you will continue to work on these in other matters. And I hope people could follow even the work we're doing in Sicily with trying to regenerate a city. So many cities are falling apart. Small towns are dying, and we're into the field called regenerative marketing. And I wrote much earlier about place marketing. Marketing places. And we're continuing to want communities to be happy. You can work at the individual level, but there's the community level. We probably could search and find a lot of communities that are very happy and we don't know why, but we better find out why and see if the lessons can be applied to other communities that are unhappy. Very good.
Christian Sarkar:
Thanks Phil.