Network Capital

Sanjiv Saraf is the founder, Chairman and principal shareholder of Polyplex Corporation Limited, which is among the world’s largest producers of PET films.

Sanjiv is an alumnus of The Scindia School and a graduate from IIT, Kharagpur (1980). After completing his graduation, he joined his family business in Orissa. In 1984, he ventured out on his own to establish Polyplex. Sanjiv has built an outstanding organization with exemplary values and ethos which are widely respected and admired in the industry, as well as within the financial markets- being publicly listed both in India and in Thailand.

An entrepreneur at heart, Sanjiv has incubated other businesses such as Manupatra –India’s premier legal information provider. Concern for the environment has led him to invest in renewable energy with the launch of a number of Hydro Electric Power projects in Punjab, Uttarakhand and Sikkim. He is an active member on the boards of various companies across different industries.

Black-swan events, global warming, COVID-19 and a host of other natural and man-made disasters have tested the resilience of businesses across the world. Usually, blame for business failures is apportioned to external factors such as adverse business cycles, badly framed government regulations and lack of infrastructure. However, the causes often lie within -- short-term thinking, destruction of natural resources, exploitation of labour and poor management, to name a few.

To outlast their competition, build resilience, gain competitive advantage and achieve greater returns in the long run, businesses must improve their performance on material ESG metrics: Environmental impacts such as monitoring their consumption of natural resources, waste discharge and carbon emissions; Social factors such as ties with local communities, diversity and inclusion, and building a good reputation with stakeholders; and Governance, including board effectiveness protocols, approach to senior executive compensation and appropriate reliance on independent directors. The benefits from implementing ESG factors include more efficient use of resources, lower cost of operations, reduced risk, higher employee productivity and increased investor interest.

Outlast: How ESG Can Benefit Your Business is a clarion call to corporate leaders to follow the pathway of ESG. The authors, Mukund Rajan and Col. Rajeev Kumar, draw upon their considerable experience of working for some of India's largest organizations to present evidence and case studies that show that ESG is the mantra of the future. This is a timely must-read for all those who belong to, or aspire to be part of, the corporate world.

Mridula Ramesh is the founder of the Sundaram Climate Institute, which focuses on waste and water solutions and education. She is a leading cleantech angel investor, with a portfolio of over fifteen start-ups, and is involved in multiple initiatives to build climate entrepreneurship.

The author of the critically acclaimed The Climate Solution: India’s Climate Change Crisis and What We Can Do About It, Mridula writes regularly on climate issues. She is involved in high-level policy discussions at national, state and municipal levels and is a part of India–US and India–UK Track II dialogues on climate change and energy and was the Co-Chair of the adaptation and resilience working group in the latest India–UK Track II dialogue. She is the Chairperson of the Board of Governors, National Institute of Technology, Andhra Pradesh; part of the Board of Trustees, World Wildlife Fund; and Member, Advisory Group, UNDP National Circular Economy Project and of the CII National Sub-Committee on Sustainable Textiles, among other memberships.

A graduate with distinction from Cornell University and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Mridula worked at McKinsey in Silicon Valley before returning to India. She teaches a postgraduate class on climate change at the Great Lakes Institute of Management, regularly speaks at national/international forae on climate issues, and is a frequent jury member in climate-tech startup competitions.

She is the executive director of Sundaram Textiles and lives and experiments in Madurai in a net-zero-waste home with her husband and two children.

Follow her on Twitter@mimiramesh

Key lessons: 

Adam Jackson is the Co-founder of Braintrust, the first user-controlled talent network that provides enterprises with the highly skilled technical and design talent they need.

Prior to founding Braintrust, Adam co-founded Doctor on Demand, the popular video telemedicine provider, with daytime talk show personality Dr. Phil. Other notable ventures include DriverSide, a marketplace that connects car owners with mechanics, which was acquired by Advance Auto Parts in September of 2011 and MarketSquare, the first online local shopping destination on the Internet which was acquired by Intuit in September of 2006. Adam is a passionate Angel investor in 100+ companies including LTSE, SuperHuman, Filecoin, Binance, BlockFi, Automatic, Apero Health, Zenefits, and more.

In Leadership to Last, Geoffrey Jones and Tarun Khanna interview iconic leaders in India who have demonstrated leadership to last. There are leaders from South Asia and other emerging markets as well to illustrate that the ideas Indian entrepreneurs speak about are echoed by their counterparts in the Global South. All these magnates--Ratan Tata, Anu Aga, Adi Godrej, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Devi Shetty and Rahul Bajaj, to name a few--have built, to general acclaim and acknowledgement, organizations that are seen as forward-looking and innovative. They subscribe to a code of ethics and contribute to the betterment of society. The authors demonstrate that this is a lot harder to achieve than unicorn status.

​The authors corroborate how these stories are less about building a get-rich-quick organization and much more about triggering foundational and institutional change in society. These interviews, encapsulating the history of recent decades, eloquently lay out the opportunities and challenges of today and the future. The profiled leaders inspire awe by displaying audacity of intent, humility of demeanour and steadfastness of purpose.

Dr. Christian Busch is an internationally known expert in the areas of innovation, purpose-driven leadership, and serendipity. He is the director of the CGA Global Economy Programme at New York University (NYU), and also teaches at the London School of Economics (LSE). A cofounder of Leaders on Purpose and the Sandbox Network - and a former director of LSE's Innovation Lab - he has worked with senior executives and governments around the world. He is member of the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Expert Forum, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and on the Thinkers50 Radar list of the 30 thinkers "most likely to shape the future." His work has been featured by outlets such as the Strategic Management Journal, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, The Guardian, and the BBC.

Ravi Venkatesan is a business leader, writer and social entrepreneur. He is the Chairman of the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) and UNICEF's Special Representative for Young People and Innovation. Ravi is also the founder of the Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship (GAME) and serves on the boards of Hitachi Ltd and Rockefeller Foundation. Ravi has served as the chairman of Microsoft India, Bank of Baroda and Cummins India. He has a B-Tech from IIT Bombay, an MS from Purdue University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Ravi is the author of Conquering the Chaos: Win in India, Win Everywhere. He was voted as one of India's best management thinkers by Thinkers50 and as Microsoft's Alumni Hero 2020.

Aarti and Aditya fell in love with water lily pops all the way back in school. This love for the snack followed them into college. The husband-and-wife team shared their ‘pop’ romance with their friends, classmates, and professors too. They’d pop ‘em at home and share the little goodies on campus. This was the start of it all.

​They were onto something… They started small. They kept it simple. Salted was the first flavor, but a lot more would follow.

​The aim was always to give people a wholesome snack that they’d love both while consuming it and later too, sans any guilt. After researching and examining numerous flavors and grades of water lily seeds, they finally identified five flavors and the best-quality ingredients that worked, and Taali was born.

​Since that moment, Aarti and Aditya have worked hard to ensure the Taali supply chain is sustainable and the ingredients are 100% natural. And given the fact that these two young founders have no prior food or entrepreneurship experience, we can imagine the effort they have had to put in to make Taali the delicious reality it is today.

Neel Ghose is the founder of the the Robin Hood Army, (RHA) a volunteer organization which redistributes surplus food to the less fortunate. With a zero funds policy, the team has served meals to 83.9 million people across 255 cities through a family of Robins across the world - the RHA is now a Harvard case study. From a work front, Neel manages partnerships for Google Pay, he previously launched international markets and worked for Zomato from the seed stage.

​Neel has done his bachelors in Shri Ram College of Commerce and has an MBA from Harvard Business School. A passionate fan of cricket, Neel spends most of his free time struggling on the squash court, and procrastinating with friends and his 6 year old niece Tara. He believes the Robin Hood Army's work is just 1% Done.

Devi Lockwood is the Ideas editor at Rest of World and the author of 1,001 VOICES ON CLIMATE CHANGE, a book published by Simon & Schuster (Tiller Press) on August 24, 2021. Previously she worked as an editor and writer at the New York Times Opinion section. She spent five years traveling in 20 countries on six continents to document 1,001 stories on water & climate change. As a 2018 National Geographic Explorer, she photographed and recorded audio with ArtCirq, an Inuit Arctic performance collective. In 2019 she completed the Graduate Program in Science Writing at MIT. In 2014 Devi graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude from Harvard where she studied Folklore & Mythology, earned a Language Citation in Arabic, and rowed for the Radcliffe Varsity Lightweight Women's Rowing team.