This is a story of how things apparently outside suddenly turn into things affecting you. Many years back a leading Indian company was expanding in Chennai and wanted to buy land. The CFO of the company who used to come on TV every result day thought he was not recognizable by public and came in torn jeans and chappals to negotiate for land. He wanted land in hottest suburb at prices of the back of beyond. His logic was when I can get land at Old Mahabalipuram Road outside Chennai for lower rate. For a company making so much money that fact that it's employees would spend 1 1/2 hours daily extra had no consequence. Once this mindset of this company was known to all a clever politician decided to make money out of it. He called them to a western Indian city and gave them lot of land "acquired" from farmers cheaply. So farmers paid for this billionaire promoters' freebie . This company was happy that they got land almost free and started creating 1000s of high paid jobs. It left the housing needs of a large employees -_a huge exogenous jump in the market to the market forces aka wolves many of whom were fronts of politicians. The politician sold the industrial land cheap knowing he could make it up in housing. Instead of buying land for both housing and industrial like Tatas did in Jamshepur this company only minimized what it thought was its "cost" little realizing that other costs will sooner or later be imposed on it. As real estate prices climbed 5x and people bought houses in an haphazard way the higher costs of residential real estate, travel costs, higher cosr of schooling, lost productivity, and health of employees have all been re-imposed back on this clever company and its cohorts through ever increasing wage costs. So much for the clever management ! In the end the politician had the last laugh ! Today a similar situation is prevalent in many CSR activities. CSR honchos want to fund tangible activities that are internal to their span of control little realizing that external things can become internal sooner or later. The reluctance of the highly evolved corporate leaders to fund initiatives that appear external to their world but will help manage things that will become internal to them is one such. Today civic planning of cities is one such area. Government due to its past limitations on hiring and current limitation on tenure, training etc of professional skilled professionals is finding it difficult to solve problems in a manner and a time frame expected by society. When such capacity comes up as think tank/ implementation partner if corporates don't fund them they can expect longer commutes, more frequent traffic jams, higher costs for their labour due to poor government schools, higher safety costs from city unemployment ... And all of this will fund a way to flow to their P&L. Choice is the corporates ..
