|
Described variously as a corporate guru,
quality guru, "guru of substance", a visionary and futuristic
thinker, Dr Mehra essentially is a social entreprenuer who quit
a cushy government job, sold his imported Mercedes and a plot
of land back in 1988 to launch himself as a quality trainer so
he could train corporate leaders to improve quality of services,
environment & governance and thus repay the debt he owed to
the society.
Navroz Dhondi wrote in Economic Times of 9 February 1995, "If
you do not know Dr. Madhav Mehra, your quality co-efficient must
be low". The man, who pioneered India's quality movement
after quitting a director's job with the Ministry of Indian Railways
in 1988, is spearheading another worldwide movement today. His
mission is to bring world's poor in to the market economy by educating
companies of the enormous business opportunity represented by
poor. His seminars on CSR - Key to Profitability have received
worldwide acclaim from Singapore to South Africa and Slovenia
to Santa Clara. He is a highly sought after keynote speaker. His
seminars on Unleashing the Power of Corporate Boards, Collaborative
Governance, Profiting from Chaos, Becoming World Class and Providing
the Urge for Excellence (PRUFE) conducted in different parts of
the world during the past 16 years have been attended by thousands
of corporate leaders from Fortune 500 companies. He founded India's
Institute of Directors in 1989 established Total Quality clubs
in India as well as the Golden Peacock Awards to improve competitiveness
and accelerate individual and corporate performances. The Golden
Peacock Awards are now presented for Quality, Environment, Innovation,
Governance and Social responsibility and have become the benchmarks
for individual and corporate excellence.
Dr Mehra is both a change agent and a change maker. He is a unique
social entrepreneur who excels in both teaching and doing. He
says teaching has no meaning unless it is practiced and lived.
He says that the significant problems that we face today stem
from too much posturing and too little practice. People simply
act the part and rarely get real with the problem. He has conducted
hundreds of workshops designed to transform futures of individuals
and organisations. In January 2002 he launched the International
Sustainability Movement and founded scores of non-profit initiatives
spreading from Indonesia to Argentina covering Total Quality Management,
Total Eco-Effective Management, Eco-Innovation, Partners in Action
for Sustainability (PIAS), Partnership between Europe and Asia
for a Cleaner Environment (PEACE), Bridging the Gap, Justice for
All, Centre for Social Responsibility and Hariyali. He has established
several NGOs including Foundation for Good Governance, S M Charitable
Trust, SM Medical Centre, SM Community Centre, PATHIC, PREWALE,
DAMSEL and QLEC. He is the chairman of the Advisory Board of several
publications including international Journal of Corporate Governance,
Quality Times, Director Times and Hariyali. He has published several
books including Driving Globalisation Without its Discontents,
Innovation - the Key to Success in 21st Century and Challenges
of Sustainable Excellence in 21st Century. He has authored over
a hundred articles on Leadership, TQM, Environment, Employee Motivation
and Corporate Governance, which have been published in eminent
national and international journals.
Dr Mehra has brought a holistic, transformational and ecological
approach to business by integrating issues of quality, environment
and governance. Says Dr Mehra, "Attempts to deal with human
problems in a compartmentalised and piece meal manner in the past
have spelt disaster. Humans are an indivisible whole".
Dr Mehra was elected chairman of the World Quality Council by
52 national quality organizations in their meeting held in Chicago
in May 1996. He has the unique distinction of bringing convergence
to 3 themes - quality, environment and governance which are driving
the 21st century. Apart from being the President of UK based World
Council For Corporate Governance and Chairman of US based World
Quality Council, he heads World Environment Foundation, a U.K.
registered charity. He is also the President of the Foundation
for Good Governance and chairman of the board of Worldwide Quality
Management Network, NQAQSR Certification, Environment Assessment
Quality Assurance, Association of Quality Systems Auditors, SM
Charitable Trust and International Institute of Management and
Governance.
As president of the World Council for Corporate Governance Dr
Mehra is leading a movement bringing about transparency, accountability,
integrity, equity and social responsibility in corporate decision-making.
He believes that the best way to transform societies and organisations
is by providing a networking platform. Networking is to knowledge
economy what productivity was to industrial economy. He is the
force behind four annual conferences - International Conference
on Corporate Governance, World Congress on Total Quality, World
Congress on Environment Management and National Conference on
Corporate Social Responsibility.
The World Council for Corporate Governance was founded in January
2000 as a non-profit independent international imitative to improve
the quality of governance and registered in the UK. Its Advisory
Board of Governors is chaired by Dr Ola Ullsten, former Prime
Minister of Sweden. The founding board of the World Council for
Corporate Governance included persons of eminence such as Lord
Puttnam, producer of bock busters and Oscar winning films such
as "Chariots of Fire", "Killing Fields", Lord
John Patten former Secretary of State for Education in Margaret
Thatcher's government, Tony Colman, a Labour MP from Putney and
Lord Swraj Paul of Caparo.
Dr. Mehra has trained over 50,000 professional managers through
hundreds of workshops, courses and seminars organized globally
on management, governance, environment and leadership. His interviews
have been telecast by many channels including BBC World and CNBC.
Dr Mehra is an inveterate traveller and impossible to keep pace
with. He is a workaholic who works 17 hours a day, 365 days a
year. To an Interviewer, who asked him, "Don't you ever get
tired"? he replied, " I have re-tyred myself and turned
my vocation into a vacation .My work excites me, so I never feel
tired".
A firm believer in corporate values, Dr Mehra says "values
are the moral compass that gives you direction, energy and passion".
He is passionate about corporate governance and truly believes
it to be our generation's only hope for both economic and social
transformation. He believes that for corporate governance to work
we have to go through a profound metamorphosis and develop an
inner value system that prides in ethics and transparency and
regards dissent and diversity as value enhancer.
As a child, Dr Mehra read Gandhiji's work. "I was deeply
impressed by Gandhi's candor and transparency". Dr. Mehra's
most favorite book is the 1925 edition of Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography
"My Experiments with Truth" which he avidly quotes together
with ancient Indian scriptures at his seminars. He got through
the very last civil services exam held in London in 1961 and joined
the Ministry of Railways. He was fascinated by management as a
subject which led him to study for PhD in Management by Objectives
in London. He established the faculty of management at the Railway
Staff College, Baroda where he was the youngest and most popular
member of the faculty.
Dr. Mehra took voluntary retirement from Govt. of India in 1988.
He says, "I wanted to redeem my debt to the society. The
best way I could do that was to do something I thought I could
do best viz training people and organizations to achieve their
goals." People flock to Dr Mehra's programmes. His seminar
participants say "Dr. Mehra has an amazing insight into the
forces driving the change. His analysis of the complex management
subjects is most insightful", "Mehra challenges traditional
assumptions of management and governance and shows the way how
business is to be conducted in future".
Dr Mehra is a great networker. His unique contribution stems from
the powerful coalition or reformers that he has been able to build
worldwide in the fields of quality, management, social and environmental
responsibility and governance for constructive engagement between
government, business and civil society.
Dr Mehra has been a champion of small causes and wants to prove
how society can be transformed through small practical initiatives.
10 years ago he founded a small dispensary on the outskirts of
Delhi to dispense medicines to the rural poor. Today it is a primary
health centre called SM Medical Centre catering to 150 patients
everyday. He has now extended this initiative further under PATHIC
(Preventive Action Through Health Information and Counselling)
through, mobile medical clinics in remote areas of Himachal Pradesh.
Born in Amritsar, Dr Mehra grew up in the Himalayan
town of Palampur, Himachal Pradesh. The town had no electricity
nor tapped water. He had to study with lantern and fetch water
in buckets from a nearby wellspring. So obsessed he is about the
role of training in transforming lives that he has converted his
2 bedroom family home in Palampur into a Convention Centre with
35,000 sq foot of convention space to hold conferences & seminars.
He took the construction of this Convention Centre as a challenge.
Its foundation stone was laid on 3rd November 2000. It was ready
to host the third World Congress on Environment Management on
15 June 2001, a record time of 7½ months. He has donated
the Centre to S M Charitable Trust founded by him in the name
of his mother. One of his current passions is to put this small
picturesque town of Palampur that he calls an "odyssey beyond
words" on the world conference map.
|
