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5 People Who Will Save the World

They certainly have the influence, and along with it, the will to bring positive change

Published: Dec 25, 2009 09:39:43 AM IST
Updated: Dec 25, 2009 09:39:24 AM IST

1 Angela Merkel
German Chancellor

Across Germany, the world’s third biggest economy, the former physicist has earned the trust and the political leverage to push ahead with a range of much-needed reforms. In her second term, Merkel’s centre-right coalition has a bouquet of pro-market measures that claim to promote growth, reform the tax system, restructure the health system and yet not allow the fiscal deficit to run away. Her supporters call it a new beginning. The results could also have far-reaching implications for an entire continent caught in a dangerous state of drift.

 

But the challenges are formidable: Germany’s population is aging and shrinking, public debt is increasing and the economy needs to focus more on domestic consumption to drive growth. That’s driven Merkel to change her own beliefs. Initially, she didn’t believe in fiscal stimulus. But now she has decided to push through a $10.4 billion fiscal stimulus in the hope that it will trigger demand. Critics see it as a risky gamble, but in Merkel’s book, the task of reviving the German economy cannot be achieved by baby steps.

At the same time, Merkel built her reputation as a quiet networker, someone who prefers to shun media publicity and focus on brokering difficult deals on important issues in the European Union and around the world. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she addressed a joint session of the US Congress last month, a clear signal of her growing stature as an international leader.

Image: Kent Coston Horner / AFP for Forbes India
2 C.K. Prahalad
Management Guru

Early on in his research career, C.K. Prahalad realised that most management research ended up focussing on things that had already happened. It seldom asked the question: How is the future being created? That was what truly fascinated the scholar. Yet when Prahalad and his colleague Stuart Hart came up with their first draft of the article on the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) in 1998, no management journal would accept it. Unconvincing, they said. In 2002, Strategy+Business agreed to publish it and that one idea changed the way multinationals thought.

It isn’t for nothing that Prahalad is today the reigning management guru of our times. Very few ideas have had the legs to survive the management fad industry for more than a couple of years. The work on BoP, on the other hand, is now into its fifth edition, and continues to find new adopters among a long line-up of multinationals eyeing growth in emerging markets.

Businesses, governments and donor agencies invariably looked at the poor as victims. Prahalad urged them to start seeing them as resilient and creative entrepreneurs and value-seeking consumers.
And for their part, to make money, businesses have had to completely rethink their business models, find innovative solutions and challenge the existing assumptions. For instance, the Tata Nano, a low-cost transportation solution for the masses, is forcing the global auto industry to explore new opportunities in frugal engineering.


3 Carlos Ghosn
CEO, Renault-nissan
Carlos Ghosn is a believer — in the prospect of good business. Over the next decade, the world is expected to have two billion cars on the roads. With increasing carbon emissions and limited availability of fossil fuels, the auto industry knows full well that its future lies in more fuel-efficient cars. Yet in the last decade, no automobile manufacturer has had the courage to tackle the problem at its core. Several start-ups came up but fizzled out.


The big auto firms merely offered lip service by offering hybrids — an additional motor in the car which brings you a 20-30 percent better fuel efficiency, but is more complex and more expensive. That’s why, even though hybrids have been around for more than a decade, they represent less than 2 percent of the global car market.

Now, Ghosn is all set to change that. Beginning 2010, the Renault-Nissan combine will start offering zero emission vehicles, i.e. electric cars in markets like the US, Israel, France, Denmark and China. Ghosn has been travelling around the globe forging alliances with various government bodies, battery manufacturers, energy utility companies and not-for-profit organisations.

If his big bet comes off, he expects electric cars to make up 10 percent of global car sales by 2012. That could be the spur that the auto industry needs to fall in line with notions of sustainable development.

4 Barack Obama
President, United States of America
He represented fresh hope for the world and for the US even before he became the leader of the world’s biggest superpower. But Obama inherited a country half sunk in quagmire. Consider the legacy of Obama’s predecessor, George Bush: A ravaged economy had pushed the rest of the world into recession and a remarkably naïve foreign policy agenda stoked wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, simmering resentment in the Middle East, and had Russia, China, and large parts of Latin America and Europe seething. Sandwiched between the two problems, American’s middle class struggled to emerge from job losses, rising bills and falling asset values.

Image: Reuters
Obama may not be the answer to everyone’s prayers, but he certainly strives to be. Yes, people have scoffed at his recent laurel, the Nobel Peace Prize. But on the international front he has done the unthinkable; reaching out to the Muslim world not to talk about the ‘War on Terror’ but to listen. “All too often the United States starts by dictating…and we don’t always know all the factors that are involved. So let’s listen,” Obama told Al Arabiya, a news channel based in the Middle East.

But making the world a more secure place will always be tough. And dealing with domestic challenges like rescuing the three Big Auto Firms in Detroit have been tricky. But rather than simply writing a cheque — a policy of the previous administration — Obama did what good policy makers do: Prevent thousands from losing their jobs and in turn losing tens of billions of taxpayers’ money. He refused to sanction empty ‘bounce back’ proposals, restructured the industry by cutting several union and white collar jobs and shutting down various loss making manufacturing units and dealerships. Almost all stakeholders — workers, retirees and creditors — were forced to take equity rather than cash for their obligations. It’s created a sound foundation for a good manufacturing business — something that Detroit had lost over several decades.

A clear minus: His big promises on health care reform are yet to take off. But that hasn’t dimmed hopes that if Obama manages to resurrect a vibrant America, it could mean a safer and better world too.

5 Y.K. Hamied
Chairman, Cipla

For someone who calls himself a man of science, Yusuf K. Hamied has a patent dislike for intellectual property rights. He’s been lobbying for India and other like-minded countries to walk out of the WTO and form the TWTO (Third World Trade Organisation).

For long, Hamied has almost single-handedly fought the Big Pharma of the Western world. He accused them of holding 3 billion people in the Third World to ransom by using their monopoly status to charge higher prices. About a decade ago, Cipla shot into the limelight, when Hamied offered AIDS drugs to African countries at $350 for a year of treatment, compared to $10,000-15,000 that Western multinationals charged. He followed it up by supplying a drug that stops AIDS transmission from mother to child free of cost to African countries. In India, however, authorities declined his free offer.

Hamied believes that Indian patients could get a raw deal in the next few years. Since 1972, the national rules allowed Indian companies to freely make copies of patented drugs and sell them cheaply in India. The Indian government, under the WTO guidelines, changed this rule. Now no local firm will be allowed to copy a drug patented after January 1, 2005. Since it usually takes seven to 10 years for drugs to hit the market after patents have been filed, Hamied says that Indian patients will be forced to buy expensive, patented medicines starting 2013. He’s egging on the Indian government, under TRIPs, to allow automatic licensing to copy drugs in case of emergencies. If he has his way, Indian patients could get life-saving drugs at 30-80 percent lower prices. It may even encourage developing countries to follow suit.

 

(Text compiled by Ashish Mishra, T. Surendar, Neelima Mahajan-Bansal, Nilofer D'souza, Pravin Palande)

(This story appears in the 08 January, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)

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