Profile
"For making corporate governance work, we have to go through a profound metamorphosis and develop an inner value system which prides on ethics, morality, equity, legitimacy, transparency and values dissent and diversity." read more...
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 inpidual and corporate performances. The Golden Peacock Awards are now presented for Quality, Environment, Innovation, Governance and Social responsibility and have become the benchmarks for inpidual 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 inpiduals 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 inpisible 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 is involved in a variety of public activities. He is essentially a serial social entrepreneur who has established scores of charities and other non profit inititatives including World Environment Foundation, a U.K. registered charity, Foundation for Good Governance, 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 persity 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.
