Acumen
Acumen: Ideas
Published in
6 min readSep 26, 2016

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One of the villages outside of Bhopal, India, where Acumen investee Sahayog Dairy works with farmers to help provide them market access to improve their livelihoods.

By Acumen Fellow Navin Muruga

I hate flies. It’s mating season and the office is full of them. Every time one makes a landing on the rim of my cup of chai I find myself thinking about where those grubby little feet have been. Maybe they were at the open dumpsite outside the office where men urinate and stray cows feed on scraps. Or maybe they were buzzing around the dusty road I take to work, bothering the half-naked children squatting inches from the road’s edge, openly defecating, oblivious to the cars whizzing by them.

“Navin!” I hear my Managing Director bark my name. I bolt upright. “Yes, sir!” I’m not used to this traditional employee-boss culture. A little bit of my pride gets chipped away every time I comply, but I tell myself “This is India.”

I’m in Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh, in the midst of my year as an Acumen Fellow. I have been placed with Sahayog Dairy, an Acumen investee that helps provide India’s dairy farmers with market access to improve their livelihoods. As their interim Chief Operating Officer, I’m trying my best to fit in, being the outsider. I’ve been here for nine months now, enough time that my Pavlovian reaction to my boss is now second nature.

When I was told that I’d be placed in India, I didn’t know what to expect. I had volunteered for small nonprofits in war-torn villages in Sri Lanka and rural Kenya, but India has a reputation for being unlike any other place in the world. Acumen informed me that I’d work closely with Sahayog’s leadership team and understandably left the rest to my imagination.

So that’s what I did.

I imagined I’d visit rural villages in a battered four-wheel drive to meet with local communities. Armed with a moleskin and broken Hindi, I’d finally understand the “real” problems of poverty. In the office, I imagined late nights brainstorming new innovative solutions with the leadership team on a white board. Like any good storyline, there would be challenges, difficult living conditions and moments that would test my mettle. But I’d learn. I’d finally be able to get my hands dirty doing “real” work. I’d finally graduate from being a glorified volunteer to hard-core, on-the-ground change agent. I could already imagine the stories I’d tell at the end of my Fellowship.

Nine months into my placement and my experience has been the complete opposite of what I had imagined. I do get picked up in a four-wheel drive but, it’s not so battered, in fact, it’s rather nice. It takes me straight to an air-conditioned office where I have a comfortable desk waiting for me. I spend my day squinting at Excel spreadsheets, clearing out my inbox and taking meetings with my director.

I interact more with machine manufacturers, graphic designers and packaging suppliers than I do with the local community. I don’t spend my day brainstorming new innovations to alleviate poverty. Instead, I work on improving our HR systems.

Navin, second from left, with some of Sahayog Dairy’s employees and farmers at one of the company’s milk collection centers.

The only thing I imagined that actually happened — I am learning every day. I learned that the real work isn’t always sexy. I learned that there is a great amount of ambiguity in this work. And I have developed a deep understanding about what it means to lead and how it’s very different from authority.

These lessons and many more have changed my life, but one lesson, in particular, has impacted me more than the others. It is a lesson on balance. I learned how to balance my ambition with self-awareness. But really, I learned how to balance “Who I want to become” with “Who I am.”

Prior to becoming an Acumen Fellow, I had wanted to be a social entrepreneur. I was on a steady diet of articles and blogs about the d.lights, One Acre Funds and Grameen Banks of the world. I was hooked. I so desperately wanted to be part of one. I wanted to work in disadvantaged communities and create new innovations that would change the world. This desire to become one of them quickly made me understand who I wanted to be.

Currently, I was an HR guy but I hated admitting it. I thought it was the world’s most unimpressive job. Whenever people asked me what I did for a living, I’d quickly hide behind the cloak of talent consultant. I always wanted to hide my boring HR career.

Navin’s background in HR became his greatest contribution to Acumen investee Sahayog Dairy. The social enterprise needed to reorganize its talent and implement performance management systems, so Navin held workshops to help the team get them in place and engage employees.

This obsession with the person I wanted to become and the rejection of who I actually was fundamentally challenged me during the fellowship. Ironically, one of the biggest contributions I made at Sahayog was in HR. As a social enterprise, Sahayog needed to get its house in order. The company needed to reorganize its talent, engage employees and implement performance management systems. It didn’t need a privileged foreigner running around rural villages trying to change the world.

By the end of my time in India, I had put my seemingly boring HR experience to good use. The fellowship taught me that I could create more change by embracing who I truly am. It taught me to look inward, to identify my strengths and to understand the unique role I could play in changing systems of inequity.

I’ve come to realize that we are all uniquely skilled to play specific roles in making the world a better place. We need more social entrepreneurs to develop innovative solutions but we also need more HR guys to support the growth of these solutions.

Recognizing your role isn’t about giving up ambition. Ambition is important but it needs to be balanced with self-awareness. Without self-awareness, it’s like you’re playing soccer in the dark, kicking about not knowing which position you’re playing.

Navin embracing his role inside Sahayog’s state-of-the-art dairy plant in Sandalpur, India.

Self-awareness isn’t easy. Personally, I’ve found it to be very much a process of elimination.. Recognizing who I was not helped me come closer to understand who I actually am’. I have found that I have to carefully and very patiently chip away at the outside to get inside. The more I chip, the closer I am to understanding the role I am meant to play.

As my time as an Acumen Fellow comes to a close, I’m not going to claim I now fully understand ‘who I am.’ But I feel like I’m getting closer and know there’s more chipping to be done.

The Acumen Fellows program is a leadership development program that equips emerging social leaders around the world with the skills, knowledge and moral imagination to drive change in their communities.

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Founded by @jnovogratz, Acumen is changing the way the world tackles poverty by investing in companies, leaders & ideas. Follow us: www.acumenideas.com