From Shakti to Shaktify
Shaktify founder Shakti Saran shares his journey of change
I was born and raised in cosmopolitan Mumbai, formerly Bombay, to a household that had both conservative and liberal influences and a lineage of entrepreneurship.
The India of the ‘60s and ‘70s was chaotic, unorganized and in some respects isolated from the world. At college, I discovered how fragmented our world was and it created a hunger to study liberal arts which I satisfied through voracious reading alongside management studies.
Shaktify aims to build a constellation of changemakers
On graduating from my MBA class at Boston University, I settled on a corporate career starting as a banker, later as a management consultant and ending as a general management professional. While much of my career was spent in adapting to a mechanistic view of life, I experienced two fundamental shifts during the last few years of my corporate life at IBM.
The first occurred in 2011 when IBM, celebrating its centenary year, urged every employee to take-on a day of service on IBM pay. I opted to volunteer for V Care Foundation, a cancer care NGO and my association continues to date. The experience at V Care allowed me to dip my toes in the non-profit sector and was an eye opener.
Later in 2017, I was one of the few IBMers selected for the Corporate Service Corps (CSC), a skills-based volunteering program, and deputed to Morocco. It was here during a trip to Marrakech (the city hosted COP22 the previous year) that the gravity of our planetary crisis dawned on me and that saving our environment was everyone’s responsibility. IBM-CSC resulted in an accelerated realisation that for social and environmental impact to be sustainable, it was essential to bring synergy between the private and non-profit sectors, governments and civil society.
On my flight back home from Morocco, I made up my mind to cross-over to the social sector on hitting IBM retirement age which was just a few months down the road and soon enrolled in a leadership program offered by India Leaders for Social Sector(ILSS). Here, through a process of self-discovery, I decided to devote the rest of my life to building awareness of preserving our planet and making our economics more sustainable and inclusive. I felt equipped to take the plunge and started work with Pyxera Global, a D.C. based non-profit.
Soon after starting my new career, I was fortunate to have encountered the Radical Transformation Leadership (RTL) program which laid bare the nuances of the social sector. It focused on developing change makers and strengthening one’s capability to shift unwholesome systems and cultural norms. It also helped me establish linkages between social change and personal self-transformation.
RTL introduced me to the discipline of systems thinking and I was keen to get grounded in systems theory and change. My pursuit led me to a certification in systems thinking from eCornell followed by the Systems View of Life, an advanced systems thinking program, offered by Capra Course.
Systems thinking is a space for refining our mental models of complex social problems by unearthing inter-relationships between people, things, phenomena and our planet in a way that cognitive bias is removed and polarization is lessened. For instance, energy shortage, environmental degradation, climate change, economic inequality, social injustice, violence, and war cannot be seen as different problems but in fact are different facets of the same problem.
Now, several decades later, looking back, everything has fallen in place neatly, quite like finding my Ikigai, the Japanese art of bringing meaning and happiness into one’s life. This new-found equanimity gave me the power to set up Shaktify, an assimilation of my life-long learnings.
Shaktify aims to build a constellation of changemakers to unleash an individual’s potential by helping her or him gain a unifying world view and foster positive change in the communities they live and work in. It powers social and environmental change to help people and organizations find common ground to work together for human and planetary welfare. Shaktify’s forte lies in its ability to take a systemic view of global and local challenges by providing insights and resources.
Shaktify will achieve its mission through a signature series of webinars, by storytelling, by raising awareness of systems thinking through a set of masterclasses, providing a library of pro-bono resources and offering consulting and coaching services to enhance social impact.
Welcome to the world of Shaktify!