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The Social Intrapreneur: A person within a large corporation who takes direct action for innovation(s) which
address social or environmental challenges profitably.
Sumanta Kumar De, General Manager, Olam (Indonesia)
I am entrepreneurial, I love building and creating. I like being close to the problem and searching for a solution.
A sustainable business model is not about charity, it’s about win–win solutions.
I was born in Jamshedpur, India, a large town that developed around a steel company (Tata Steel) in one of
India’s poorest states, Jharkhand. I had a relatively comfortable, middle-class childhood but did see lots of
people well below the poverty line and really struggling – many were farmers who had given up on their farms
and moved into the city to take on menial, low-paid work and were now worse off than before.
When I look back at my childhood I do think I was lucky due to the influence I had from both my parents and
schooling. My parents focused on the values system, education and performance – integrity and honesty was
always chosen over financial profit alone. I went to Jesuit schools and now realise that unconsciously some of
these principles of simplicity, hard work and fairness have influenced my values in the long term.
Luckily, I was a good student, won lots of scholarships and enjoyed learning. I did a Bachelors Degree in Science
at one of the best universities in India and then decided to do a postgraduate qualification in Industrial
Relations and Labour Laws. I know it was not a typical decision; I did have offers to do finance/marketing and
more traditionally lucrative subjects but I decided to follow my heart. People management really fascinates me,
with a mix of both soft and hard skills. My education strengthened my belief that if you can get the people of
an organisation engaged then, with people as key drivers, 70% of the job is done.
The places to work in India after a postgraduate degree are the bluechip FMCG [fast-moving consumer goods]
companies such as Unilever, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble or the banking industry. It was what was expected
and so I went to work for Coca-Cola. They sent me to a state in India called Orissa which was plagued by
unemployment, poor infrastructure and very minimal industrial development. My job was to build up the
division of Coca-Cola there, with very little support, infrastructure or business processes.
And I loved it! I liked not having these support systems in place and at the age of 22 it is the closest I have come
to setting up my own business. It really gave me a complete picture of business and how to operate in an
environment externally where there are no established systems or ways of doing things. I realised I thrive
under chaos; I love not having a rule book and creating some of the rules, building something new. I had lots of
discretion and space to build networks, partnerships, go into society and see what they were doing and not
doing . . . I had to engage with people, learn how to communicate in Oriya and see things from their point of
view. It was critical to understand what type of relationship would work for both them and Coca-Cola.
I had no office and spent the first two years working out of a hot cramped local telephone booth. The owner
was eventually kind enough to give me a chair and a part of his table. I convinced the booth operator to
become a Coca-Cola distribution agent and today he is a dear friend and owns one of the largest and best
distribution systems for Coca-Cola in Eastern India. I was able to make that decision based on instinctive
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judgement and hence I owe my first lessons on entrepreneurship and win–win business deals to a very ordinary
telephone booth operator.
This stint in my career really made me realise that I thrive on the sheer enormity of a challenge, with no
direction, and like making my own way. After a couple of years, when things were becoming more established,
I started to get impatient. So I moved on to Unilever (then called Hindustan Lever Limited), another blue-chip
company but very different – very organised and with strong support systems. I found the processes there
constraining and only stayed two years. Unilever is a good employer, very professional and with robust
systems, but it was a mismatch for how I operate; for me the processes took away individual contribution,
uniqueness that individuals could bring.
And so in early 2005 I moved on to work with Olam. I joined precisely because it sounded exciting and there
was uncertainty about what needed to be done. In the interviews they said that I would be sent to Indonesia,
to a region I had never heard of, and there would be challenging opportunities – my role would be to build the
business and look for further business development opportunities. I would be in the cocoa business in
Sulawesi, Indonesia and would need to be entrepreneurial, to say the least! Now, years later, I can say that I
had landed in the right place.
For four years I worked out of Olam’s cocoa warehouse in Makassar, Indonesia as a business manager starting
from the ground up. My main job was to increase purchase volumes of dry cocoa beans from Sulawesi. Very
soon it became clear that generating this volume growth is easier said than done. Cocoa production in
Indonesia was in serious trouble at that time from pests and disease. In my zeal to buy more cocoa I was
spending at least 60% of my time on the ground, travelling in deep interiors for weeks at a time and this is
when I got close to the farmers, the villagers. I would have dinner in the evening with the farmers’ families or
the village elders and got to see what the real issues were. I needed that closeness and in-depth understanding
to be good at my job. Olam encouraged me to choose my own path for business development, to be
entrepreneurial.
At this time I started to realise that to make any progress we need to be credible with the farmers; one could
not just come with ideas for the business development, but rather ideas of how the farmer would benefit in the
longer term as well. We had to design a way to be close to the farm-gate and building value for them as well as
us. This experience really started to cement my ideas of what a good business model is, of creating win–win
situations. Previous programmes by other companies had not worked because it was about building profit for
the company alone and so when they stopped supporting the farmers . . . well, they were in trouble again.
So I had to re-engineer processes so that the programmes were beneficial to the farmer as well as us. We had
to find a way where the farmer is successful, in the longer term, which helped our success. It is difficult to do
this when there are no support systems, processes or manpower to do this sort of activity. Although I am
entrepreneurial, I did learn from Unilever that proper support systems can really help to scale up projects.
An idea began to emerge of a programme to train farmers, but it had to be in a win–win way. I researched the
idea in 2005, spoke with colleagues about it and got support and some resource commitment. A senior
colleague from London was travelling in Indonesia at this time with an important customer and over an
informal chat one evening the ideas of developing sustainable, traceable supply chain for cocoa really started
to take shape. We got customer commitment and we started the programme with 120 farmer families, to train
them on good agricultural practices focusing upon their needs. We started small, testing it out for six months.
And it became really popular, with neighbouring farmers wanting to join. But we did not have the manpower,
technical material and funding to scale it up and I realised that overcoming this bottleneck is where the real
success of the programme lies – to scale it up.
In 2007 we approached USAID [United States Agency for International Development] who were interested in
an Indonesian programme targeting the agricultural sector with long-term impact after the funding period was
over. To our good fortune, they contributed over US $1.8 million to beef up the programme and we extended
it. Olam focused on developing the relationships – creating farmer groups and providing critical market linkage
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so the farmer got training and could sell his cocoa beans at a transparent and fair price. It was called the
Amarta Programme and by 2010 it grew to include 22,000 farmer families. Now in 2012 it helps over 30,000
farmer families that we directly purchase cocoa beans from. It has been really successful and helped me
achieve professional goals of sustainable business volumes while making a difference to the community around
us. Olam now gets the best-quality cocoa, we give the fairest prices and get a stable and strong supply. The
farmers are involved in sustainable farming practices and are likely to stay invested in their future as cocoa
farmers.
I have to say I’m not a farmer and I don’t have the technical skills of a farmer. But I understood the farmer, had
a good working relationship and understood the context. I had an idea and saw the need and opportunity for
that idea. To me this was not a charity thing; it is a business model, a business opportunity. It made sense to
me and was a way to do my job successfully. That is what I am interested in: sustainable business models that
create win–win opportunities for all. It’s about recognising the need and creating an opportunity.
It was critical to understand the bigger picture, the inter-linkages between partners. But it would not have
succeeded without business acumen, execution skills and some hard-headed determination at times – most
importantly, the support from Olam and USAID. Being able to execute something like this is possible because
I’m working in Olam. It is a company that is very much about ‘Get on with it’, with lots of trust and confidence
in its people. Olam has an appetite for experimentation and even for failure. If we have about 20 of these
programmes going on around the world, maybe only five will be successful – but these five grow exponentially
and really help Olam to grow the rate it has grown and be the success it is. This entrepreneurial
encouragement really benefits Olam and the spirit of experimentation gives this groundbreaking growth. This
really excites and attracts the talent. It’s about selecting the right people, putting them in the right place,
letting them get on with it, empowering and trusting them, and directing them in what is right and wrong. The
employees will then do what is right.
I now have a team of over 300 people working out of various locations and believe that this entrepreneurial
spirit attracts them to Olam. It’s the ability to make a difference as an individual that is so important to me and
that has made Olam successful.
My advice? Well, my entrepreneurial streak has been very important, and the freedom to do my work. The
context at Olam to encourage, empower – this is so important. But it is critical to impact business and people at
the same time, to understand this business model. Just doing business alone at the expense of people will not
produce a sustainable or successful business. And execution of an idea is always more important than just the
idea alone – good execution comes from understanding the context, putting in place the systems and processes
that are needed and building good teams who are aligned.
Chapter 3: Social Intrapreneurs, of Employee engagement with sustainable business (N Exter, Routledge,
2013)