Mandar Apte On How Social Enterprises Can Profitably Promote Peace

Mandar has worked at Shell for nearly two decades where he created and managed Shell’s prestigious GameChanger social innovation program investing in ideas that create shared value – business value and social impact.

In 2016, Mandar produced the From India With Love - a documentary film to reinvigorate the message of nonviolence in the world. Aligned with this mission, in Oct 2018, Mandar hosted the inaugural World Summit for Countering Violence & Extremism that brought together peace activists and law enforcement executives from across the world in the spirit of promoting peace and compassion in the world. For over a decade, Mandar has taught leadership programs using meditation practices for the International Association for Human Values and the Art of Living Foundation.

Mandar discusses his work of empowering individuals to come together in the spirit of healing and promoting peace as well as the key role of media for influencing social cohesion and systemic change.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led to your work in entrepreneurship and peace building?

[Mandar Apte] - Like everything in life, it wasn’t just a snap decision. Everybody thinks you wake up someday and become an entrepreneur, but I think life prepares you to play certain roles. In my case, my background and the life experiences led me down this rabbit hole of peace building and entrepreneurship.

In 2001, when I was working at Shell as a petroleum engineer, I was given an assignment in Nigeria. I vividly remember I was attacked by a mob, and a whole village came at us with sticks, swords and stones. We barely escaped in a Nigerian military truck, and that experience shook me.

Mob violence doesn't look at your belief systems, bank balance, or where you're from, and that day I felt like my exposure to violence in Nigeria was not about me, but about the perception that people have about the oil industry. That experience keeps shaping my life.

I remember attending a meditation program to enhance my own wellbeing and see how I could get over the trauma of this event. When I did this meditation class in 2002 in Houston, I realised unless trauma is healed, violence will perpetuate.

Those were my two milestones, and then in 2009, I was lucky enough to become part of the GameChanger incubator program at Shell. That's where I came across people who wanted to make a difference in the world, and the word for that was entrepreneurs. That is where I felt I gained the confidence to become one. Those are the moments I would look back on that made a big difference to my understanding of peace and the entrepreneurship ecosystem.

As the executive director of Cities4Peace, can you please share more about this organisation and how it’s creating resilience and peace in communities?

Fast forward to 2019, I was invited to Los Angeles by the chief of police. I had just finished a visiting scholarship at George Mason University, and I had started looking at how business models promote different types of violence.

For example, when drugs are sold on campuses, women are trafficked, or unreasonable wars happen, somebody is making money. Those business models perpetuate violence, so I started looking at if we could promote peace through business instead. That is the origin behind the Cities4Peace thought process.

I researched the cost of one homicide for the taxpayer, and concluded it is a staggering $8 million per murder. After this, Los Angeles became my first client, because in a large city like Los Angeles where there is a homicide almost every day, there’s a business reason for why the city should think about promoting peace.

The way to counter the business of violence is what I believe in, and that is the reason why we started working with communities where there is violence. That is the mission of the organisation I've started; we work with cities and communities where there is violence. We also don’t work with only one type of violence; we go with an open mind and look at different problems in urban settings.

In Australia for instance, what I'm working on is how do you become part of the solution to the rising domestic violence against women? Once you look at violence or peace from the point of view of the business model, then many solutions will come to you.

In the case of Los Angeles, our idea was can we take the members of the community who are gang members, victims of violence or local police officers, and train them to become ambassadors of peace?

Usually, these various stakeholder groups don't usually come together, and so that is what we were challenging ourselves to do in that first experiment. We researched and met with these various stakeholders, and we found that all of them are traumatised. That is the reason why they can come together, to build their own resilience. Once you have healed your trauma, or at least the process has started, compassion is right there.

The next step is how do I promote peace and compassion? That is the two-step journey we bring our stakeholders on, and what we do is promote resilience, mental wellbeing and trauma healing in individuals and communities. We empower them to think about the solution to building peace, because external solutions will not help.

People who have been impacted by gangs, both perpetrators and survivors, after they have finished our certification program, we empower them to think about how they can solve the problems that lead to violence in the first place?

What are the fundamental aspects of “intrapreneurship” and why is it necessary for companies to incentivise it in their own organisations?

Fundamentally, I think intrapreneurship is an entrepreneur working internally in a larger ecosystem, so an internal entrepreneur, hence “intrapreneur”.

Now, from my own experience with working at Shell for nearly two decades, companies will hire you like they hired me as a petroleum engineer. I was hired into the company to design pipelines and chemical treatment systems, and that was it.

The company didn’t look at what I’m doing in my life, and whether they could give me an access point to bring my passion to work. That’s what happened in my case, the passion I had is based on my own life experiences that I’ve shared with you.

I had taken up meditation practice, and within a year or two I had also become a trainer. Here I was putting nine hours into my corporate job designing pipelines, and at some point of time, you start to think about what the purpose is of your life.

Clearly, designing pipelines would never be the purpose of my life, so in my evenings and on the weekends, I used to go and teach meditation to American soldiers coming back from the Iraq or Afghanistan war, domestic violence victims, and law enforcement officers’.

I couldn’t think of a reason why Shell would allow me to bring that practice into the workplace until I met my friend and mentor [at that time, manager] who interviewed me for the GameChanger role. When he heard about what I was doing in my evenings, he asked, “will you be able to create a learning intervention and program that uses meditation as the “chocolate”, but the wrapper on the chocolate could be creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship?" This became the GameChanger role.

That is where I realised that until you meet somebody who understands the concept of the intrapreneur, you must keep your passion as a tempered radical locked inside without expressing it too much.

That's the fundamental difference between an entrepreneur and an intrapreneur, you need a garage, a small investment and a proof of concept. Going from an idea to a proof of concept is easy, but for an intrapreneur, taking an idea to a proof of concept is difficult until you meet somebody who values what you are bringing to the table.

Scale up however is easier for an intrapreneur, because they are working for a large organisation. Once that proof of concept is finished, the scale up becomes easier, whereas for an entrepreneur, scale up is not easy, because they don't have the networks or funding. That is primarily the reason why companies should incentivise employees to bring their passion to work, because you don't know what people can bring to the table.

If you create an environment where people, intrapreneurs, can try out ideas they believe in and that they’re passionate about, you can see whether there is a business reason as a company to support them. Then it’s about the shared value principle, where you make a business impact while creating a social impact. That's what the world needs today.

I hope that the people listening to this, especially the ones working in larger organisations (they don’t even have to be for profit companies) might think about if there is an internal change maker who might be within your offices who has never been kindled to bring their passion at work.

Can you describe the role of the media in inspiring collaboration in society and how are businesses and groups able to utilise communications to create change?

The world stands polarised on multiple issues in most countries that I've visited. I just came back from the United States, and the amount of polarisation and lack of trust in the media is quite depressing. Media can be used for good, and today you don't know who's paying for the media you are watching. That's why we need to have more media literacy, where we start asking people, "do you know what you're watching?"

Advertisements, videos, or short films can be a force for good, because stories matter. Stories, when they are more human, inspire you. That's where I think business and organisations can use storytelling. This is not from the point of view of making the population more depressed, where you’re telling people how many gun violence incidents have happened. You're telling the facts, and yes, the media also needs to say the facts.

The question is can you tell these facts in a way where they inspire people to act. That is the entrepreneurial gene; you need to stimulate people to think about being part of the solution. Sometimes we feel helpless because we see so much news about violence. In response, we have become immune and desensitised to it. That is why the role of the media in promoting peace and social cohesion is a passion of mine.

That's the reason why I produced my documentary film From India With Love where I was presenting facts and content inspiring people to become a change maker.

What are some of your secrets for creating stronger bonds and ties between polarised groups with diverging beliefs, ideologies, or goals?

I wouldn't call it my secret; I'm also learning as I'm doing this work. I can see that if you want to be a peace builder and to bring people together, the number one skill you need is to move past emotions. Unless you have the tools to manage the peace within, and this work is tireless, time consuming, and stressful, you shouldn’t even start.

That would be what I would say is my most important learning, I have never missed a single day of my meditation practice for the last 21 years. It gives you the ability to reconnect or recalibrate. No matter what happens in the external world, I need to be centred. That has been one of my key learnings.

My second learning is that when it comes to trauma, we all think of the negative things that have happened to us, but trauma can also be the positive things that never happened to you. When you look at people who are in violent conflicts, they could have different ideologies, beliefs, and even dreams.

There is an opportunity to create a beautiful space for each other where we can agree to disagree. I would say we need to look at simple lessons your grandmother taught you. Even if you have a conflict between a partner and a spouse, they should be able to come together at the end of the day for the sake of the child. They can make certain rules like I'm not going to fight in front of my child.

That's the example we can follow, while we cannot agree with everything that other people are saying, can we bring ourselves into civil conversations where we are allowed to agree to disagree on one or two things? That doesn't mean we do not agree on 95 other things, but that dynamics keeps our umbilical cords connected, we still belong to each other.

That is the secret sauce, how do you enable human connection, because you can live your life with all the logic you want, but at some point of time you need to make a journey from the head to the heart. The heart space is more loving, kind, and compassionate, and that's where the purpose of our life sits.

Whether you are a gang member or police officer, we need to find things which bring us together. Both sides want safe neighbourhoods and for our children to be happy, so those things can bring us together. That would be my second learning, to help people get over their trauma and find a way to keep communication with them.

What advice would you give to someone who's starting out on their entrepreneurship journey?

The best piece of advice for any entrepreneurship I’ve received is it’s a marathon, not a one hundred-metre dash. You need to prepare yourself for the long run, not just physically, but mentally. Practising meditation will help you with this.

My second piece of advice would be to keep yourself surrounded with one or two people in your network who have the free reign to give you critical feedback you will listen to. It's easy for us to think that nobody understands you. Maybe it's the universe telling you you need to pause and think about another way of accomplishing your goal.

Having a good friend with a shoulder to lean on is important but give them the permission to tell you bluntly whenever you're doing incorrectly. Surround yourself with people who care for you and want you to succeed.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating positive change?

I met recently with somebody that introduced me to a documentary produced by Steve Waugh, the cricket legend from Australia. In the film, he travels around India, and he has become a photographer. He now wants to combine his photography with his cricket acumen, so he plays cricket with blind students and people.

He can’t score runs, while he’s playing, he’s blindfolded to simulate their experience. He realises they are enjoying the game without what would be considered the most important sense of eyesight, and that is where I felt inspired there are people spending their time to bring the sport to marginalised individuals and groups.

I try to meet at least one social impact venture from diverse backgrounds every week. It doesn't have to be related to what I’m doing in my peace building work, so there are many projects which are inspiring. I think that was the full purpose of Steve [Waugh’s] documentary, and it inspired me that day. While he was a cricketing legend, he’s now putting his time and money into supporting social impact projects.

This is important for anybody who is successful, whether in the realms of sport, media, or business. Give back to the places and communities where they don't have anything, the joy you get from this is unparalleled.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend for our audience?

I have three resources to share. The first is a book I read about 10 years ago that changed my life. The title of the book is Ignore Everybody, and it's available on Amazon. You can even download a PDF, but that is a crucial principle in life, especially for an innovator.

You need to learn the skill of how to ignore everyone around you, otherwise you will always be pulled back by people who don't get what you’re doing or are jealous. Whatever those emotions are, you need to learn how to ignore everyone around you.

The second book I would recommend in that same stream of thought is called Celebrating Silence. Silence can be of two types, one is the mourning type of silence, and the other is a celebrative silence.

Being an entrepreneur is a lonely journey, and to get over that loneliness we need to learn how to be comfortable with ourselves and the silence around us. That is where meditation practice helps anybody, but especially for someone who is an innovator or entrepreneur.

The third and final resource I would recommend is a module that I have prepared. It's a one-hour module called Be The Change. This uses my documentary film, the wisdom of trauma, and some guided breath practices which teachers, police officers, and nurses have used. At the time of this interview, it's September 21st, and tomorrow is the International Day of Peace. Find some time to become peaceful within.