I got to spend a week in Pune and Mumbai on business a couple of months ago. It was such a refreshing change from America, where everyone is miserable because they can’t find a job. I talked to a couple of sharp young twenty-somethings who told me they change jobs (on purpose!) a couple of times a year just to meet new girls. It’s no problem finding new jobs – there are tons, and companies give out raises and bonuses every year just to try and keep workers from jumping ship too frequently.

So does this sound familiar to you?

Me neither.

It was fun thinking about how I’d deal with that novel situation – high attrition due to high demand for skilled workers and a relative shortage of those workers. If you’re going to outsource to India, how do you handle the HR/communications challenges?

Well, you could try to create a workplace that’s too cool to leave. My ideas:

1) Have the nicest office around. Plenty of American and European companies open offices in Mumbai or Hyderabad or Pune and, in an effort to make the most out of what’s probably a cost-saving effort in the first place, choose dank cinder block rooms and furnish them with crappy old furniture and computers. Wouldn’t you rather work someplace nice? The people I met who had been in their jobs for a year or more mostly worked in nice offices with windows, clean new desks and modern computers.

2) Offer a career path without a glass ceiling. If you shipped in a white guy from the States to be the local boss, and you don’t have a reasonable, visible plan in place to put a local in that job eventually, why should anyone ambitious stick around? Make sure there are advancement opportunities, including the training that’s needed to set Indians up for success in those higher-up jobs.

3) Make your workplace a community. It’s easy to leave a workplace behind when it’s a place that you go five times a week to earn your paycheck. It’s hard to leave a place where you know and like the people around you, and you are doing fun, important things with them that make your life better and richer. Set up get-togethers for everyone in the office and make sure they can bring their families to some events, and that there’s good food to eat. Coordinate community service efforts that are meaningful to your team – and ask them to define ‘meaningful’ and ‘service’.

4) Make your company a good place to work. I know, I’m coming back to Daniel Pink AGAIN but he makes such an important point: people aren’t only motivated by money. Your employees in India, like their colleagues in America or Europe, want to do interesting work with people who they like, and they want some ability to self-direct and choose what they do. It’s not all about the money for them, either (although money might be a bigger motivating factor than we’re used to in the States…see #5.)

5) Ask. What does an American consultant really know about any of this, anyway? You can find out what you need to know about how to get your Indian employees to stick around…by asking them. Don’t let your employee research stop at the ‘engagement survey.’ You might get some data that shows your Indian employees are less engaged than those at the home office, but was that a surprise? Do some qualitative research in India and take the time to find out about what really matters to your workforce, before they all leave for better dating opportunities elsewhere.

Perhaps you’re sick of the topic — it sure can be hard to take any given day.  But if you’re open to a rational discussion of the evolution of our species, this may be one channel to which you ought to stay tuned.

After two days of an over-stuffed, mind-numbing agenda full of heady topics and full-tilt hobnobbing, roughly a third of the group returns for a day with the agenda collectively created by the participants.  This process, called Open Space, was expertly facilitated by Jerry Michalski, and the session draws out the topics people want to discuss.  From tightly huddled six-person intensives to ranging 40-person explorations, the day exemplifies the open source spirit of the community, a yin to the bustling yang of the previous 48 hours.  The next three photos are images of the wall of topics that got discussed.  Since each person had already presented their idea by standing up on a stage and speaking to the topic for something like 45 seconds, you’ll just get a snapshot of each discussion.  For the full benefit, well, you had to be there.  Nonetheless, this should provide a peek into what’s on the mind of the most collaborative third of the thought leaders at the edge of impact investing.

What does this make you think?

Still think global warming is in question?  Still think we’re going to return to the old financial stability?  Still think those two are separate issues?  The screenshot I just pulled from Google (right) is the latest in a long line of hard news (as opposed to debatable opinion) to disbuse you of that.

The earth is rumbling, as the recent global series of earthquakes can show.  The latest is the Icelandic volcano that has stranded travelers on one side of the Atlantic or the other, resulting in measurable financial impact and adding to the still-escalating costs on nearly every continent from recent “natural disasters.”

Meanwhile, the fallout from the financial crisis continues to grow, as the lead story at Google implies.  To think that the global banks are going to return to normal is sheer folly.  An unnamed advisor and thought leader in the impact investing field told us this weekend at a currency retreat (report on that is coming) that the Bilderberg group is already designing the next global currency, and that the world will have to forgive trillions of debt (much of it American) in the process of stabilizing the global economy.  Whether you believe this is conspiracy theory or a real conspiracy depends more on your world view, than on what’s actually happening.

Does the world really need another iPhone App?  w1sd0m partner Cameron Burgess ponders this on the eve of the first Startup Weekend with a triple-bottom-line frame.  Join him tonight to dig in on what that might really mean.

Triple Pundit reported on a different angle of this intersection at SXSWi, and called it the “Big Green Disconnect” between tech and sustainability communities, saying “the few green related panels were under attended and often rudimentary,” suggesting that each community is talking a different language.  Our friend and advisor Bill Shutkin had a similar, less politic rant over dinner a few weeks back, along the lines of “do we really need another Twitter app while our energy and financial systems are in crisis?.” Both comparisons were predated by Silicon Valley tech guru Tim O’Reilly’s call in 2008 to “work on something that matters,” where he beat a drum of “create more value than you extract.”

So, now the meme has been released, and some cool kids in technology (largely a comfortable-if-not-affluent crowd from a global perspective) think social entrepreneurship is the next big thing.  Mostly, this is good.  Right?

Well… a great piece in the NY Times on March 14th reported a story that pointed to an important trend — when inundated with snow, the Washington Post was not using Twitter, YouTube or Foursquare, but rather Ushahidi, an IT platform built in Kenya, to map road blockages and resource availability during the disruptive storm.

The article points out, “Ushahidi comes from another world [than Silicon Valley], in which entrepreneurship is born of hardship and innovators focus on doing more with less, rather than on selling you new and improved stuff.  Because Ushahidi originated in crisis, no one tried to patent and monopolize it.  Because Kenya is poor, with computer systems out of the reach of many, Ushahidi made its system work on cellphones.  Because Ushahidi had no venture-capital backing, it used open-source software and was thus free to let others remix its tool for new projects.”

The Washington Post serves an important lesson to the Austin-Boulder-SF-Cambridge crowd of digi-do-gooders and green lemmings at SXSW.  Even thought an important tide is tipping in the consciousness of the web-tools crowd, practical results still seem far off.  And in the (currently somewhat less) well-financed hubs all trying to “the next Silicon Valley,” e-mails about new conferences, magazines and other gathering points for this new intersection are traveling the web today.  The space will surely evolve, but today, the bottom line remains pretty much single in the tech community.

As Triple Pundit points out, much of the progressive IT community is still pretty slow to get even the second layer of complexity in the massive puzzle of global human sustainability, even as they drink the free green beer at a SXSW party called “Good Capitalist.”  In the meantime, the ability to actually get things done is created by people who have a pressing, immediate need for the transformation of data and information into the knowledge and understanding that can affect practical decision-making.  As the back-to-back DC blizzards (a climate anomaly, at least) pressed the city into micro-catastrophe, tools borne out of crisis trumped tools born out of opportunity.

Even though sustainability thinkers like Shutkin debate the value of “sky is falling” framing for the presentation of a new social innovation, we think there’s more Nairobi (necessity is the mother of invention) and less Sunnyvale, CA (wouldn’t if be cool if…) in creating social-purpose IT.  The consciousness shift will be complete when technological innovators realize that the balance is not between making profits and serving people, but between earth’s resources serving 3 billion people or 9 billion.  Until that shift happens, we’ll still be chipping ice off the icebergs for our drinks at the next party.

President Nicolas Sarkozy told the French national statistics agency Monday to take greater account of factors like quality of life and the environment when measuring the country’s economic health.

Mr. Sarkozy made the request after accepting a report from a panel of top economists he had charged with reviewing the adequacy of the current standard of fiscal well-being: gross domestic product.

The panel, chaired by two Nobel economists, Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University and Amartya Sen of Harvard University, concluded that G.D.P. was insufficient and that measures of sustainability and human well-being should be included.

Sarkozy plans to present the findings to the G20 Summit in two weeks, according to the piece, and plans to encourage other countries to consider a different strategy.

GDP has been under fire in some progressive and academic circles for years, generally charged with under-reporting human health and quality of life issues, while focusing too much importance on macro-level financial and economic indicators.  GDP also does not take into account environmental factors, including greenhouse gas emissions, which are now widely recognized as a key factor in measuring human enterprise and progress.  Philosophically, the concept of gross domestic product is, itself, a metaphor for the problems we are facing as a global society — we have passed a tipping point; more is not universally better, and quality must be considered alongside quantity for any measure of human endeavor.  The Times piece continues,

For instance, “developing countries may be encouraged to allow a foreign mining company to develop a mine, even though the country receives low royalties, even though the environment may be degraded, and even though miners may be exposed to health hazards,” the report says, “because by doing so G.D.P. will be increased.”

The mistake many radical progressives make is throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. It’s not that economic growth is evil, per se, but that it’s not the only important measure of  a country economic progress.

“There isn’t a single indicator that can encompass everything,” said Enrico Giovannini, the chairman of the Italian national statistics agency, Istat. “It’s not a question of replacing G.D.P. It’s a question of complementing it with other indicators that can provide other measures of well-being.”

Our two-part report ran this week at the nuPOLIS blog.

• Part 1 covers our observations about the field of social innovation.  In short, the field of social innovation is in its very early days, and there is a significant need for more work and better organization to increase impact.
• Part 2 highlights the people, organizations and initiatives that caught our attention, and are worthy of further review.

In summary, it was a wonderful and enriching experience for which I am humbly thankful.  It has further enhanced our resolve to get to work here at home, creating and amplifying the social innovations that will change the lives of our communities, and ensure a sustainable future for our children.

As we wrote in our new feature at nuPOLIS,

Air travel is the most damaging form of travel when it comes to global warming — yet most of us “social change agents” depend on it for our professional work. It’s time to stop avoiding the practical and ethical dilemmas.

Please share your thoughts, and contribute to the collective wisdom on this challenging issue.