>
Thanking
you
With warm regards
Sincerely yours
പ്രൊഫ്. കെ.എസ്.ചന്ദ്രശേഖർ
Professor and Director
School of Business Management and Legal studies
University of Kerala(കേരള സർവകലാശ)ല), Kariyavattom
Thiruvananthapuram 695581
® KRA A18, Chettikulangara, Thiruvananthapuram 695001
Phone: R: 0471 2476238, 04712412179 extn: 13, +919447268840
LEVEL 6 CONTRIBUTOR: kscnair Dear Prof. Bholanath Dutta ji,
Thanks once again,
- Our prime minister did not hesitate to bring up this issue on the occasion of independence day celebration at his hands; UN summit 2015 too has prioritized sanitation.
- Thanks for sharing truly inspiring world-class (WC) Flush Revolution.
- Mahatma Gandhi ji had once said: Be the change you want to see in the world!
G.S.Autee
From: join_mtc@googlegroups.com <join_mtc@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Prof. Bholanath Dutta <bnath.dutta@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, September 26, 2015 3:23 PM
To: join_mtc@googlegroups.com
Subject: [MTC Global] Toilet Man Jack Sim's push for the Flush Revolution--Truly Inspiring--SINGAPORE: Self-professed "Toilet Man" or "Mr Toilet", Jack Sim was a successful businessman who turned his attention to toilets about 15 years ago. He started the Restroom Association of Singapore, then the World Toilet Organisation (WTO) to ensure cleanliness in Singapore toilets and to ensure that people in other countries, such as India, got access to toilets.
His efforts have earned him many accolades, including Time Magazine's Hero of the Environment in 2008. He also managed to get the UN to honour Nov 19, the WTO's founding Day as World Toilet Day.
Sim is also part of a feature-length documentary, called Flush Revolution, which tells the story of international leaders like him, who are striving to improve access to proper sanitation. The documentary is set to be released in early 2017.
938LIVE's Bharati Jagdish sat down with him, to talk about his growth - first as an entrepreneur, then as a social activist.
HIS START IN LIFE
JACK: When we were growing up, we were very poor and my father was earning a salary of S$90 a month, which after 35 years, became S$350.
BHARATI: What kind of work was he doing?
JACK: He was a provision shop assistant. Part of his job was to deliver bottled drinks to the higher floors of the building. When the lift broke down, he had to climb up the stairs, physically carrying all the bottles - this was very hard labour, a very hard job. Through this, I saw how being diligent, being very loyal to the boss is a good thing.
My mother was a very entrepreneurial woman, although she had never been to school. She started with investing a dollar to go to the community centre to learn how to teach sewing, sewing smocking. Then she taught the neighbours - six students - the same lesson for one dollar each, so she earned S$6. From this, I learnt that business is very easy to do. From one dollar, you could make S$6 the next evening by repeating everything you learnt the night before.
From there, she became a haberdasher. She sold the cloth, the wool, the needles and thread. And then she sold the end product - cushions to people who owned cars. And so, in this very simple business, there was a training fee, there was a material profit and there was a trading profit. There was also job creation for the neighbours' women because they got to sew products that they could sell and earn an income from. So there was a social entrepreneurship element too.
BHARATI: Did she make a good enough living to make your life comfortable though?
JACK: Yeah, after she did all this, we were able to pay for renting a 3-room HDB flat in Jalan Bahagia, and were eventually able to buy it for S$6,500. She went on to fund the whole family, three children's education. Of course, unfortunately, all of us did very badly in school. So all three of us became entrepreneurs and I think failing in school was very good for us, because it made us become business people. First, we became sales people, then business people.
BHARATI: Why didn't you do so well in school? Why weren't you interested in that kind of academic success?
JACK: Yeah, I was very talkative, always joking at the back of the class and disturbing the teachers, so very often, I was told to stand outside the class. For the teacher it was very convenient, but it meant I learnt nothing, so I failed most of the time. Also, I was very often sent for public caning by the principal on stage, so that helped me in terms of having no stage fright and be better at public speaking.
Everything in life can be positive. So failing in school means you should do business and get more money than you would working for somebody. I think that, as long as you are an optimist and as long as you keep on looking at what's next.
BHARATI: Aside from not being academically inclined, what made you want to enter the business world? You did everything from sell roof tiles to setting up an international school in Singapore.
JACK: Every time I think of a need, I want to solve it. So today I do social work, that's the same. Look at the need – toilets, poverty alleviation, the need for a new definition of success - all these needs drive the solution.
BHARATI: Aside from fulfilling needs, surely there was a monetary motivation to all that you did, in the initial years. Some people have targets. They think: "By the time I'm thirty I want to be a millionaire." What about you?
JACK: No, no, I didn't. I just think that life guides you. Every time you see a no-entry sign, it means don't go here, go somewhere else, but it doesn't say go where. So you have to go and find new clues on what to do.
BHARATI: Yet, after you became successful, you decided to sell off your businesses to be financially free and eventually went into the non-profit sector full-time.
JACK: After forty, I realized there's only forty more years of existence and then you die, and you don't need a lot of money to live forty years in a very moderate, middle class manner. Eating in hawker centers, you know. So why waste time making more money that you won't need, whereas the main currency of life is time. If we can create a lot of impact that triggers other people to take ownership and become the champions themselves, I think that is more meaningful.
LOOKING AT TOILETS
BHARATI: You started the Restroom Association. What happened to make you want to devote your time to this?
JACK: Because it's something that people don't want to do, and when then-Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong said: "We should measure our graciousness according to the cleanliness of our public toilets", I thought the reality is that we have got untrained, unskilled toilet cleaners, poor design in the ergonomics and also that we don't have a vision, so I think that once we have that, the behaviour will be better. And so I started the Restroom Association.
BHARATI: You mentioned earlier that as you were growing up, you lived in poor conditions, in an attap house. Did you have your own toilet? Your family?
JACK: We didn't have a toilet. We had a row of bucket systems - common toilets outside and then we had to go to those toilets. And it was traumatic. Other people's poop, and there were worms - a lot of intestinal worms - because all the children had intestinal worms. And there were also sanitary napkins with blood ... And there were the big shiny green flies that would come to you while you are going. It was terrible, so I always did it in the chamber pot at home and my mother would go and dump it in the bucket. But when we first moved to the 3-room flat, it was like paradise. Felt like we were the same standard as the British 'Ang Moh' toilet.
BHARATI: We don't have such problems now, but in the rest of the world, there are millions, billions who still don't have access to toilets. So now tell me how you're trying to fix this.
JACK: The big problem is to make sure that 2.5 billion people around the world also gain access to toilets, at least proper sanitation that doesn't pollute the rivers and doesn't transmit diseases. I will be instigating lots and lots of people every day to solve this problem. So in Andhra Pradesh, I'm going to make this state the sanitation model of excellence and then other states will copy.
BHARATI: You were a successful salesman, so how do you use your selling skills to get attention for this issue in terms of getting governments to take action. I understand that you've managed to do this in India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made toilet accessibility and toilets in homes one of his government's priorities, but what did it take exactly?
JACK: We tell jokes and we make it very funny, so the media really loves our stories.
If we had not legitimised the toilet subject and turned it from a dirty word into a clean word, I think it would have been very difficult for a politician to do that.When people make fun, when they laugh, it is a positive. It means that they are listening and paying attention. There are thousands of agendas competing for attention. Our agenda is "shit". It is right at the bottom and if you want to compete with visibility for this agenda, then you need to get attention. We called ourselves the WTO (World Toilet Organisation). That sounds like World Trade Organisation. It gets attention. Then you tell about the serious facts of 2.5 billion people not having toilets, and the 1 million children dying of diarrhoea and diseases every year, and how girls drop out of school because the schools have no toilets and all that.
And if you start telling this too seriously, they fall asleep. So you tell them something quite funny, and then you tell them something quite serious. If your story is the WTO, then it's very funny, it's the other World Trade Organisation, the other WTO. And then we say, this WTO is about big and small businesses, which again sounds like trade, but it's about going to shit and pee. And then you can say words like shit, and toilets.
BHARATI: To normalise them.
JACK: Yes, they will laugh about it and then when we tell them the facts, they will say: "Actually this is very important!"
BHARATI: But statistics show that toilet and sanitation promotion campaigns really still have a high failure rate. So maybe all this isn't really working.
JACK: I think there's a lot of effort, but they're mostly rational efforts. Most people require you to touch the limbic part of their brain, which is emotional. You have to make toilets fashionable, you have to make it as desirable as the television or the cellphone. And the reason that televisions and cellphones are desirable is not just their functionality. It is the status that's associated with them.
BHARATI: There are people in India, for instance, who have a cellphone and a TV set, but have no toilet.
JACK: Oh, tons of them. Lots of them - they squat in the open, shitting by the roadside while talking to their friends on the cellphone. This is a strange priority, but it is something that can be solved with turning toilet into a status symbol. So we're going to build toilets in Andhra Pradesh that are so beautiful that you don't even have to persuade somebody to have a toilet.
BHARATI: How beautiful is this toilet?
JACK: The toilet is colourful with tiles and looks like a rich man's toilet, they immediately say "I want to have one of that!"
BHARATI: No gold-plated taps, right?
JACK: (Chuckles) Basically, the toilet has to be so desirable that people would automatically want it. This is a vision that is very easy to achieve.
Model of a toilet Jack Sim is planning to build in India. (Photo: Jack Sim)
Because I grew up poor in an attap house, I know how dynamics of a neighbourhood are. People are always looking for somebody poorer to look down on, because they feel very insecure. So they are always worried about somebody looking down on them. The need for dignity is universal. So people would be very concerned that their neighbours have toilets that look beautiful and they would also want to have a toilet. They will do it because of jealousy, but they will justify it later on, to say that they bought it because of health and hygiene reasons.
BHARATI: How are you making this affordable to them?
JACK: Today in India you have a 15,000 Rupee (S$320) subsidy for people who don't have toilets to have one.
BHARATI: Are there cases where even after the toilet is built in the home, people don't use it?
JACK: Yes, if they don't understand what it's for, they'll continue to defecate openly in the field, the river and everywhere, and use that room for other purposes. Maybe a kitchen. Maybe a storeroom. The last time the last government built 32 million toilets, a lot of them became "ghost toilets". "Ghost toilet" means they are not used as toilets.
BHARATI: How will you resolve this?
JACK: We're going out to create a greeting called 'Aap Khush Hain?' which means "Are you happy?" We want to position the Indian toilet to be the happiest room in India. We will make ads in which movie stars, cricket stars, celebrities and high status people, religious leaders will ask people "Are you happy?" And they will go in and out of toilets.
So some Indian people ask me, "Why is it the happiest room in India?" I say I've interviewed a lot of Indian people, and they all told me that they are much happier after they visit a toilet than before. So they laugh, you know? But they agree, right?
BHARATI: I understand corruption can be an issue. That in many cases, money is committed to a project and it just doesn't happen.
JACK: It's a cultural thing that we have to get around. But these are things that you don't grumble about and you don't see them as difficulties. You can talk to the bureaucrat and you tell them that you are not going to do this. And when they don't expect it, there is a self-selection process.
There are bureaucrats who are really interested to improve their country. And you can work with those. And there are bureaucrats who are not interested as long as there is nothing for them. But sometimes, there is something for them - status. That means looking good. You always appeal to the good part of the person. If the person is 50 per cent corrupt, you deal with the 50 per cent non-corrupt part of him.
BHARATI: We've talked about problems around the world. What are the problems when it comes to sanitation and toilets in Singapore? You often say it is not the users fault. The toilets have to be designed to shape positive user behaviour.
JACK: The expectation rises as quality of life rises, and the politicians need to have the vision of a 100 per cent clean toilet situation in Singapore. And I've told them, you have do it like Changi Airport. And then they tell me: "Oh that means they have to employ a lot of people. That's wrong, that's wrong! I can't do that. I want the people to behave themselves".
BHARATI: What's wrong with that? Why should users be absolved of blame? Surely, we have a responsibility too.
JACK: You have to facilitate it. You have to maintain it.
For example, if you make it easier for people to dry their hands by providing paper towels, they will not flick the hands on the floor, and wet the floor and get all the footprints going around. If you see a piece of tissue paper in a urinal, then you will say, why did this guy throw a piece of tissue paper in the urinal? Because there's no dustbin next to it. So you put a dustbin next to it.
All this is facilitation. And you have to understand all the dynamics, ergonomics, all the behavioural issues, and facilitate it. But if you don't want to do that and you blame people and then you walk away feeling very justified, it's very irresponsible.
How did Changi Airport get toilet users to respect the space? Because the space respects them. When the space is clean and nice, your behaviour improves. When the place is dirty and scruffy, then your behaviour is bad.
BHARATI: Okay, let's talk about littering. I've noticed there is a bin next to mailboxes at HDB void decks, yet some people don't use it. They will throw take their junk mail onto the ground. So how would you explain that? That's facilitation, yet people are not using it properly.
JACK: So you have to study why are they doing that. It must be because it's more convenient to do that. You have to design a solution where it'll be more convenient to do the right thing. So you might want to have a dustbin with a very big mouth, you might have a dustbin where if they throw from a distance, they can't miss, something like that.
BHARATI: Where do you draw the line though? Catering to people's laziness versus getting people to be more responsible and building character.
JACK: You have to figure it out. If blaming people solves the problem, go ahead. If blaming people don't solve the problem, don't do it.
BHARATI: You also mentioned that toilet cleaners need to be paid more and professionalized. The Government has taken steps in recent times to address the plight of low-wage workers – including cleaners. But how do you ensure that all establishments invest in their training and salaries? Getting business people to invest more in these things – stocking toilet paper, soap, paying and training cleaners.
JACK: First, it must start with a vision. Whoever is making the policy has to see this end result. And if they don't see this end result, they are never going to make those policies that will reach this end result. If they see the result as "I will try, but you know lah, Singaporeans, hopeless lah. Oh come on, I am going to fail even no matter what", then you are not going to make it work, you know.
BHARATI: Some might say that business people and employers are ruthless, and you can't change their focus on the bottomline. They will continue to cut corners.
JACK: No, I think to solve problems, we have to be kind to everyone. No matter how ruthless they are, they have a gentle, compassionate streak in them. Every person is a good person if you appeal to his good side. If you blame him, he will become a bad person. To solve problems, you have to love the people who will be part of the solution. You cannot suspect them. You cannot despise them. You cannot moralise the problem. You look for what will work.
TACKLING POVERTY AND INEQUALITY
BHARATI: You've also started a poverty alleviation movement called BoP Hub, working to empower those who are at the base of the pyramid, not through altruism, but through capitalism. You've said that the pendulum of capitalism has "overswung" and caused a huge wealth gap. Yet you're trying to solve the problems of capitalism through - of all things - capitalism, by getting corporations to package everyday products like soap, electronics, etc, for the poorest 4 billion people, making the poor within those communities sellers and distributors, helping them earn money while increasing the standard of living in their communities.
JACK: When you donate money, you will never solve the problem. You know why? You create the market price of zero. When the market price is zero, no entrepreneur can start a business because they cannot compete with a free market, right? Then there's no job creation and no multiplier effect, and if you think about GNP that is the consumption, investment, and the government expenditure export minus import. So if you were to want to generate a vibrant economy, you have to make people do business, you have to create jobs.
BHARATI: How do you feel about income inequality in the Singapore context?
JACK: You have to put people in the centre of all your policies and all your solutions, not to show off that this is the richest country per capita.
Doesn't make any difference if it's third richest or first richest. What makes a difference is distribution of wealth that is more equitable. And the only way you can solve it is to create opportunity for these people. Capitalism was good to overcome the failure of communism, socialism, feudalism, and today capitalism has over-swung the pendulum and has started to create poverty and disparity and big human dissatisfaction.
So a new definition of success is needed, and we can use "relevance" as the new definition. If we change the measurement of success to "relevance", that means that having a lot of "show-off" items is no more fashionable. It may become very lame. If somebody goes to his Facebook page and says "I just bought a new Ferrari", and everybody tells them "if you want to be famous, join the circus. Don't tell me this kind of thing, you're showing your inferiority complex so badly".
If we then say "relevance" is the new definition of success, then Malala Yousafzai is a billionaire, and Donald Trump is not. I think Malala's message that girls should go to school resonated with a billion people. Whereas Donald Trump might have five billion dollars, we don't know, maybe it's just fictitious number, but it has no relevance to us.
BHARATI: What continues to inspire you?
JACK: Death. To use my remaining time as much as possible to create more usefulness through others and to hand it over to a lot of very talented people and to continue to create more and more. I'm very greedy about life because I know I'm going to die.
Best Regards,
Educate, Empower, Elevate
Prof. Bholanath Dutta
Founder, Convener & President- MTC Global
An Apex Global Advisory Body in Management Education
www.mtcglobal.org I www.mtcglobalaward.org I www.knowledge-cafe.org I
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