Shakti Saran

Background

About Shakti Saran

After working across the corporate and social sectors for about four decades, I founded SHAKTIFY, an effort to build a constellation of change-makers to precipitate social and environmental change. My corporate career lasted 33 years. As a banker, I discovered the power of lateral thinking during a financial market crash and as a management consultant, I honed the skills of thinking out-of-the-box. IBM introduced me to the social sector during an eye-opening, day of service – to commemorate IBM’s centenary celebration – and provided a subsequent secondment to Morocco for a month's life-changing, social sabbatical. Post-IBM, I crossed over to the non-profit sector to work with social purpose entity, Pyxera Global. where I gained remarkable insights on the slender but invaluable common ground between the social, private, and public sectors. SHAKTIFY is the culmination of my cumulative and diverse experience. It has been brought about by an accelerated realisation of a systems view to life and the role of various actors and institutions that help make our planet and humanity what it is for better or worse. My aim is to create ‘agency’ in individuals and inform, inspire, and instil the care and concern needed to create a thriving humanity and planet and provide resources for strategic and mindful action. The two key challenges that I intend to address are: 1. Although the world of business has since evolved considerably, economic systems remain blind to ecological considerations that have led to climate change and environmental havoc. While the world needs geographical boundaries to make the burden of administration manageable, the problem of ‘identity’ and ‘isms’ stubbornly persists. This manifests in ways that threatens peaceful coexistence on our planet. SHAKTIFY will achieve its mission through a series of blogs, webinars, masterclasses, systems consultancy and provide a set of pro bono resources for fuelling change. Through much of my adult life and my career, whether it was pursuing my MBA degree or in my corporate life, I oscillated between the world of business and the larger world view. At SHAKTIFY, this duality has given way to a unifying vision in which systems thinking and universal values show the way.