Haas, Happiness, and the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan

Happiness as a national objective serendipitously found Laura Unger, Brian Busch, and Cang Quach in their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) class taught by Kellie McElhaney at the U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business. The Kingdom of Bhutan is pioneering the path of national development that prioritizes the innovative notion of Gross National Happiness (GNH), balancing economic growth with nine other domains such as psychological well-being, community vitality, and environmental diversity. In an effort to actualize the development philosophy of GNH, as it impacts the Bhutanese economy and private sector, the investment arm of the Royal Government of Bhutan, Druk Holding and Investments (DHI), invited the trio to assist in the development of a CSR strategy and framework, that seeks to integrate key GNH principles, to be implemented by DHI and its portfolio companies. These companies include Bhutan Telecom and Druk Green Power Corporation, which together generate roughly 20% of the revenues of this fledgling democracy. DHI believes that the implementation of such a strategy and framework within the portfolio companies can serve as a model to guide Bhutan’s private sector and facilitate the adoption of GNH and CSR principles on the day-to-day operational level among such private sector participants.

To get a broader understanding of GNH and the ways in which CSR principles could be integrated into existing practices and institutions, the Haas team visited Bhutan over Spring Break to interview individuals representing a broad cross-section of Bhutanese society, including the Chairman of DHI, Lyonpo Om Pradhan, key management at several of DHI’s Portfolio Companies, civil servants, a member of Parliament, representatives from His Majesty’s Secretariat, the head of the GNH Commission, Dasho Karma Tshiteem and the Director of the Centre for Bhutan Studies, which is responsible for much of Bhutan’s scholarship related to GNH, Dasho Karma Ura. Laura notes “the gravity of this project insofar as the CSR Framework that our team develops and the resulting best practices will trickle into the portfolio companies and has the potential to be adapted by the private sector as well.” “Companies in Bhutan, a country guided by Buddhism, already exhibit many qualities of CSR,” Brian adds, “so our task is to capture the process in a robust opportunity recognition framework with associated metrics, reporting, and communication—the three main areas that need to be strengthened in all of the companies we interviewed.”

The project initiators and liaisons from DHI, Chimi Zangmo and Jonathan Mukai—an U.C. Berkeley alumnus, put great hopes on the team to deliver a solid and impactful framework. “The heavy lifting, however,” observes Cang, “will come from local GNH and CSR champions and visionaries like Lyonpo Om Pradhan, Dasho Karma Tshiteem, and Sangay Khandu, a member of parliament, who have the courage and leadership to coopt decision makers to tenaciously incorporate CSR strategy into every aspect of a company’s operations with a healthy tolerance for uncertainty in the early years.” This project has meaningfully touched the lives of Laura, Brian, and Cang—a former private equity consultant, micro-financier, and equity analyst respectively—in a business school that asks no less from its students than to go beyond oneself and challenge the status quo—perhaps to do corporate good by merging business with happiness.

By Cang V. Quach

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((Photos: Kyodo-Landov, Kyodo-AP)