Although not that well-known outside India, the Mahindra Group is a $12 billion+ monster with 120k employees in 100 countries.

It is now the largest auto maker in India – and the biggest tractor maker in the world. With its acquisition and turnaround of Satyam to form MahindraSatyam, it is also a big player in IT services, and some 15 other segments.

It may seem a bit odd then that its new brand positioning should be focused on building a mass movement through the use of social media.

The ‘Rise’ brand was launched to some fan-fare in India at the start of this year.

And now Mahindra has made good on the promise with the launch of http://www.sparktherise.com, an online platform where anyone who as a project that will help India to rise can ask for help with funding (which Mahindra provides), or with volunteers, expertise or equipment, which comes from the wider community.

Monthly grants are awarded by Mahindra to winners of both public online votes as well as a Mahindra jury. The Grand Finale takes place in March 2012, where the overall winners receive further
support.

Take a look at this infographic to see what has happened since the site launched on the 17th August 2011: http://bit.ly/qaisSparkTheRiseweek1

The initial rush of traffic was so intense that the server struggled with the loads and new hardware had to be added.

In the first week of SparkTheRise.com, a stunning 1,960 projects have been submitted. Submissions have averaged 11.7 per hour.

The first submission arrived within 8 minutes and 54 seconds, and most submissions have been in the technology category (542 projects), with Maharastra the most popular project location (251 projects).

A total of 85,630 volunteers are being sought, and equipment needed ranges from usual items such as computers to the extreme, such as 1 ton of coconut shell powder and a sensing satellite!

The platform is being built and run by Qais Consulting, an award-winning full services digital agency that was founded in Singapore in 2004, and which is currently setting up its India office in Mumbai. Global clients including Hilton, Sony and Standard Chartered Bank, while in India it works for national leaders such as Mahindra, Tata and Vodaphone.

Earlier this year, Mahindra engaged Qais as its Digital Agency of Record for the Rise brand initiative.

Published on: 6:03AM on 25th August 2011

I have so much respect for Steve Jobs. To turn a near-death company into the most valuable company in the world in 15 years, and to do it the right way: relentless imagination and drive. Amazing.

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i've heard so many of these kinds of stories - someone should collate them.

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Last week, fellow HBR blogger Tony Schwartz, whose writings are my favorites on this site (my own included), asserted that those who sacrifice greatly should be society's role models. Tony praised Warren Buffett for saying we should tax him and his billionaire peers more. Tony wrote that we should "save our admiration for people whose lives are about serving a greater good, and our greatest admiration for those who are willing to make sacrifices to do so."

I disagree on three fronts. First, financial sacrifice and serving the greater good are often not correlated. My role models for serving the greater good are not the people who walk around in sack cloth and ashes but industrialists like Gustavus Swift, who developed the refrigerated boxcar, which dramatically reduced life-threatening food-borne illness; the drug companies that continue to innovate new forms of protease inhibitors that keep my HIV-positive friends alive; and my friend who's risking his savings to start an ice cream business, which will employ a dozen people.

Second, this elevation of a particular type of sacrifice — financial sacrifice — keeps us from solving more of the most urgent social problems of our time. It reinforces the notion that we should not allow people who want to make money to do it in the humanitarian sector. It denies our humanitarian organizations some of the best talent in the world.

As a senior at Harvard I organized 38 classmates to bicycle 4,256 miles across the United States to raise money and awareness for hunger relief. It was a grueling, 9 1/2 week trek during a hot summer. People applauded the sacrifice I made. But I got back more than I contributed. I got to see America, appeared on the Today Show, and was admired for my selflessness. All these things made me feel just great about myself — as is probably the case for Warren Buffett, who is being lionized for his statement.

Human beings act out of self-interest. Including when they make sacrifices. When society restricts the types of self-interest that people may indulge when it comes to humanitarian causes to conspicuous (or even inconspicuous) acts of selflessness, we prohibit large numbers of very talented people from making a difference in the world, simply because their flavor of self-interest might be money. We laud the martyr who is paid poverty wages — and who lets everyone know it — without knowing anything about his talent or productivity. He gets his psychological needs met by being praised as one who sacrifices on behalf of others. Fine. Yet we refuse the talents of someone who may be far more productive because his self-interest is simply in dollars instead of sainthood.

Tony wrote that we should "blow up, once and for all, the myth that there's something admirable about earning a great deal of money." Doesn't that preclude admiration for Warren Buffett? And what about Bill Gates? It's clear that he has great love in his heart. But he decided that the best way to make a difference (beyond the massive difference his business made) was to make a ton of money, which would dramatically expand the philanthropy he would be capable of. What ambitious, smart, enterprising young student, who aspires to be the next Bill Gates, would trade the kind of say Gates has in dictating the course of tens of billions of philanthropic dollars for the chance to work for a sacrificial wage?

Some people assert that anyone who wants to make money just doesn't belong in the nonprofit sector. And yet it is the Rockefellers, Fords, Gateses, and countless other people who set out to make a lot of money who make the sector possible.

Tony wrote that he admires "the intensive care nurses I met several years ago...who get treated as second-class citizens by most of the surgeons, but still put in 12-hour shifts, often without the opportunity to sit down, or eat, or even go to the bathroom. They do so because they're devoted to saving lives." I don't want a nurse who hasn't had adequate sleep or food, who is distracted by the need to urinate, and who's resentful of my surgeon, to be administering my medication. I would rather they ditch their halos and go on strike for better working conditions.

And third, giving up money is not the only way to make a sacrifice. It is a sacrifice to give up being liked, as Steve Jobs has, in order to remain true to an insane standard of quality few around him could ever relate to. I'll take that kind of sacrifice, and what it has brought to the world, any day over someone willing to forgo a bit of money.

Thomas Merton, the famous Trappist monk and Catholic scribe wrote, "A monk is a man who has given up everything in order to possess everything. He . . . has abandoned desire in order to achieve the highest fulfillment of all desire." If giving to others brought monks nothing in return, it wouldn't be long before they were out looking for something more rewarding. We confuse everyone and everything by use of this word "selfless" to describe something that is actually self-fulfilling. The monks may be smarter or more enlightened than the rest of us, but they aren't more selfless. They've just figured out that doing for others delivers a better rate of return to self than a Maserati. To go around asking the rest of us to be selfless is to ask us to live up to an impossible standard, which even the monks themselves don't attempt to meet.

To deny the masses of suffering human beings the talents of people who could greatly help them — and to deny it because of a blanket opposition to paying valuable people the significant money they might be worth to do it — is to put our fantasies of the selfless society we wish we lived in ahead of the life and death situations of those who suffer. Do we really think it is of some comfort to the mother whose child just died of starvation to know that at least no one made much money in the failed effort to save her son?

Thomas Merton's abbey at Gethsemane sells cheese, and in the 160 years since it was founded it has grown from 44 monks to precisely 65. We have an inadequate supply of saints. If it is saints that the suffering masses of the world have to wait on, we are sentencing them to death.

something awesome.

GOOD, the media platform whose tagline is “for people who give a damn,” is acquiring Jumo, the social action site founded by Facebook (and Obama campaign) vet Chris Hughes.

Jumo, which Hughes founded in February 2010, is like a Facebook for nonprofits and NGOs: It lets them create pages on Jumo, which people can “support” (follow). There are currently about 15,000 organizations on Jumo.

GOOD was cofounded by Ben Goldhirsh, the son of Inc. Magazine founder Bernard Goldhirsh, in 2006 and started out as a print magazine. The GOOD network now includes a website, videos, and live events in addition to the magazine. Last year, it launched GOOD Corps, a social action-oriented marketing and consulting firm that has worked with brands like Pepsi and Toyota Prius. Terms of the deal, which is GOOD’s first acquisition, were not disclosed.

Hughes told Fast Company, which first reported the news of the acquisition (and is the sister publication of Inc.), that the partnership provides the editorial content that Jumo has been lacking:

“People need carefully curated content if you are going to sustain their interest. Particularly in the context of the not for profit world. People have to be consistently inspired, outraged, or excited. And there are nonprofits out there who are doing noble work in their communities and good jobs with their social outreach, but simply can’t generate enough content, particularly on local issues.”

Hughes will join GOOD as a senior advisor, and Jumo content will be integrated under the GOOD umbrella. “As our teams combine, you will see the emergence of a single, vibrant online network on GOOD.is,” Hughes writes on the Jumo blog. “I will be teaming up with GOOD’s CEO, Ben Goldhirsh, to help grow GOOD and Jumo through an important stage of development. And in the spirit of our heritage as a non-profit, we will be open-sourcing our own codebase to enable other social entrepreneurs to use our progress thus far for their own endeavors.”