Ubuntu: I am because we are

I had heard of Ubuntu before, the profoundly simple message it conveys – the inescapable inter-connectedness of our existence as humans. How an acceptance of Ubuntu means living life openly, sharing and receiving with open arms, reveling in the success of others and despairing in their failures with complete acceptance of our inter-dependence.

 Now, more than ever, as we face a lockdown, our eyes open up to how connected we are, not only with our ‘near and dear ones’ but to humanity at large, in joys and in crises, how we crave ‘connection’ now to feel ‘complete’.

 But I reflect on Ubuntu now from a different perspective today. I am forced to think of Catalyst as a person. If I were to personify Catalyst, she would be a person also falling in the realm of Ubuntu. She has always been dependent on an ecosystem to thrive but now as Catalyst lies in a state of slowness and reflection, gaining back energy, she knows that when she wakes up in an altered world, she would depend on her ecosystem not to thrive but to even survive.

 Its inevitable, the reality of inter-dependence and inter-connectedness of businesses, more now than ever before. EVERYTHING, literally EVERYTHING would change. We would wake up in a world where survival would be at stake – but it wouldn’t be the toughest or the fittest that would survive, it would be the Ubuntu-Orgs, the ones that would truly open up to giving and receiving, the ones who would collaborate in a boundaryless fashion with an acceptance of the reality that it’s only together that we can stay alive. No insecurities about the success of other organizations but a sense of comfort and reassurance in other’s successes because what it signifies is that the industry is still relevant and there is place to thrive.

 In the reality of tomorrow, companies will cease to exist in isolation, Ubuntu-orgs would exist as part of a larger, inter-dependent, complex and self-supporting ecosystem.