In today’s competitive economy, successful companies cannot be driven solely by the accumulation of wealth, according to entrepreneur Vijay Eswaran. The most successful companies have discovered that productivity and financial success come from the promotion of employee wellness and environmentally friendly workplaces. Through years of studies, researchers have found that striking a good work/life balance and ensuring company dedication to improving employee quality of life actually promotes innovation and saves money. Being a good corporate citizen pays dividends as well. By creating a corporate culture that gives back or rallies around a cause, you not only make the world a better place, but you create loyal customers who believe in your brand.
One company dedicated to this kind of corporate responsibility is QI Group. QI Group is a diversified multinational entity that caters to a variety of businesses, including education, hospitality, direct selling, financial services, and retail. It employs more than 1,500 people across 30 countries, with key regional offices in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines. The company’s main focus is to help people work by providing solutions that promote entrepreneurship, enhance urban lifestyles, and reform the education sector. QI Group is constantly evolving and expanding through tactical investments in global markets, creating high-quality interrelated ventures, products, and services worldwide.
Founded by Vijay Eswaran and Joseph Bismark, who are both advocates of value-based leadership, QI Group commits a full 10 percent of its profits to philanthropy. The idea for QI Group came from Eswaran’s work after the Asian financial crisis of 1998. In the aftermath, he established a direct selling network in the Philippines called QNET. By combining direct selling and e-commerce, he revolutionized the industry. The company expanded quickly to become a leader in the Philippines, and eventually reached other South-East Asian markets.
QNET expanded further to become the dominant direct selling network in the Middle East and, in recent years, has led the industry’s expansion into Africa. Supporting a growing network of entrepreneurs at QNET gave Eswaran, in his own words, “the bedrock of today’s QI Group.” QI Group has made its dedication to corporate responsibility a public part of its mission statement, championing employee wellness and an eco-friendly work environment. QI Group has taken this commitment so seriously that it made the promotion of vegetarianism a corporate policy.
Mr. Eswaran himself is a lifelong vegetarian and firmly believes in sharing his values with others. He understands that dietary choices belong to the individual, but he is open to disclosing his personal reasons behind his vegetarian lifestyle. Eswaran believes that food is “defined by tradition and culture, but we should not stop there. Eating should be a choice. It should be dictated by conscience.” He is firm in his personal belief that eating meat is wrong for a number of reasons beyond a compassion for animals. A vegetarian lifestyle is, he says, “a choice for health, for natural survival, for oneself, for the world, a choice for life.”
His choice to be a vegetarian begins with biology. There are many indications that the human body is not meant to eat meat. Our flat teeth and fingernails, for example, suggest that we are meant to be vegetarians. Studies over the years have repeatedly confirmed that a balanced vegetarian diet can provide all the nutrients necessary for optimum health – including iron and protein. It is a myth that humans require animal protein for optimal health, as evidenced by the growing list of vegetarian Olympians and professional athletes like Carl Lewis and Venus Williams.
There are much broader benefits to global health and prosperity as well. A vegetarian diet costs less not only for your personal bank account, but also from a global and humanitarian perspective. Countries stand to save billions of dollars in healthcare as a result of disease prevention associated with plant-based diets. People who live in countries where vegetarian diets are the norm, for instance, tend to live longer and healthier lives.
Mahatma Gandhi once said that “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” In the west, we have a different relationship with animals and food. Western countries raise most livestock in factory farms, where animals are crowded together, disfigured, and treated like machines. We allow this suffering because it is kept hidden from public view, but animals have rights too. Slaughterhouses are like battlefields, and by dissociating our food from the unnecessary cruelty, we continue to allow it to happen. There are hidden consequences for the environment that we also choose to ignore.
The animals are so densely packed into factory farms that their waste builds up in the environment in higher concentrations than are natural or healthy, creating a toxic sludge that poisons our waterways and oceans. The use of land and water for this type of agribusiness is completely inefficient. Some studies estimate that 95 percent of the food and water energy required for a pound of meat is waste. What’s worse is that this waste happens in countries where people are starving. These are valuable resources that could be allocated as more food and fresh water for people in need.
Some people are drawn to a plant-based diet for health, and others for religious purposes, but many people choose a vegetarian diet to curb animal cruelty. Compassion for animals and animal rights are driving factors behind Mr. Eswaran’s vegetarian ways. He is inspired by a combination of ancient wisdom and contemporary philosophy. Hippocrates, known as the Father of Medicine, believed that “the soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body of each is different.”
I am proud to run #Businesses built on #compassion, with a mission to bring change to the world. In line with this, all QI Group Companies uphold #vegetarian principles by adopting a company-wide vegetarian policy. https://t.co/X39A6P1Miy
— Vijay Eswaran (@VjayEswaran) June 29, 2018
As a value-based leader, Eswaran founded a corporate policy dedicated to living a vegetarian lifestyle. He says that “all living beings are spiritual beings because all life takes breath. Every living entity is interdependent, and we all share a common life force. Whatever we do in violence or in compassion affects everything and everyone.” Gandhi is the corporate icon for QI Group. Inspired by the concept of ahimsa, or extreme non-violence, the company believes that all life is sacred. This is the foundation for the practice of vegetarianism, which Gandhi also lived by.
Joseph Bismark is the co-founder of QI Group, and says that, “as a company, we believe in nonviolence and living in harmony with everyone and the Earth.” Mr. Bismark grew up in a typical meat-eating household, but switched to a vegan diet when he became influenced by holistic health and wellness. Eswaran and Bismark both believe that vegetarianism is not a food choice, lifestyle statement, or even a health preference. For them, it is a statement that all life is sacred. That is why QI Group, from its founding, has followed this fundamental rule, and has remained vegetarian in all of its events, be it a corporate lunch, press event, or feeding thousands at a convention.
This policy of vegetarianism became part of RHYTHM – an acronym that represents the notion that one’s life should be guided by a rhythm that helps one Raise Yourself To Help Mankind, the guiding principle of QI Group. When you live a vegetarian lifestyle, you help promote animal rights and respect for the environment, reduce global warming, and aid in alleviating world hunger.
The majority of people have no idea the damage they do on a global scale by choosing to eat meat. The consumption of meat increases a person’s carbon footprint, especially when eating poultry and cattle raised on factory farms meant specifically for human consumption. This is because land and water are limited resources that are beginning to run out. The world’s population is increasing, creating growing competition for these limited resources and drastically increasing the likelihood of conflict.
The same land and water used to raise livestock is also needed to grow and harvest feed grain. This double allocation of resources leads to an alarming amount of inefficiency and waste. While the average vegetarian consumes between 135 kg and 180 kg of grain per year, the average meat-eater is responsible for the consumption of over 900 kg of grain per year. This is because 80 percent of that grain is first digested by livestock, compounding the impact on the environment.
With a growing population, a diet that includes animal products is not environmentally sustainable. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that more than 1.7 billion animals are used in livestock production worldwide and occupy directly or indirectly approximately 30 percent of land on Earth that is not covered by ice. In the Amazon, for example, almost 70 percent of the forests have been replaced by land that is primarily used as cattle pastureland. The overgrazing has resulted in the loss of biodiversity and destroyed the productive capacity of ecosystems, particularly in arid environments. Livestock production also leads to unsustainable water use by demanding high volume and depleting local supplies. Animal waste is a serious concern, since only a third of the nutrients fed to animals are actually absorbed, and the rest pollutes lands and waters. Inadequate waste management causes pollution that impacts water quality.
The livestock industry, including feed production and transport, leaves a huge carbon footprint. The FAO estimates that the meat industry is responsible for about 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. This means that the effect that meat production has on the environment is now even more damaging than the impact made by the transportation industry. Another study by NASA found that consumption of meat is essentially the third largest net contributor to climate change pollution in the world.
Dangerous greenhouse gasses are released as products move along production and transportation lines before they finally reach your dining table. Almost half of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is attributable to animals raised for the food industry. That does not include the sources of greenhouse gas emissions that are unaccounted for in emission calculations. Methane gas emissions from the accumulation of livestock manure on a large scale is a prime example of a difficult-to-measure impact, and the methane emission does not stop there. Even more methane, along with nitrous oxide, is released into the atmosphere when this type of animal waste is processed.
Even a modest reduction in the production of meat and other animal products goes a long way in the fight to conserve our planet and advocate for a more sustainable way of life. We forget that the crops needed to feed livestock could instead be feeding people who are in desperate need of it. Whichever way you look at it, the livestock sector emerges as a significant contributor to environmental problems at every scale from local to global, including land degradation, climate change, air pollution, water shortage, and loss of biodiversity. For Vijay Eswaran, the answer is simple. The choice to live a plant-based lifestyle consumes less of the planet’s limited resources. Everyone has the power to reduce their carbon footprint and help reduce global warming. By adopting a vegetarian diet, you can help make a difference.
All this positive change brought on by the food we eat blends into Mr. Eswaran’s beliefs about community and spirituality. He brought these beliefs into the creation of QI Group’s guiding values by drawing from the wisdom of Gandhi. He believes that “behind every company lies a powerful story.” Eswaran has included corporate social responsibility in QI Group since its inception. It was Gandhi’s ideals that inspired a small group of people from different nationalities and cultures with common values and a common cause to create a multimillion-dollar business with a heart. Gandhi’s teachings about care, service, and integrity are woven into the fabric of QI Group’s leadership, giving them purpose and serving as a guide for everything they do as a company.
At the heart of QI Group lies a strong sense of purpose: a commitment to improving the world around them. They have created a culture that is not only dedicated to financial growth, but also community growth. The reason behind the establishment of the organization in 1998, and what drives it today, is what the leaders refer to as their “corporate heartbeat,” better known as RHYTHM (Raise Yourself To Help Mankind). This is the corporate philosophy of QI Group, and it’s all about following the path of Mahatma Gandhi, who believed that to change the world, you must first change yourself. Gandhi is QI Group’s corporate icon, and the company’s corporate philosophy was derived from the key principles by which he led his life. The concept of RHYTHM is woven into the DNA of QI Group, and employees across all levels of the company strive to live and breathe this ideal. Following his own values and a long history of philanthropy, it was a natural progression for Eswaran to set up a social responsibility arm of QI Group, so, in 2005, the RYTHM Foundation was formed and registered in Hong Kong.
The RYTHM Foundation is committed to educating, inspiring, and working with others to create a brighter future for those in need. It keeps alive QI Group’s social conscience as a reminder of the importance of making a difference, whether in personal lives, the workplace, community, or society in general. The Foundation’s mission is to go above and beyond in caring for the less fortunate by creating better living conditions and opportunities for them to rise above hardship. It strives to create a better and safer world for children, who are the embodiment of the future. Through its dedication and combined efforts with other organizations, the RYTHM Foundation fosters social change that makes an impact in the lives of the most at-risk members of society. The Foundation stimulates positive change by improving systems, inventing and teaching new approaches, and creating sustainable solutions. In combination with a plant-based lifestyle, this belief drives the Foundation to be mindful and respectful of the environment and communities it serves.
The compassionate life of a vegetarian goes well beyond animal rights; it is an integral part of mankind’s overall health and happiness. The ideals that Vijay Eswaran has built into QI Group come from his own beliefs, and being a value-based leader, has only helped him thrive, improving the lives of the people who work for QI Group and also fulfilling the company’s goal of improving the world.
