HBR's 10 Must Reads on Creative Teams Collection (7 Books)

Bring Your Breakthrough Ideas to Life

by Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux, and Michael Wade

IN 2003 THE Indian environmental researcher Narayana Peesapaty spotted an alarming trend: Groundwater levels in the region of Hyderabad were falling precipitously. He examined rainfall records but found nothing to explain the drop. Looking deeper, he discovered that the culprit was a change in agricultural practices. Many area farmers had abandoned millet—a traditional crop increasingly regarded as “the poor man’s food”—in favor of rice, a thirsty crop that requires 60 times as much water to grow. And because they had access to heavily subsidized electricity, the farmers were continuously pumping water into their fields.

Peesapaty tried to influence ...