Building Systems for Social Impact: A Conversation with FSG’s Nikhil Bumb
In this engaging conversation, Managing Director at FSG, Nikhil Bumb, sat down with E4E Relief’s Ashley Wilson Oster to explore his unique journey from engineering to social impact consulting. Connecting his background as the son of immigrants from rural India and his engineering training, Nikhil shares insights on systems thinking, organizational culture and the importance of creating environments where everyone can reach their potential—both internally within organizations and externally in the communities they serve.
Ashley Wilson Oster: I'd love to learn more about how you got into the work you are doing and what FSG is focusing on today. So let's start there – tell me a little bit about what led you to this work and introduce us to FSG.
Nikhil Bumb: There are three elements I like to highlight from my personal story that led me to FSG: (1) heritage, (2) academics and (3) prior professional experiences.
I'm the son of two immigrants from rural northwest India. They migrated to the U.S. in the late 70s and early 80s and really made sure that, as a family, we prioritized maintaining a connection to our roots and culture. We spent a lot of time going back to India as children and living for extended times with our relatives in these small towns and villages. Those summers in India growing up led to a curiosity and examination of how context contributes creating self-advancement and why different people end up with different outcomes.
Academically, I'm an engineer by training. We talk a lot about systems change in the social impact space. My first exposure to systems change was in college. Engineering disciplines are all systems disciplines by design—this idea that we aren't doing things in a linear fashion and you have to understand the interconnectedness between how you build it all together.
Professionally, I started my career in the life science industry in commercial strategy roles. Despite the industry inherently being purpose-driven, I felt there was a disconnect between how business strategy is set and solving the greatest unmet needs.
About 13-14 years ago I pivoted and said, “How can we bring a much sharper lens to this intersection between business strategy and how we create societal impact?" That was the start, and nine years ago I joined FSG.
Ashley Wilson Oster: Who is FSG?
Nikhil Bumb: FSG is a nonprofit, dedicated to working with leaders on strategies for social change. We were founded in 2000 by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter and Mark Kramer, a Harvard Kennedy School fellow. While we remain true to our genesis, FSG’s mission and approach have evolved over the past 25 years. We continue to work with and build the capacity of social change leaders and we have grown to focus on creating strategies that catalyze systems change and lead to more inclusive or equitable outcomes. Those are inherently linked, and we do that in three ways: (1) consulting and advisory services; (2) research and thought leadership; and (3) programmatic work and communities of practice.
I sit primarily in our consulting and advisory services, where we mostly work with companies and foundations. I lead FSG’s Corporate consulting practice in the U.S. Across our offices in the U.S. and Asia, we have done work across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.
One piece of our work I particularly like to highlight is the work led by our Asia office in Mumbai, India; our inclusive markets practice, which brings together elements of each of those three levers. Our team in India leads projects shaping initiatives over a 5–10-year horizon, where they help stand up and shape stronger markets where there's a weak or non-existent market, and to do so in a way that intentionally creates more inclusive outcomes.
Ashley Wilson Oster: You led work in the last year around corporate crisis response. How do you envision corporate response evolving to help transform how our economic and social systems prepare for and respond to the inevitable crises that workers and communities will face? What does success look like at a systems level?
Nikhil Bumb: We are seeing two primary shifts and reframes that give us hope for how we hope all companies evolve their responses. The first is that crisis response moves from being thought of as a cost to being seen as an investment for the good of the business. The second is that we move from a response mindset to building resilience.
Rather than saying, "We need to respond to disasters because our stakeholders expect us to and it is a cost item on our budget,” we are seeing companies move to “…this is actually for the good of the company. If we invest in making a better response system—providing relief funds and building a more resilient ecosystem—as these crises occur, they will have less of an impact on us.” That's good for any company’s employees, good for their community, and good for their bottom line.
Ashley Wilson Oster: You mentioned that in the crisis report, Crisis After Crisis: Reimagining Corporate Disaster Response, there were six levers that were deployed by companies in their response approaches. Where do you see the most traction and what can you tell us about what those levers might be for us to learn?
Nikhil Bumb: Company leaders are increasing their crisis responses while also making them more strategic in terms of the full range of levers they deploy in their response. There are six levers that came up in the research.
Three levers come up in almost every company response—an employee action plan and relief fund, in-kind donations (often products), and philanthropic grants to organizations leading humanitarian response efforts—and will continue to be a core part of corporate disaster response plans.
Where we’re seeing increasing traction is in the remaining three levers. More and more companies are leveraging their core business capabilities, engaging employees more deeply in crisis response, and utilizing their corporate voice and public engagement efforts to push for more systemic change and a move towards building resilience.
Ashley Wilson Oster: Given FSG's expertise in helping corporations strengthen their competitive positioning while addressing societal issues, how does our partnership demonstrate the concept of shared value—where business success and social impact reinforce each other, especially during times of crisis?
Nikhil Bumb: One of our core beliefs when we're working with companies is that having social impact is inherently good for your business. At its core, the concept of shared value emphasizes that addressing social and environmental issues strengthens competitive positioning. By creating more impact and directly linking that to how you create more top-line or bottom-line business success, you are then able to invest that into scaling and innovation, which creates a virtuous cycle.
If I think about the work that you all do in disaster response and crisis response, and the work that we do, one commonality I really appreciate is the stakeholder lens. It is inherently about employees and communities. At E4E Relief, you are telling companies, "Put your employees first." The first thing that you should do is make sure that your employees are protected—put your own mask on before you put somebody else's mask on. If they are protected, they will serve customers better, which will create more value for the business and, ultimately, serve the company’s investors and other stakeholders as well.
What we'd love to see is not just that leaders deploy all six levers, but that they do it in an integrated fashion so that they build off of each other to amplify impact. So, they use their voices in ways that create better enabling conditions and a stronger ecosystem for the places where their products and services address disaster response, and the way their philanthropic dollars are deployed. All those can work in tandem to actually build a portfolio of mutually reinforcing and integrated crisis response activities—rather than one-off initiatives—that can create more long-term, holistic impact and build resilience.
Ashley Wilson Oster: Going back to FSG being a nonprofit and having a mission that includes creating "a world where everyone can live up to their full potential"—speak a little bit to how you see that playing out at FSG, and how that might translate into equity in crisis response and being able to give vulnerable community members a real chance, after crisis, to live up to their potential.
Nikhil Bumb: At FSG, I believe it means we have to first think about it internally before we can do it effectively externally with our clients. We have to be willing to have those conversations with ourselves, asking: Are we set up well internally? How are we executing our projects to know if we are helping everyone live up to their own potential – first, with ourselves and our employees and, then, with our clients and partner organizations?
In terms of what it means for crisis response, it similarly needs to be integrated at every step of the process. Bring more community and partner voices—as well as lived experience—into the process. That can be through your employee relief funds, your grantmaking, or any of the six levers companies deploy in crisis response. Doing so increases the reach of the impact because those who are impacted are the ones who also have a better understanding of whether the response will be able to address the need.
The second thing we're seeing more companies do is pre-position funds. Get funds out there early, before a crisis hits, so that you can accelerate response time. To figure out where to pre-position the funds, you have to do the work to build the relationships to identify who understands the needs of this community, which organizations are doing good work and have the ability to respond and activate quickly. That builds trust with these organizations and the impacted communities.
Finally, as much as possible, build more direct connections with grassroots organizations. That goes for the big organizations leading response efforts as well as companies.
Ashley Wilson Oster: I feel like there's a lot of conversation and maybe even confusion around social impact measurement, data collection—what are people doing now? What is expected as far as metrics? How do you know if the efforts you're doing, whether it's crisis response or otherwise, are worth measuring and how do you know if the integrated approach and the levers that you've pulled are actually benefiting your people and your community? How do you help the corporations you work with navigate that?
Nikhil Bumb: Often, we have seen that companies measure to share externally in a report. It's a communication piece, and it can be reputational. Sometimes it is also to get internal buy-in and to show the return of those efforts in terms of the impact it’s creating. As a result, it is mostly reactive.
In our work with our corporate clients, we emphasize two main things when it comes to measuring. First, measure to learn. Learn what matters to the communities you are serving, and what is working and what isn’t. And use it to adjust your strategies and approaches. Second, shift from measuring outputs (e.g., lives touched, events held) to measuring outcomes (e.g., percentage reduction in clinic wait times, increase in smallholder farmer livelihood).
Together, these can move companies towards a proactive learning orientation. It tells a much more compelling story of impact both internally—to employees, leaders, and investors—and externally, it invites more meaningful partnerships into the conversation.