GNH Certification
GNH assessment tool for business was initiated by Dasho Tshering Tobgay, the Prime Minister of Bhutan. He first presented the idea of aligning business towards Gross National Happiness at the Sixth International Conference on GNH in 2015. To this end, the Centre for Bhutan Studies & GNH developed and released Proposed GNH of Business, a draft tool for integrating GNH in business, at the Seventh International Conference on GNH held in Thimphu in 2017. The report introduced an assessment tool to evaluate a business’s commitment to social responsibility. The tool, inspired by GNH, is comprised of a holistic set of indicators categorised under the nine domains of GNH.
Proposed GNH of Business
The idea of incorporating GNH values into business was first proposed by His Excellency Dasho Tshering Tobgay, the Hon’ble Prime Minister of Bhutan, in his keynote address at the Sixth International Conference on Gross National Happiness held in Paro in 2015 (CBS, 2015). The Prime Minister mentioned that the current business model of overemphasizing profit maximisation and increasing shareholder value at the cost of environment and community was unsustainable. The Prime Minister expressed the need to recognise and manage these costs and risks, and called for integrating GNH values into business operation. Essentially, it meant measuring the success of a business by its ability to serve, facilitate, and engage with its stakeholders. This will require rethinking of business indicators used for gauging their success or failure.