Just another WordPress site
“What I want is someone who will do what I tell them to.”
“What I want is someone who works cheap.”
“What I want is someone who shows up on time and doesn’t give me a hard time.”
So if this is what the boss really wants, how come the stars in the company don’t follow these three rules?
From Seth Godin’s Linchpin
This video provides a useful and at times very beautiful introduction to the topics of complexity and emergence – which offer us a very different way to think about our organisations and how we manage them.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdQgoNitl1g]
and this one takes the journey a little further:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5NRNG1r_jI]
If you want to see how you can use these ideas to improve your leadership and management then do get in touch.
If we want engagement, and the mediocrity busting results it produces, we have to make sure people have autonomy over the four most important aspects of their work:
- Task – What they do
- Time – When they do it
- Technique – How they do it
- Team – Whom they do it with.
After a decade of truly spectacular underachievement, what we need now is less management and more freedom – fewer individual automatons and more autonomous individuals.
I have just come across a really good online video, thanks to Phil Gerbyshack, called Change is Good. It seems to sum up so many of the principles that I try to teach people how to practice in my PMN workshops. (There are still someplaces left on Giving and Getting Great Feedback on 20th May in Leeds).
The film is only a couple of minutes long but contains so many great hints, tips, reminders and pointers to profound truths that should have immense implications for personal and organisational change.
Why not show it at your next team meeting and see what reactions, suggestions and feedback it elicits.
The video has a soundtrack – but still works if you are not sound enabled!
Share this Post
I have been watching a movement develop over recent years called ‘conscious capitalism’ or ‘conscious business’. It provides a different take on what it means to be a ‘social enterprise’. The idea is being pioneered by amongst others, John Mackey, CEO of Wholefoods Supermarket. In a recent speech he says:
A Conscious Business is one which has two major attributes that define it:
- It has a deeper purpose beyond only making profits. Just like individual people by following their hearts can discover their own sense of deeper purpose, so can the business enterprise. I believe that great businesses have great purposes that inspire them to higher levels of success. Think for a moment about some of the greatest businesses in the world and ask yourself whether they exist to fulfill a greater purpose beyond only maximizing profits. Certainly Apple does, driven by its intense desire to create “insanely great” technology which transforms our lives in positive ways. Clearly Google does too with its passion for discovery and desire to operate an ethical company. One of the best examples in the world is Grameen Bank in Bangladesh founded by 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammed Yunus, which exists to end poverty in Bangladesh and throughout the world. Every business has the potential to discover and actualize its higher purpose—it has the potential to become more conscious.
- The Conscious Business also understands the interdependency of all of the major stakeholder groups—customers, employees, investors, suppliers, communities, and the environment—and the business is managed to consciously create value for all of these major stakeholders. Instead of viewing the stakeholders in terms of win-lose relationships with conflicts of interest dominating their interactions, the Conscious Business understands that there is a harmony of interests between the stakeholder groups and that by working together greater value can be created for all of them. At Whole Foods we understand that management’s most important job is to make sure the team members are well trained and happy at their work. The team members in turn understand that their job is to satisfy and delight the customers and happy customers result in happy investors through the prosperity of the business. A virtuous circle is created with all of the stakeholders flourishing together.
Who will create the Conscious Businesses of the 21st century—businesses that have deeper purpose and are managed consciously to create value on behalf of all of the stakeholders?
John Mackey, May 2008
This feels to me like a much more coherent, honest and powerful approach to making business work for the planet than cleaving it along ‘social enterprise = good; for profit = bad’ divide.
Of course words are relatively easy (although John Mackey has found that words have got him into lots of how water in the past. We have to judge the movement by its achievements. But I am hopeful.
You can read a much fuller paper by John Mackey called ‘Conscious Capitalism’ here.