Tag Archives: sustainability

How to Take the Leap to Sustainable Value Creation

Screen Shot 2015-09-13 at 7.59.52 PMMy advice to any executive who has decided to take on an accelerated path to innovation and sustainable growth is to resist the temptation to systematically seek immediate financial results and short-term solutions.  To go beyond business as usual, and to reach truly innovative solutions, you need to shift your focus from financial profitability to sustainable value creation.  The financial logic is exact but not very conducive to imagination.  The concept of sustainable value opens our business reflections and strategies to new horizons.  To make deeper and better decisions, you need imagination, patience, and open mind, and tolerance for ambiguity and confusion.

This calls for a new awareness.  It requires us to balance our faith in logic with the secular wisdom of instinct.  In doing so, we will need to tap into our intuition, an attribute of the feminine part of our psyche.  Intuition opens up new possibilities to feed the masculine part in us, which is ruled and often restricted by the logical mind.  And that is the message of Intuitive Intelligence: anything is possible when the feminine and masculine energies join to cooperate creatively, where improbable solutions can come to our rescue.

In our postmodern age we are still not used to the discomfort of the unknown, the demands of the feminine, and the fact that we are not in control.  But with determination, courage,and faith we can surrender to another belief system, one that enables us to overcome our fear and escape the deadening impact of our need for control.  As is the case with any creative journey, we have no guarantee of success, and no one can show us the way, because the way is unique for each one of us.  But we can receive guidance from the part of ourselves that knows better–the intuitive voice of feminine wisdom–and finally find our way out of control mode into a novel clarity and a deeper relationship with life.

Just as it always is for the mythical hero, the path we’re facing is filled with challenges and unknown factors.  However, we can choose to look at these challenges as parts of a creative process:  the process of evolution.  And we can rely on Intuitive Intelligence to help with decision making and creative problem solving in these unpredictable times.  It will provide unexpected creative answers, which will feel like magic to us because we cannot always explain them.  In this particular time of many unprecedented challenges we have a unique opportunity to engage and be taught in new ways.  

There are many real-life successful examples in the business world that prove there is a plausible route beyond conventional logic.  This will always require a leap of faith, but the leap can be an educated one.  We need to rethink the way we think.  We need reinitialize our thinking program in light of a new scientific understanding of the power of instinct and play and the quantum laws of matter, which show the paradox of our limited individuality within the holistic force of our interdependence and an unlimited number of possibilities.  In this new world view, power has to be reconsidered, money deconstructed and reconstructed into its real purpose:  the prosperity of all.  We’re called to move on.  No time to waste.  A new generation is already there, and we can all do it.  Together we can create a more meaningful, more prosperous, and more balanced world, It requires some adjustments and faith, but it is possible.

The Lakota people have a saying: “It is not about peace on earth but peace with earth.”  When we observe nature, we see how everything and everyone in nature contributes to the whole; that nothing can exist without the others, the conflict, tension, destruction, complexity,  and mystery are also part of it; and that the sum of it all is the most mystifying system we could ever imagine and learn from.

 

My TEDxKC presentation : make business innovation happen

Synopsis: “Creativity and innovation are keys to business success in the global economy. Yet recent research shows American creativity has been significantly declining for the past 20 years. A new competence – Intuitive Intelligence – is needed to win the creativity challenge. Read More

A New Corporate Mandate: Rethink Efficiency and Play!

“Play is the highest form of research”
– Albert Einstein

“I was not working, I was playing. I was letting things reassemble in front of my eyes and … I knew I had come up with something that would get me the Nobel Prize… and it did!’
– Dr. Kary Mullis, Scientist, Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry (1993)

Since 2006 IBM has published a series of biannual studies highlighting the priorities of CEOs around the world. Read More

Sustainability: Bill Gates Gets It Wrong?

Hats off to Grist‘s David Roberts for putting together a thought-provoking line of thinking in Why Bill Gates is wrong. And no, he’s not talking about Bing.

At the core, Roberts challenges the hubris of viewing all society’s problems through the lens of innovation.  Read More

The Deloitte Big Shift Index 2009: What’s Missing?

If you have not already read “The Big Shift Index” report from The Deloitte
Center for the Edge
led by John Hagel III, John Seely
Brown
, and Lang Davison you should do so immediately.

 

This first release of the Shift Index reveals a startling fact: the return on assets (ROA) for U.S. firms has steadily fallen to almost one-quarter of 1965 levels; at the same time,  the researchers found modest improvements in labor productivity.

Grim news, indeed. The report also finds:

– The ROA performance gap between winners and losers has increased over time, with the “winners” barely maintaining previous performance levels, while the losers experience rapid deterioration in performance.

– The “topple rate,” at which big companies lose their leadership positions, has more than doubled, suggesting that “winners” have increasingly precarious positions.

– U.S. competitive intensity has more than doubled during the last 40 years.

– While the performance of U.S. firms is deteriorating, the benefits of productivity improvements appear to be captured in part by creative talent, which is experiencing greater growth in total compensation. Customers also appear to be gaining and using power as reflected in increasing customer disloyalty.

– The exponentially advancing price/performance capability of computing, storage, and bandwidth is driving an adoption rate for our new “digital infrastructure” that is two to five times faster than previous infrastructures, such as electricity and telephone networks.
                                     

The Shift
Index
 consists of three indices: Foundation, Flow, and
Impact, and 25 metrics that together quantify the stock, pace, and
implications of the shift. The index enables analysts to
anticipate changes, identify bottlenecks, and guide strategy.
Not everyone, of course, will choose to monitor the same metrics or assign them
the same weights.  Thus, the Shift Index is less a single measure and
more an informational platform that will give rise to a diversity of models
and, a stronger collective sense about the pace and nature of change,
constraints and opportunities within that system.  As constraints
fall away and opportunities increase, old configurations become unstable
and new structures emerge.

 

A number of
key ideas in the report resonated with our observations at The Human Company:


– the importance of creativity and innovation in ROA

– information “flows” over
information “stocks

– passion as a driver for higher productivity

– more and more
discriminating consumers

– consistently declining return
on assets

– increasing rate at which big companies lose their leadership
positions

– rising executive turnover tied to increasing performance pressures

 

However, I was surprised to find one element missing in their measurement model.


What’s missing? Sustainability and its impact on the economy.


 

Sustainability
is the business imperative for our time. From global-warming to competition for natural
resources, sustainability must necessarily sit at the core of any sound
business strategy. The sooner businesses understand this the better.


Organizations will have no choice but to
follow government regulations and anticipate consumers reactions and merciless
communication via ever more powerful social networks aiming at securing a
healthy future.


More importantly employers who align their
businesses to create a more sustainable world will also attract, retain and
empower more and better employees. Sustainability challenges have become so
pressing that they 
not only affect us at a rational and emotional level but they
also threaten our survival instincts. And  as such they are bound to impact employee productivity, loyalty, and creativity. Meaning is the underpinning and decisive factor of human efficiency. How could a corporation careless of its employees’ and
employees’ children future ever encounter long term success in a flat world?

 

In order to maintain competitivity, growth and profitability
organizations will have to build sustainable blueprints for the future. Take a look at Adam Werbach‘s latest book:
Strategy
for Sustainability
.

The Deloitte report is an example of a brilliant work conceived in an
intellectual tradition largely limited to our analytical minds.
Yes, they do mention creativity and talent and yes, they talk about information flows, but I wish they had mentioned sustainability. A quick glance at the Intuitive Compass shows us that Deloitte overlooked the South West Quadrant. Regrettably, this is often the case with our business thinking.

intuitivecompass.gif

Going forward, we cannot leave out the importance of our reptilian brain in its relentless ability to impact every second of our lives and its superior intelligence to sustain our species and hence help us make the best business decisions for a sustainable future (1).

Here’s looking forward to the the 2010 Shift Index; I hope to see a section on sustainability and a study on the decisive intangible dimensions of value creation which intuitive intelligence is designed to help us reckon with.

(1) In 2004 MIT School of Science Picower Insititute for Learning and Memory has shown that the basal ganglia which are parts of our reptilian brain are involved in our most sophisticated decision processes (Nature, Feb 24 2005)