Are you a social architect?

Live into business As a young manager, I remember lots of talk about work-home life balance. I even had a commission to write a book called The Natural Manager about 40 years ago. It never got written, but I have always believed that there was no reason why work life and home life had to be in opposition. When I was a student at Besançon in eastern France back in 1958, I visited Le Corbusier's  Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp that had been built four years earlier. This amazing hilltop pilg...

Peak and Path

Peak and Path Keeping your eye on the peak, while watching the path is a nice skill for leaders, followers and entrepreneurs. If you aim to start a business, there is every need to do just that. Dream of profits, but monitor your cash flow. Top managers have a hard time balancing command and control systems, while at the same time being social architects to enable the performance they dream about. Good social architects create the means through which the ends can be achieved. It is a...

Creating Shared Value

When Michael Porter, strategy guru known for his five forces of competitive advantage comes to the view that creating shared value (CSV) is the key to the survival of business, I pay attention. When you think about it, the concept is not only ethical and about doing the right thing, it is also a very sustainable business strategy. Porter's article, written with Mark Kramer, appeared in the Jan-Feb 2011 issue of HBR and deserves to be read by any thinking entrepreneur or manager. Selfish compe...

Ethonomics

Ethonomics is a word that will that spread, so don't be freaked out by it. Most recently used by Fast Company magazine to mean a hybrid of technology, design, and social responsibility that is about ethics in the marketplace. Progressively the concept of the triple bottom line will become the quadruple bottom line - in my opinion. The fourth element will be about ethics, or the state of being. If the motivation for dealing with profits, people and the planet does not come from the heart, ...

Weisure may be redundant

The word 'weisure' was coined by Dalton Conley, New York University sociologist (and author of Elsewhere, USA: How We Got from Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety) to indicate the 24/7 life where work and leisure interweave. Weisure makes a value judgment and comes across as critical of the way in which many western men and women live 'lesser' lives because of its instant and in-touch nature.  I see the experience as ...

Health or sick reform?

Someone Must Pay for Health Reform is the title of an article by Catherine Arnst in Business Week (June 1, 2009). She says that, "there are only three ways to pay for universal coverage: Raise taxes, cut payments to medical providers, or ration care." How can it be in this era of systems thinking that such a view can prevail? It assumes that the current US view of healthcare delivery is about health, when it is actually about sickness. The whole current argument rages around a sick sy...

Sustainable Justice

With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second. More than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state and federal governments about $55 billion a year. Given the poor outcomes, is this expenditure worthwhile? American justice makes a poor job of considering the system of which we are all a...

Worldly Happiness – Transcendent Happiness

We all seek happiness. Most of us want worldly happiness: things, experiences, relationships. At work we want business success. Where does that lead us? In most cases to wanting more. That is why so much of business counts growth as the reward: growth in sales, market share, profits. It produces frustration, stress and suffering. What if we could get ourselves to move on from that repetitive cycle? Where would we be headed? Most probably towards transcendent happiness. In business that may so...

Being and Doing

You can read the graphic many ways. The vertical axis represents the 'given wisdom' about business performance encapsulated in the phrase, "what gets measured gets done". The horizontal axis represents a view of management based on emergence, arising from systems thinking. While in your business either style may predominate, they are not mutually exclusive. I would like to suggest that the successful entrepreneur is able to blend the two, with a slight leaning towards the horizontal axis. ...

The Tao of Sustainability

John Ehrenfeld's excellent book, Sustainability by Design, should be the starting point for anyone thinking about sustainability. With his business, academic and scientific backgrounds, he stresses a non-mechanical approach to the subject and talks about the importance of being over doing. Many in the business are starting from the point of view of curing what's wrong, rather than from the point of view of starting from the heart. Here is his view of sustainability in a nutshell (apologies to m...