The Responsible Business

January 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It’s clear now that the most competitive businesses in the future will be the ones that serve a variety of stakeholders AND generate a profit. Through our other project – www.2le.ad, we’ve been speaking with senior leaders and young professionals about sustainability and the future of business. This has led us to some interesting material and individuals.

We’re most impressed by Carol Sanford’s work which is described in her book The Responsible Business. Rather than carrying the sustainability flag around the world, Carol has been doing the work for more than three decades without talking about it so much, until recently. Here’s a video clip of a presentation she did at MIT a while back:

There are three parts to this video, YouTube should present you with the next parts as you finish each one.

or Part II and Part III.

Sanford gives a wonderful explanation of the difference between working from a problem solving perspective versus an evolutionary perspective. The problem solving mind is focused on arresting disorder; stopping the bleeding. The evolutionary perspective focuses on higher order potential – on regeneration, seeing essence and then setting the stage for that essence to be supported.

If this sounds a little abstract, a simpler way to think of it is “working on solving the problem versus working to on the positives”.

The problem solving mind focuses on fixing the parts. That there is a mechanism that is broken and that this can be solved by identifying the faulty part, the missing fluid or the incompetent operator. You’ll probably recognize this as the normal way with which we approach work on a daily basis.

The evolutionary mind is what we should aspire to and it’s a combination of protecting or taking care of one another because we’re all interconnected and regenerating – taking the places and people around us to the next level.

Imagine the impact business could have with a slight adjustment in thinking along these lines.

Filed Under: Sustainability, What we're reading Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Power & Love

September 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Ying and Yang, Eros & Agape, Inside & Outside, Profit & Contribution…

Power & Love?

Are you still listening?

It’s funny how a word can awaken so many of our preprogramming. Adam Kahane wrote an interesting book on Power and Love that is extremely relevant to Leadership. He has found a generative and degenerative side of both of these dimensions and does a nice job of explaining how whole, mature leadership is a combination and/or cooperation between the two drives. Both and again it seems.

Here’s a video of a speech he gave at the RSA a while back:

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Is your business “Purpose Driven?”

August 31, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I highly recommend the book The Responsibility Revolution written by Jeffrey Hollender, former CEO of Seventh Generation. This book is a great guide for anyone interested in the catch phrases: CSR, sustainability, corporate consciousness and sustainability.

One of the topics that struck me was the idea of starting a corporate strategy process by investigating the “global imperative” which is defined as:

Global imperative: What is it that the world needs the most that the company is best able to provide

Yes, companies are in business to make money for their stakeholders – that’s important. But what if we could extend company purpose to something like it’s global imperative? Would this allow us to develop meaningful purposes that employees, owners and customers could relate to? And then as they say – maybe even do well by doing good?

I’ve become rather intensely interested in these topics lately, mostly due to the fact that most of the companies I’ve worked with over the last several years have not had these issues on the agenda at all. When I ask my peers what they think I often hear different variations of the same answer. It goes something like this:

“When I was a teenager and college student I was super interested and even involved in social and environmental issues. Then I started to work, maybe had a family and daily life took over. I still think it’s very important but I recognize that I never managed to do anything about it.”

It often comes back to the same old topic: “I’m too busy.” But if we’re too busy to look our after ourselves (think big, not little) and our earth, who else will?

Referenced in this blog post:

Seventh Generation, Burlington, Vermont, USA

Jeffrey Hollender

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Are you leading for the future?

March 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This is a brilliant video clip on leadership and it’s evolution since the end of the industrial revolution. I think a lot of leaders are still operating from an industrial mindset – Seth Godin speaks to that topic. Enjoy!

Exclusive interview with Seth Godin from GiANT Impact on Vimeo.

Seth Godin sat down with us to talk about his leadership philosophies. Be sure to check out www.chick-fil-aleadercast.com to learn from Seth Godin LIVE on May 6, 2011.

Filed Under: In the News, What we're reading

Why I do what I do – Rick Wheatley

March 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Few leaders and, as result, few business reach their potential. I love my job because I help people acknowledge their own reality AND their possibilities.

In many companies the status quo is like an imaginary box that leaders and employees operate within. Sir Ken Robinson (more on him below) firmly believes that school kills creativity. We’re born with it, yet most adults don’t see themselves as creative.

Little kids don’t understand that there is a box – breakthrough thinking in business is the same – be a heretic that ignores the status quo and goes out and creates something new.

My job is to help people find their way out of the box. Sometimes it takes years, sometimes a person is just teetering on the edge of seeing it themselves. Either way, witnessing this process and the potential it unleashes is what I find most meaningful about my work.

That’s why I do what I do.

Rick Wheatley

Here’s Ken Robinson talking about schools and creativity – how do you think this thinking can be related to business?

Filed Under: In the News, What we're reading

Adecco Medical Norway show’s us how important values are

February 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The importance of values-based leadership demonstrated by Addecco.

Hindsight is always 20/20, right? It’s easy to be critical of others’ mistakes, however sometimes it’s important to learn from them.

I’m sure the former director of Adecco Medical never intended to end up in the situation he finds himself in now. It’s also impossible to say how and why he ended up there. What causes a respected company that provides a critical service to makes such horrible decisions? We’re talking about the kinds of decision that, once they become publicly known, cause great damage to the company’s business and reputation. Lying about it to the press only makes it worse, especially when the things be lied about are items of fact.

So what happened here and how can companies prevent this sort of thing happening in the future?

In August of 2010 I had a meeting with a CEO where we spoke about corporate values. His statement on the matter sums up how I think many leaders feel about the subject:

“Aren’t values something you just decide and then get back to work?”

That depends on who you and your organization want to be. I’m sure Adecco has corporate values, they may even be plastered all over their business cards, conference room walls, websites and annual reports. The thing we know for sure is that if they have them, they are not lived. They don’t walk the talk.

The fact that businesses are in business to earn a profit makes it extremely important that there is a counter-balance, a human element if you will. If we’re in business only to maximize profits we’ll make decisions to that end and potentially that end alone. In that setting it could be okay that employees work like the employees in Adecco did.

Is that good enough or do we expect something more from ourselves and companies we interact with on a day to day business?

Values help us decide what we should do when we think no one is looking.

Many companies invest a great deal of time on values processes that include the employees and then communication them far and wide.

In fact, the only thing that is critically important once a company establishes it’s values is that the CEO and leaders on all levels ensure that they behave according to them. Not doing so is not only extremely dangerous for the company (ala Adecco), it also creates a counter-productive culture that takes years to turn around.

Read more about the Adecco example:

Synopsis from newsinenglish.no:

Following a Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) investigation last week, which revealed that employees at Adecco Helse’s Ammerudlunden nursing home in Oslo had been working 84-hour weeks for years and slept in the basement, evidence of even more serious illegal activity has now been discovered at the Midtåsen nursing home (also in Oslo) and at Greverud in Akershus. At Greverud in particular, employees have apparently worked 100-hour weeks, with 20-hour days, for as long as 20-day stretches.

In English: newsinenglish.no

In Norwegian: NRK broke the story initially

Filed Under: In the News, What we're reading Tagged With: , ,

Does our focus on meaningful work mean less prosperity?

February 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I found the following article while reading the New York Times this morning. My night train to Stavanger was running late so I did what my generation does; fire up an app on a fancy phone.

Te decision to take said night train was based on two desires. Firstly, to avoid getting up at 4:30 am for that uncomfortable dash to the airport. Secondly, as an attempt to do something responsible when the opportunity actually existed. We’re told that airplanes belch quite a bit of CO2, right?

Anyway – this article left me thinking. We know that workers in the knowledge economy are wired differently than workers were before. Heck, calling workers workers seems almost wrong now. After all, we’ve become so much more, right?

We can often see these differences very clearly between the generations present in the workplace. The fifty/sixty-somethings and thirty-somethings seem to be motivated by different things.

Trouble is that our doing more results in less somehow. Yet we get more for less now also? I know – abstract.

Read the article

Filed Under: In the News, What we're reading Tagged With: ,

The Reluctant Leaders

February 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Over the past few months I’ve been interviewing leaders to find out how they experienced their transition into their first leadership role. One of the things that stood out was that many them are what I would call “reluctant leaders”.

Reluctant leaders often find themselves promoted to their first leadership position because they’ve proven their ability to do their job well. They describe being taken, at least partially, away from the profession they’ve spent years preparing for and being thrown into a new profession, leadership, one they feel unprepared for.

Then it seems that it truly becomes survival of the fittest – the same leaders describe different scenarios following their promotion with some similarities. Most feel that they don’t have access to direction and/or mentorship from their superiors. The standard reply seems to be “I trust you completely, I know you’ll figure out how to handle this” often followed by some form of “don’t “f” this up”. Their leaders are either too busy or far away to ensure their transition to leadership is smooth and supported. They are “thrown” into it and the stakes are sometimes high.

Leadership development programs don’t seem to help much either due to the fact they are either reserved for levels higher up in the organization or serve more as corporate policy education than leadership development.

The preceding paragraphs discuss the majority of responses from an unscientific research project. The potential conclusions are striking – do organizations take talented competent people and throw them into situations where they have little hope of being competent? Does this result in people that should be leaders not continuing? Many clever people don’t like feeling incompetent and avoid it – such an experience could lead many people that could be great leaders to give up on leadership altogether.

I don’t know why this dynamic exists in organizations and I should stress that these interviews are not scientific.

However, I think it’s safe to say that this dynamic exists and is important to better understand. Senior business leaders and the companies they lead have a responsibility for cultivating their next generation of leaders and my experience is that in most organizations this area is need of improvement.

Filed Under: What we're reading Tagged With: ,

We’ve moved! New offices on Oscars gate in Oslo

February 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

After five great years on Bygdøy, we decided to move into the city in order to be closer to the “action”. We’ve enjoyed the peacefulness and the fjord view on Bygdøy so there’s a hint of sadness connected with this change.

However, there are exciting things to come! We’re enjoying getting settled on Oscars gate and getting to know our surroundings and the people and companies in the neighborhood.

Pay us a visit if you’re in the neighborhood and curious about what we do!

the HUMAN element
Oscars gate 35A, Oslo

For more detailed information, please visit our contact page.

Filed Under: In the News, What we're reading

New Year’s Resolutions: the “meaning” organization

January 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Daniel Pink inspired us with his book Drive where he argues that people are driven by autonomy, mastery and purpose. Purpose is another way of saying meaning – people can be more effective at work when they understand what is meaningful about what they do.

So you could say that I’m on the lookout for things that expand on this thinking. An HBR blog post titled The Shape of the Meaning Organization describes meaning in some more detail.

Food for thought for leaders looking to bring more Enterprise 3.o thinking into their organizations.

Filed Under: In the News, What we're reading Tagged With: ,
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