Conscious-Business.org.uk

A home for the Conscious Business community in the UK


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Own goals?

I have always been rather suspicious of goals. So I was delighted (!) to find a recent post by Jeff Trexler pointing to this Harvard Business School paper and a Boston Globe article on “Why setting goals can backfire“.

The late, great coaches’ coach Thomas Leonard remarked in 1989 that “goals are overrated and unnecessary”. Perhaps some evidence that he was right is  finally starting to emerge.

As the HBS paper succinctly puts it, it’s not that goal setting doesn’t work. It’s that it’s “a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision.”

So take care. Be careful what you aim for.


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Asking the right questions

A friend of mine asked me the other day “What is strategy?”.

It’s a great question. It’s a question I remember asking one of my mentors over 20 years ago. We were working for a consultancy and together we had just completed a fairly significant strategy exercise for our client, one of the big six accounting firms. We were in the pub having a quiet drink to celebrate. Perhaps I was asking the question a little late?

And I admit now I didn’t understand his answer. Maybe I just wasn’t ready.

Now, twenty years later, I think I understand what he said. I think he was saying that strategy is in three parts:

  1. finding direction – developing vision, and mission, that sort of thing;
  2. choosing the route you are going to use to get there, and steering;
  3. doing it – implementing the strategy.

The first and last are relatively easy to understand, even if they are not easy to do. But the middle one is, in my opinion, the really tricky one.

Tricky because it requires different skills. Skills of analysis, connecting things, and seeing the big picture, to name but a few.

And even if you have access to these skills it requires something else, something that is sometimes in short supply in organisations: courage and confidence.

Courage and confidence to trust one’s instincts and ask what strategy is. Know that what other people call strategy probably isn’t. It may be tactics. It may mean simply blindly following a vision, without making any difficult choices.

Courage and confidence to stop whatever habitual busyness you have, and take a long cool look at yourself, your world and what is happening in it.

Courage and confidence to see clearly, despite the pressure that social systems put on us to conform and ignore reality.

Courage and confidence  to work with others and trust others, in such a way that a shared choice can emerge. The world is so complicated I really doubt whether strategy can be done alone.

Courage and confidence to go it alone. Effective strategy is usually a lonely path. You (and your colleagues) won’t be following the crowd.

Courage and confidence.

Setting direction takes courage and confidence too. It’s not easy to be what we most want to be.

Implementing your strategy takes courage and confidence too. To take the first steps. And the next steps, and the next. This requires tremendous effort – to overcome the inertia and resistance that exists in organisations of any size.

So maybe that is what strategy really is: courage and confidence?


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Rivers and lakes

I posted the other day that I was thinking of changing the name of this blog to “Happiness is over-rated”.

The reason for the change was that I was getting fed up with the focus on happiness – just about everywhere I look everyone seems to be talking about it.

I have probably read more books on happiness than most sane people (something to do with being burdened with a negative outlook). I agree that it’s a worthy topic. But there’s something about the word that annoys me.

Don’t get me wrong. I am overjoyed that the discipline of positive psychology now exists. When I was at Uni it all seemed to be just a big battle over whether rats had minds.

But life is complicated. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad.

Happiness, by contrast, seems to me to mean a “state” (a way of being) that is just good. Happiness is something we admire, something that is better than what we have. Something to strive for.

And all that striving after getting better can be exhausting.

As a friend said the other day, it’s important to distinguish between lakes and rivers. Surely life is more like a river than a lake?

I am not talking about flow, as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Flow sometimes seems even harder to attain. Great if you’re a top athlete or top musician. But what about me?

I just mean living life, with all its ups and downs. From beginning to end. Through the rapids, the eddies and the calmer bits too.

Accepting the rough with the smooth seems, to me, a better route.


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WWGD – What Would Google Do?

I enjoyed reading “What Would Google Do?” by Jeff Jarvis.

It’s something of a litany – at times I felt a bit exhausted by the long list of examples and case-studies. And I may be old fashioned but personally I prefer chapters in a book.

But that’s a minor niggle. As a survey of the field at this moment it seems pretty complete.

Because of the breadth there’s not much scope to go into details on business models. But I liked the clear overall message of how business works in the new world order; and that platforms, for example, are the way to go. That is so right, and so well explained.

It’s a rather intellectual book, perhaps. I definitely don’t mean deep or difficult. I just mean not a very emotional book. Many of the issues that arise, such as trust, for example, are surely rooted in emotion? Personally, I’d like to see more exploration of these themes in terms of “affect” and not just “effect”. Maybe someone else has written that book.

But overall, well done to Jeff.


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The meaning of money?

I was mildly amused by a comment overheard on twitter the other day. One G20 protestor to another “How do we know which ones are the bankers?” Answer: “They’re the ones wearing jeans”.

This reminded me of a minor turning point in my life some years ago: coming out of Temple tube station on a visit to London I was struck by the fact that all the men seemed to be wearing ties. All around me, men (and some women) in black shoes, smart suits and ties.

I was suddenly transported back to my school days – the men suddenly seemed like school boys, pouring and up and down the staircases, carrying their homework home in their briefcases.

Off to the next lesson. Eager to please.

Semioticians would probably talk of the meaning behind these symbols and others that appear in central business districts the world over, such as the architecture of the buildings themselves. What do the sharp creases in trousers and buildings alike signify? Why is it all so shiny?

They might also ask what it means when someone reportedly waves a £10 note out of a bank window at marchers. Just what did that mean?


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Opening Minds

I wrote the other day of the dangers of over-confidence and not knowing what I didn’t know.

Knowing what we know and what we don’t know seems to me a core competency. How else can we start to move forward and explore and learn?

So I was very encouraged to come across the RSA‘s Opening Minds programme.

The programme has been running some years, and is now being used by more than 200 schools. It’s aim is to encourage schools to teach “real world” skills including Learning, Relating to People, Citizenship, Managing Situations, and Managing Information.

The framework includes a focus on, for example:

  • “how to learn”, “to enjoy and love learning for its own sake and as part of understanding themselves” (Learning)
  • “how to develop other people”, “managing personal and emotional relationships” (Relating to People)
  • “how society, government and business work”, “an understanding of ethics and values” (Citizenship)
  • “how to manage risk and uncertainty” (Managing Situations)
  • “the importance of reflecting and applying critical judgement” (Managing Information).

The last few don’t seem to have been taught at any of the schools that our bankers went to.

And they all would help with running most businesses, I believe. So all power to the RSA for this programme. You can read about how to get involved here.


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The elements of passion

A colleague, Mick Landmann, introduced me to the great Ken Robinson, a very funny speaker and holder of strong views on education. Last night, I watched him talk about his latest book, the Element, which is about the importance of having a passion for what you do in life.

If we follow our passions, Robinson argues, we are so much more motivated to do our work, are so much better at it, and we can achieve, much, much more.

He also made very clear the link between the problems we face in running up against resource constraints (land, water, oil etc) and the importance of following that passion. His suggestion is that for us, as a society, to find a way out of these problems it’s essential that all of us do what we are most passionate about.

The logic, I guess, is that these problems are so difficult that they require all of our individual and collective power to overcome them. Only by fully tapping into our passions can we access that power.

For me, this is where business comes in. I have been asking myself again recently, thanks to Simon Conroy, what business is. For me, business, when all is said and done, is a sandpit, a place to experiment, that allows people to be their best. To tap into that passion.

Sure, business can generate money. It provides employment. But much more importantly it clearly identifies problems and opportunities. Such problems, opportunities and the resulting solutions are meat and potatoes to someone with passion.

With passion people will work the long days, take the risks, and overcome the fears (facing conflict, for example) needed to solve the most difficult of problems, tackle the most inspiring of opportunities, and come up with the most creative solutions.

And through that work, become whatever they can become.

“Win-win” is a rather over-used term. But if at the same time as developing ourselves, we solve some of our hardest and most challenging problems, I can’t help thinking that is a real win-win.


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The politics of business

One of the programmes I most hate on the radio is Any Questions on BBC Radio 4.  Of course, I don’t really hate it. I hate it only in the sense that I enjoy listening to it so that I get many opportunities to loudly prounounce “What an idiot!”.

The brilliant idea of bringing together people into a setting where whatever they say is bound to cause offence to other participants or those in the audience pre-dates reality TV by many, many years of course. And it’s really entertaining in a true sense: it’s diverting and holds my attention.

Yesterday’s episode was set in Londonderry, Northern Ireland and inevitably some of the discussion was about the political situation. In particular the recent comments by Martin McGuinness describing dissident republicans as “traitors” came up.

Someone made the point that language is important, and so it is. And so is the context in which language is spoken.

The word traitor sits in a historical, political and broader context. Just as dissident does. Just as Ireland does. Or any other term we use.

That context affects the way meaning is drawn from the word.

I know little about Northern Ireland. But it seemed positive to me that the speakers seemed to be agreeing that, in 2009, the context has changed.

And that probably as a result of the “peace process” there is a new way of looking at the world which is held by the majority of people. In that context, the words traitor and dissident and even terrorist mean quite different things from what they did in the past.

Agreement amongst the participants of a panel show perhaps doesn’t create quite the kind of entertainment the editors are seeking. So the conversation moved on.

But I was struck by how much business in 2009 needs a new context. Our  language needs updating, of course. But for me, meaning is what counts. And it is often context that determines meaning.

I commented on an Umair Haque post on the Harvard Business site earlier in the week. Umair seemed frustrated that some people are just disguising old (really old) business models in the language of the new. He’s quite right of course. Just changing the words and calling it “Business 2.0” doesn’t change anything.

The shift to Business 2.0, or whatever you want to call it, is a contextual shift. It’s a change in the way we look at the world. A shift in the principles that underpin why we do business, what it is for. These are things we don’t often talk about in business – we’re usually far too busy discussing the how.

But to achieve the kind of seismic shift that has been achieved in Northern Ireland’s politics, we’ll surely need as deep and as far reaching a discussion as has been held there. And with all that is going on in the economy and the wider world isn’t it just a brilliant time to be having this discussion?

Umair is just one of the many people showing the way; all strength to him. I’d love to hear of more like him.


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Value of role models

Another good post from Rosabeth Moss Kanter. She says it much better than I can where big companies are concerned.

Now let’s try to find some SME examples. Which small and medium-sized companies have been investing in getting their Mission straight and have benefitted from it – even in this downturn?

Who beyond the usual suspects  has been trying to add real value. Here’s last year’s FastCompany list. I wonder who will make it this year?


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A great challenger

Some friends dropped in yesterday and put me in mind of Edward Tufte, the great information designer.

For me, he’s a great example of a challenger. I love his image of Stalin presenting to the troops using PowerPoint, strikingly satirizing the totalitarian impact of the software.

And his suggestion that PowerPoint was implicated in the fatal decisions about the Columbia space shuttle can’t have been easy. As he points out “the Columbia Accident Investigation Board found that the distinctive cognitive style of PowerPoint reinforced the hierarchical filtering and biases of the NASA bureacracy”.

Of couse, the CAIB itself  agreed: “as information gets passed up an organization hierarchy, from people who do analysis to mid-level managers to high-level leadership, key explanations and supporting information are filtered out. In this context, it is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation.”

But I still think it was a brave thing to do – it’s not easy to go against the tide. And yes PowerPoint is still widely used, even worshipped in government and banks (sorry I meant business circles) alike. Are our choices of communication tools another thing that contributes to our seeming ability to fool ourselves about very serious matters?

By the way, Tufte’s wonderful books seem now to be  available at very much more affordable prices. Go get ’em.