Good Companies - book released!

Good Companies

How to reinvent the economy and create companies that will drive us into a meaningful future?

Release date: 17 Jan 2023

The book's homepage is here.

Good Companies book on amazon.com

We are living in an era of great anxiety and great disconnect. Civilizational debt calls to be paid off while CEOs continue to pursue profit and return on invested capital for shareholders.
If we do more of the same things that we have been doing, where does it lead us to?

In recent decades, this question has grown into the #1 most important question in the public domain. I call it the Great Challenge Question.

The Great Challenge question is a manifestation of the growing anxiety of individuals and societies across the globe. It exposes our current weakness and a crisis of humanity.

If you accept The Great Challenge, then there are natural follow-up questions that you need to ask yourself. What do our actions say about our current ways of thinking? What do they say about our beliefs, habits, and assumptions we make? What do they say about the goals we pursue?

Let’s look beyond the current well-established role of business and the principles of the economy. How do we need to transform the business world to start serving what is important to us?

In the just-released book "Good Companies: How to reinvent the economy and create companies that will drive us into a meaningful future?", I invite you to explore the current landscape of business and humanity. The book offers an aspirational alternative and constructs a vehicle for the necessary change to drive us toward a meaningful future.

My humble request to you is to wait no longer and act! Sometimes it is easier than we think, even if the task at hand looks daunting! Let’s engage in a collective effort, be the change we want to see in the world and be proud of our legacy for future generations!

I express special gratitude to Andrzej Ostrowski and Mariusz Kreft for enriching the book with their friendly challenge.

#goodcompanies #goodorganisations

John Vervaeke - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

 Thanks to Mariusz Kreft I have recently discovered the series of lectures by John Vervaeke, Awakening from The Meaning Crisis. 

It is the most powerful material I heard so far on why there is so much human disintegrity, we feel so much of absurdity and are so disconnected from the reality.

What is wisdom, what is meaning, how do we pursue it, what is the vehicle that awakens our virtues, how do we become the most human, how do we fulfil ourselves?

Please find here a sample transcript as a teaser for the series:

Aristotle points out that there is this deep form of foolishness that comes from a lack of character. He calls it AKRASIA. Akrasia is when you know what the right thing to do is, but you don't do the right thing. 

Why you behave foolishly? Ignorance is when you do the wrong thing because you don't know. A part of foolishness is when you know what the right thing to do is and you still do the wrong thing. Here's Aristotle answer: You do the wrong thing because although you have the right beliefs (aka impotence of beliefs), you don't have sufficient character. 

You have not trained things, skills, sensitivities, you have not created the virtual engine that is regulating your growth and development, such as you will not live up to your potential. For Aristotle you become a good person if you actualize, if you in-form your being with a virtu-al engine that realizes those things that are distinctive of our humanity.

What makes us different from the plants, the animals, and other species with minds? a.k.a. Why am I more valuable more than this table? What are those characteristics that are unique to us? Here is where Aristotle gives the axial revolution his answer: Your capacity for overcoming self-deception, your capacity for cultivating your character, for realizing wisdom, and for enhancing the structure of your psyche and your contact with reality. That's what rational means. 

Your purpose is to become as fully human as possible. How are you cultivating your character to do so? This is what Aristotle is going to ask you again and again. How much your live is dedicated to recognizing and cultivating those rational capacities, those things that make you most human in contrast to all the other things around you.

by John Vervaeke.

Wandering vs efficiency by Jeff Bezos

I treat this quote from Jeff Bezos as another recognition of value of intelligence beyond rational intelligence and problem solving at work. Very much aligned with the direction I have been evangelizing towards :)

Sometimes (often actually) in business, you do know where you’re going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient … but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries – the “non-linear” ones – are highly likely to require wandering.

Source: 2018 Letter to Shareholders

Leadership Development programs - the vicious cycle of solving the wrong problem...

 Why does the business world put so much effort and attention into the Leadership Development programs? Seriously. Have you ever wondered what problem these try to solve?

 

Let's do a round of all stakeholers involved to understand their perspectives and expected value. Clearly the intention of Sponsors is to develop leaders to be better leaders, to perform better, to be more effective and to build a stronger organization. For Participants, it's nobilitating to belong to the leadership cohort, they feel special and rewarded. For Trainers and Coaches, training leaders is nobilitating as well, it brings a lot of self-esteem, so they feel special and rewarded, not to mention remuneration aspect. Indeed I met whole flocks of consultants who dreamt about getting access to the leadership development level programs. This is the level where one can feel impactful. In this vicious cycle everyone feels happy, so it lasts.

My challenge is: Leaders know what to do, they do not need special trainings. We, human, are good and justice and ethical by nature, by design, we are equipped to make right decisions. The real question is why leaders cannot apply all the goodness and the knowledge in their organizations? Why do leadership efforts not blossom, and do not stick in spite of best intentions?

Here is my perspective: leaders cannot apply their natural goodness and wisdom, because the goal and the rules of the game of companies are different, leaders' goodness does not apply in this game, and is neither compatible nor usable in the context of the current purpose of companies. 

My call today is: Trust your leaders, do not try to change them, instead change the environment you need them to operate within - change the companies instead. Transform companies into good citizens of the world by redefining their social meaning and purpose.

Photo by Mathias Jensen on Unsplash

The Testament of a Furniture Dealer

The Testament of a Futniture Dealer, by IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad. 

A skeleton of thinking behind perceived IKEA behaviors. 

A masterpiece. 

An appetizer quote to build your appetite: 

“No method is more effective than a good example.” 

 

The Source: here.

A brief recap of Stephen Denning's Leadership Storytelling TEDx talk

As Stephen Denning says: 

The most important role of leadership is to tell stories. Why? Because nothing else works.

Characteristics of a good story:

1. Share a True Story - not a Titanic story that hides important negative details
2. Be Positive in Tone - share a story with a happy ending, not to trigger the reptile brain of your listeners
3. Be Minimalist in form - let the listener imagine, envisage and discover how to implement details, because it's when s/he internalizes the idea as her own idea. And that’s what you want, that’s when you are off to the races. If it’s my idea only, says Denning, nothing much happens. Once it becomes their idea it is when they become champions).
4. Contrast pre and post change worlds - the story need to contrast the situation before the idea was implemented with the situation after the idea was implemented.

With big complex ideas you can easily get lost in the story and miss the point of the story.

For the full story one definitely wants to read the Stephen Denning's book: The Secret Language of Leadership.

Professor Stefano Zamagni in Leaders For Humanity

A truly human perspective on how the world could do better.

I have learnt so much on human thought of economical systems and their relation to societies from this webinar...  A must watch for every builder of the future of work! Thank you Otti Vogt! 

The front-runners: We are not slaves of GDP - TED Talk of Michael Green

Another building block to raising awareness of sustainability and civilizational debt we have been creating - Michael Green's TED Talk back from 2015, just after the United Nations announced their Global Goals by 2030. 

I encourage you to watch the whole talk, let me just quote the breakthrough observation:

Social Progress Index representing the UN Global Goals by 2030 cumulatively can grow unrelated to growth of GDP per capita.

There are countries that prove it is possible to get lot's of social progress even if your GDP is not so great. 

(...)

Costa Rica has prioritized education, health and environmental sustainability and as a result it's achieving a very high level of social progress, despite only having a rather modest GDP.

(...)

And that's really important because it tells us two things:

First of all it tells us that we alreay in the world have solutions to many of the problems that the Global Goals are trying to solve. It also tells us that we are not slaves to GDP. Our choices matter. If we prioritize the wellbeing of people than we can achieve a lot more progress that our GDP might expect.

The Joseph Pelrine's Team Health Index

Finally! It turns out that I am a part of a bigger group of people who think that Psychological Safety itself is not a sufficient factor in a team's health. Yes, psychological safety is a necessary condition for teams to be healthy yet, there is more to it.

 

According to Joseph Pelrine to assess the team's health it actually takes three factors into consideration. Here is the full equation: 

The Team Health Index = Psychological Safety + 

                          Empathy + 

                                      Thought Diversity 

or actually this should be a multiplication equation to highlight that the combination of these three factors is what impacts the final result:

The Team Health Index = Psychological Safety x 

                          Empathy x 

                                      Thought Diversity

Only now I feel comfortable that we have set up the stage properly. This triad of factors as a whole is what really matters when we talk about team health. I think this equation should be called somehow and framed together as "Pelrine's Team Health Index" ;) .

Countless number of times I met teams who were "just" safe. Safe ot the extent that there was no development possible. They missed empathy and rejected any thought provoking challenges from external stakeholders and/or clients. Many times all other voices were treated as endangering the status-quo. And those teams were let to proceed with their limited worldview and produce solutions. And those solutions reflected the worldview of those teams as a natural consequence. Only when solutions turned to be suboptimal with hard evidence, the status-quo could be challenged and a space for a wider discussion was opening.
To some extent it is called a learning loop, yet there is a thin line between the necessity to learn by failing versus getting things done effectively by upfront collaboration through empathizing and being open.

In terms of system dynamics, an exchange and mutual benefit between a team and its stakeholders / clients, one could say that a team needs to give back for Safety with Empathy and be grateful to external voices for enriching their Thought Diversity.

Thank you Joseph Pelrine for bringing the full picture together in your post!

Personal relation with "Your work is shit" leadership style

 I have a confession to make - I am a big fan of "Your work is shit" approach by Steven Jobs. It is so unpopular these days that I already feel guilty, passe and removed from your social media. Still here I am, making the confession to show my vulnerability in a hope to be understood better.

To understand where I am coming from you need to know that I am very demanding from myself. I have always been. As a result I am also very demanding from people I work with and live with. I reflected on this many times, asked myself questions how it influences my relations with others, how it influences my ability to co-create, etc. I explained to myself that I have the Achiever profile - I am fuelled by achieving. But I felt this explanation is not the whole story - that's only how it looks at the surface. Achievement is actually just a side effect of the real driver - the urge to become wholly embedded in solving a piece of puzzle. When I am solving a puzzle nothing else exists, aka the flow. This is how I engage in work. Till it's done. Then I can go out and socialise, eat pizza and drink beer. Until the next wave of urge to Solve comes. So more than an Achiever I am an Obsessive Solver, a Craftsman. Coming back to "Your work is shit" - this helps me produce better solutions - by challenging what I have done and my current approach. This helps me cross the boundaries and limitations and breakthrough to wider landscape of options. 

There is on more thing wrt "Your work is shit" - this frame is, in my honest opinion, very close to my favourite quote "The ABC of Business Decay" by Warren Buffet - Arrogance, Bureaucracy and Complacency. Especially the Complacency resonates between these two famous quotes. If I am complacent with my work it means for me that Complacency has reached me. And, as always, there are others working harder than myself while I am contemplating Complacency. 

I recommend starting every decision making, every option generating workshop by posing the "Your work is shit" frame - to open up discussion about how we can do it better. It is similar to another brainstorming technique by the Heath brothers - the Vanishing Options test. It goes like this: Imagine your favourite option is not an option given the situation. What are other options? It is also related to BHAG goal setting. BHAGs are goals that are not achievable by the current means and the current levels of thinking.

How all the above influence my desired identity of a Transformation Leader? Some will say, such confession crosses me out as a transformation leader. Honestly? I think there is a great match between being the Solver and being a Transformation Leader. A Transformation is a huge effort and it is supposed to take companies across a big river full of crocodiles to another bank. Such effort usually needs a BHAG goal to even risk it. And a realisation coming from the first attempts to solve it - that the BHAG is not achievable by the current habits, thinking and ways of working.

So here I am: suspected of being Achiever while actually being a Solver. Suspected to be a Toxic Leader while I feel a Radical Candor leader: I always care personally and yes I always challenge directly. 

Credits: Photo by Tamara Gak on Unsplash