In the IABC Fishbowl

The Secret of My Suce$s may not be Michael J. Fox’s best-remembered film, but it contains a critical message for doing business in today’s uncertain environment. Released in 1987, when the US economy was slowing and the year of the Black Monday stock market crash, the movie is set in a major corporation that has begun retrenching and firing people. Our young hero takes advantage of the situation: officially working in the mailroom, he occupies a recently vacated corner office and begins taking daring initiatives on behalf of the company on the authority of his bravado alone.

As expected, the masquerade is discovered, and everything he has built begins to unravel…until he convinces a few critical people to believe in his counterintuitive plan for recovery. Rather than cutting costs and retrenching, he argues that the company should be expanding aggressively and investing. Competitors are retrenching, and he argues that this leaves a lot of empty terrain to be occupied.

According to the dominant economic orthodoxy, this is madness. And yet, it just might work.

One of the important features of the modern economy is that it is built on confidence. The value of currencies, stocks and even physical capital is not limited to tangible features. It also depends on demand and, ultimately, desirability. The less people believe in the potential of the current situation, the more they retrench, and their pessimism literally destroys economic value. Conversely, high levels of confidence foster investment, expansion and creation of value.

Telling ourselves a new story about the economy

In “Cognitive Biases in Times of Uncertainty“, John Hagel explains why this is so. The narratives we tell ourselves influence our vision. If we focus on a risk-averse narrative, we will see threat everywhere and focus on short-term gain. On the other hand, if we focus less on risk and more on opportunities and reward, the world looks very different. Here are just a few examples:

• Social entrepreneurs are often just people who have stopped looking at human underdevelopment as a problem and have started looking at it as opportunities for entrepreneurship. From M-pesa mobile-phone-based cash payments to promoting products by sparking debates about how women’s bodies are portrayed, social entrepreneurship taks many creative forms.
• We’ve all received the e-mail listing the bad predictions made about a long list of success products and people, from the personal computer and telephone to the Beatles. The people who made those predictions had the wrong mindset to properly evaluate the situation.
• The creation of the Economic European Community in 1957 was a daring reframing of a devastating problem: recurrent wars between France and Germany (1870-1, 1914-1918, 1939-1945). Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet and Konrad Adenauer and others had the vision — and political courage — to argue for a rapprochement of France and Germanybased on the joint administration of the raw materials of war (coal and steel). In this era of short-term politics, it is easy to forget how precious the past 67 years of peace in Europe are.
• Regardless of how you rate Barack Obama’s presidency, it is difficult to deny that his hopeful “Yes, We Can” narrative was a major factor in his 2008 election. His politics directly confronted the fearful, risk-averse that had been pervasive in the US since September 11, 2001 and his personal history was symbolic of the capacity to overcome the fragmentation of American society. Barack Obama was much more than a man or a politician: he was a positive narrative that helped millions of Americans imagine a different and better future.

So what are you doing to use the economic crisis as a springboard for success? At Prospero, we help organizations cultivate change as a source of value creation and innovation. We help you improve your stakeholder relations to move from conflict to collaboration? We can help you reframe your mindset to see how to unlock the energy and enthusiam of your employees. We can help you think differently about your strategy to identify untapped opportunities. Contact us today about speaking at a conference, conducting a workshop or serving you in another way customized to your specific needs.

We agree with Albert Einstein that “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” 

Posted via email from CommunicAction

During a debate in Brussels on 7 December 2011, John Beddington, the UK’s top scientist “urged EU policy makers to make a better use of science and technology through the regulatory process when taking decisions about sustainability”, according to TheParliament.com. But this statement raises the question of which science should be used.

Part of the difficulties of managing and measuring sustainability is the totalness of the issue. In its purist form, sustainability is nothing left than the total functioning of all of the biological, physical, chemical and other systems on our planet (and beyond since the atmosphere and sun are critical elements). Therefore, any model or science will only be able to deal with some part of that total system. The more isolated and specialized the focus, the less successful the outcome.

Again, the same article is revealing when one of the speakers refers to “environmental sustainability”, which is already much more restricted than the traditional 3-pillar definition of sustainability, which has environmental, economic and social dimensions.

With regard to sustainable agriculture, the best data sets and models in the world are bound to fail if the role of human beings is not taken into account. So I would argue that the social sciences are just as important, if not more important than the natural sciences in achieving sustainable agriculture. Policy makers need to understand the human dynamics of any agricultural system, both to understand potential impacts on the people concerned and to understand how people affect what is poosible within any given agricultural system.

Posted via email from CommunicAction

A few days ago, the Financial Times reported on a study of how attached consumers are to brands, conducted by Havas Media. According to the article (I’ve not seen the original research), “The research shows far stronger faith in brands in faster-growing markets, with respondents in Latin America saying 30 per cent of brands made a notable positive contribution to their lives, compared with 5 per cent in the US and 8 per cent in Europe.”

The FT then quotes Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab as saying that the fact that only 20% of brands “have notable positive impact” should be worrying boards.

I’m not so sure. Continue reading »