Superior Economics -Seeing the Emotional Intelligence of it All
20-May-05
There's lot of good news coming up in the next 100 days, unless you are a hopeless lose-loser.
Superior economics isn't just for the expert - it works transparently, sustainably, when everyone in an organisation can see how to produce it, feel it, know it.
That's what trust-flow systemises. Networks locally, and globally!
To prove how much good news there is for human beings and people-centric organisations, this thread will post 100 excerpts from a book that has taken a leading business journalist 5 years to write. Not because he's a slow writer but because all the points individually are simple as knowing your context gravity. But they will only make inferior economists redundant by connecting, and connecting...
If this thread is of interest, the way to save the bother of coming back to this thread for each of the 100 new posts is to add a post yourself. If all you want to do is to register rather than express an opinion from the start, just hit the button and write hello (or if you prefer holo as friends of the holon system & holon network clubs)
In contrast, look at the global accounting maths ruling and ruining potentially intangibles wealthy and people- rich companies (those that produce service economy and could have been highly motivated as purpose-sharing knowledge co-workers). It's monopoly rule is the operand of addition - separating, and separating, and separating. It's done such a powerful job - it has made various of the world's biggest organisations many conflicts deep. Leadership, when you are in such a vicious spin, becomes so system dizzy that as Ackoff explains the more you defend with the old strategic controls, the faster you will lose the last goodwill relationships you have.
Even most of the so-called Built to Last companies have started turning viciously against their peoples and purpose during the last few years acccording to recent reports by world class strategy adviser Gary Hamel.
But now the good news is coming out, there are only 2 choices for the future of organisations. Join all those who want to transform for sustainability. Or become ostracised, as valueless as the way you have been treating the trust of all the peoples you have been extracting from. Companies with no human purpose, compound nothing of value-true interest to people or markets. Let's see and rejoice in that.
Details
- Author:
- Chris Macrae
- Publisher:
- KnowledgeBoard
- Date:
- 20-May-05
- Categories:
- Emotional Intelligence
- Sections:
This article has been read 6007 times.
Tools
Member comments (11)
Share your views with other users: add your own comments to this item.
sep5
An alternative governance framework
What we need, then, is not a better way of shoe-horning new and emerging challenges into old frameworks, but a new and different framework which follows its own logic.
At its core lies the idea of whealth creation – that is wealth creation with the added ‘h’ for human, holistic and healthy. If wealth creation is about getting richer in financial and material terms, whealth creation is about different dimensions of enrichment. A whealth creating organisation recognises a simple, undeniable and unavoidable fact. We are already in the business of making more than money and products and services.
In one sense, for example, organisations are already ‘making’ their social and natural environments, and they are either making them worse or better. So we have a choice. Do we want to make our environments worse by using up non-renewable resources and polluting air, water and so on? Or do we want to make them better? To be sustainable (i.e healthy) we need to look at the broader (i.e holistic) picture.
Likewise, organisations are also already ‘making’ human lives and resources. The difference between physical resources such as pieces of metal and human resources such as knowledge, creativity or motivation is that when use a piece of metal, you consume it; you use it up. But using human resources such as knowledge, creativity and motivation are not only acts of consumption, they are also acts of production at one and the same time. Every minute of every day, organisations have a chance to deepen and extend the talent, scope and potential of the people who work with them. To broaden their experience. To boost each individual’s own personal bottom line – his or her sense of satisfaction, fulfilment and reward – at the same time as making things and money.
Amazon's preview
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
To survive and flourish, organizations must create win-win relationships with the people they deal with. This, in fact, is every businesses underlying purpose: to organize and connect different groups of people (customers, employees, investors, distributors, partners etc.) in a collaborative quest for a particular form of mutual value creation. Most thoughtful business leaders are well aware of this, yet rarely make profitable use of their knowledge for one simple reason: no one has yet managed to translate this rather abstract and generalistic insight into concerted, practical action. Until now. Value Multiplication Mapping does just that, providing professionals with the tools they need to discover the value of the people, knowledge, networks, culture, behaviours, brands, communities, and learning that form the basis of today's corporate value measurement.
the new (network) world's 30 most valued corporations
Various networks of informed Unseen Wealth observers around the world are cooperating in the following transparency search. Look out for 30 of the world's largest 1000 organisations that can be valued because their leader has a transparent presentation which any other leader can openly use to make the superior economic business case.
Here is example 1 of occasional series, -more important is your nomination for transparently hi-value sustaining organisational leadership frames if you have one:
Ray Anderson Interface- Goodwill Business casing as he told it to 300 Londoners at Royal Society: Most of the time Ray tells founders and mission stories, and he uses the mount sustainability picture or a chinese whispers game style that I will describe below. He only brings out the engineer's system map occasionally to remphasise where a story he has just told fits on the map.
The Chinese whisper game of sustainability is also called how to do business case to maximise sustainable profit. Put down two words on top of each other profit and sustainability. Now these are the 2 objectives- what word somes next if we are to profit from sustainability. As Ray's web shows saving money on waste not just by reducing it but discovering which of your waste is another sompanies input. So network transparency- becoming the cheer leaders for a whole newtork's value multiplication- enters in as the next line in the business case. Now what happens - all sorts of good people get atracted by this so let's add in people. In Ray's case: Interface is in top 50 favourite places in America to work - unheard of in a sector like Industrial carpets. See lots of godwill multiplying in society; people selling you on so you need to spend less on marketing. People coming to you with innovations. What you find is whatever story to tell next in multiplying value connects with a positive word. Emerging is a list of all the links in the business case all positive human realtionship connections spinning profitability.
This is just another interpretation of goodwill attracts goodwills patterns as conversely does badwill. Any Harvard or other MBA who does not know how to construct a hi-profit business case through goodwill should be shown the carpte as fast as possible. Sadly if you look at this thread you will find the fashion over the alst 15 years started by global accountants (who I lived with for much of the 1990s) is to separate good relationships into parts. Because they never even see the system spin then are genetically incapable of measuring anything else but badwill business cases wherever their emasures are used to reward performance or to make the utterly nonsensical valuations of parts of intangibles like their brand algorithms
More details on this case here.
sep4
It doesn't matter if you treat and measure a piece of metal simply as if it was a means to your own ends. What are you supposed to do? Strike up a conversation with it? But it does matter if you treat people in the same way. People bring a whole set of new and different considerations to the party: considerations that simply cannot be contained by the closed loop narcisstic purposes, methods and measures. For example, people bring social and moral judgements to the things organisations do, which cannot be calibrated by financial measures. And they have motivations, purposes and potential contributions (such as, say, creativity) which often react badly to instrumental attitudes and methods. So people-issues don't lend themselves to the hammer and nail treatment. They pose a different type of challenge that follows a different type of logic.
Dont cry for me economics
Quite an extraordinary event happened yesterday with 200 Londoners witnessing. Ironically it happened in a room that had been hired from the British Medical Association
First someone in the panel reminded us of Unseen Wealth's research that economics and all accounting management measures now explain less than 20% of what future value or productivity compounds
Then a guy who had introduced himself as being responsible for purchase selections of 1.5% of the British stockmarket said that as a pension funds representative he was under a legal duty to follow those numbers
Next door to him, someone interjected perhaps that's why over the last 10 years pensioners to be would have better off in a building society with its interest rates
If anyone feels like discussing the crisis world where most of us have no sustainable pensions then I am doing a starbucks/BBCIcan?RSA cafe on that on
London
Pensions for people
Starbucks 51 Great Russell Street London WC1
Tuesday 7th June
5.30 p.m.
Contact:
Chris Macrae
wcbn007@easynet.co.uk
No Cost- Free coffee etasting to cheer us all up before we do the courageous conversation bit
This was only the first round of knowledge of economics implosion that happened to the 200 of us. I suggest the presence thread may help with some background understanding of how this isnt a peculiarly British blindness (though heaven knows those delegates to look after investemnts for the common people seem to be ruled by law that has gone far beyond being just an ass)
SEP3 nothing as communally practical as a good map
With respect to Lewin, I believe he was wrong in saying that there's nothing as practical as a good theory, I far prefer a holistic map. For example, tell us if you would like to test out one of those big words - transformation, sustainability, management, etc -. At least this map enables us to ask that we question the word from the perspective of each constituency represented.
I have noticed people spend hours talking across purposes about a word with different meanings to different disciplines without realising that that any actions they later enact will be different just because of this. Worse is the modern fashion deliberately to mislead. You will hear people making very mean decisions on the altar of shareholder value, but press these social controllers for a definition that makes transparent the timespan their analysis reflects and something stange happens. Usually they were not talking about a typical shareholder at all but the most rampant speculative type - who's as interested in pumping up an organisation to short it on the way down as anything else.
Do we really spend our lives in organisations to serve people who are deliberately content in seeing the organisation destruct its purpose and future value once they have wound up trust to breaking point and bet against the company's future? The silence of the lambs has nothing on letting SVA rip as a measure to govern industries in your neighbourhood with.
Meanwhile here are a few of the other reasons, our journalist loves the knowledge sharing honesty of maps:
What Maps do
Maps help people focus on what matters, at that particular time and occasion. They help people to:
• see connections and relationships and to focus on the critical ones
• place things in perspective
• identify destinations, barriers and obstacles and ways round them
• plan journeys
• calibrate progress
• communicate with others about all the above to generate shared understandings
Different types of map focus on different aspects of the same reality. We happily shift from one map to another, depending on what we are trying to achieve. Some maps show political boundaries. Others depict transport routes, weather systems, physical terrain or destinations of interest.
Also, depending on the task at hand, different types of map depict different aspects of reality
Technical note: more on the scale of the intangibles valuation crisis here, together with notes on scholars of law, and others trying to rectify this mass destruction of organisation.
Superior Economics 2 SEP2
Consider the productivity potential gained when a complete network of relationships aligns – so that what A does to keep his promises to B also helps him to keep his promises to C. In this case, we have a virtuous spiral where each party’s best interest is served by helping other parties achieve theirs. This is a positive game where each party has good reason to contribute to, and invest in, his relationships with the others, because that contribution will in turn feed the benefits he receives.
In such a case the network has integrity, in both senses of the word. It works well as a whole, and it is trustworthy: it deserves the trust people who invest their precious assets and resources in it, because it gives a good return on their investment.
Zing! 
Let’s invent a technical term for this: ‘zing’. When the potential of the people involved with the organisation is fully unleashed, everybody within its network ‘zings’ with energy. But generating ‘zing’ is not something that happens automatically. And it’s not something that happens simply as by-product of other management activities and priorities such as formulating and implementing strategies, improving productivity, driving sales and margins and so on. Generating ‘zing’ is a task in its own right – one which should encompass and influence everything else the organisation does.
Zing is about creating virtuous wealth creating spirals. It is about organisations making the most of the people they come into contact with, in order to make the most for them. To build sustainable, value-creating environments (where ‘value’ is both economic and human) that are invigorating and enriching to work for, be a customer of, and do business with. To be a Type A organisation in other words.
The narcissistic corporation
Right now in the world of work however – especially profit-oriented business – there is miserable, hope-sapping, soul-destroying, cynicism-inducing but widespread and deeply embedded assumption that Zing is not possible...
Humanist Systems
Dear Chris
It is our responsibility as humans to work for the development of humanist systems.
“That is if we want humans to survive”
Smiles
Suleman
Superior Economics 1 - SEP1
Consider two organisations. Which would you rather work for?
A. An organisation which seeks to realise the full potential of the people who work for it.
B. An organisation which uses its staff (and other people) simply as a means to its own ends.
Which would you rather be a customer of?
A. An organisation which seeks to prosper by helping its customers prosper.
B. An organisation that seeks to make money out of its customers.
Finally, as a citizen, which organisation would you prefer?
A. An organisation which enriches its surroundings – its society, local communities, environment, etc?
B. An organisation which profits by plundering the resources around it?
If your answer is ‘B’ then clearly you’re a sad loser with no interest in reading or questioning the next 99 posts of superior economics.
Q&A 1 from JG Australia
Q1 I looked at your map and wondered why you had left out what I consider to be a critical component. For intangibles to be fully valued, either the asset itself a has a market sale value or the asset must lead to new initiatives that generate future cash flow. These initiatives or projects don't seem to feature in your map, yet in the majority of organisations we have looked at, they make up most of the market determined intangible value.
A1 There are 2 views of intangibles – those who want to sell off parts, and those who perhaps as implied by the old word goodwill see the value multipliers as connecting the whole system. Mathematically, intangibles originally meant: all that is so humanly interconnecting that it cannot be measured the way that tangible separable things can. In other words, the unseen wealth of intangibles (the vast majority of all future compounding value) is seen in the integrity (minimal conflicts) of the human relations “trust-flow” system gravitating around the wholly unique purpose of the organisation. Sure our method clarifies more clearly than any other method how much that value is spinning up and down but not in a bits and piece way.
Whenever accountants count only in bits they destroy intangibles, as Andersen did by not understanding that goodwill multiplies through every relationship- if you let your identity have zero value to society, all your business value becomes zero. In a networking world of value multiplication, bottom line arithmetic, that only uses the separation operand of addition, is the most risky thing you can monopolise governance of life by.
Chris
http://holonetwork.blogspot.com
http://intangibles-valuation.blogspot.com