Smart Leadership – Wise Leadership

Environments of Value in an Emerging Future

Christopher Steed

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317142119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

There is a strong link between organisational culture and profit after all a happy workforce is a productive workforce. Yet a culture of inertia rather than innovation prevails in many organisations. Wise leaders, however, know how to work with the grain of human value and worth, harnessing it, so as to add shared value both for the organisation and for the good of society. So, how can astute leaders set the right conditions for creativity and cultivate non-economic goods, such as time and relationships, that make for a happy, effective workforce? The author proposes the notion of organisational culture as 'environments of value' wherein inner value translated into external value is embedded within the triple bottom line and indeed an awareness of how an organisation is like a force field: it exercises power and leaves a footprint. This construct informs the emerging concept of Shared Value as requiring five literacies about: ¢ Shareholder value and return for risk ¢ Value for the social environment linked to respect for the natural environment ¢ Inner value of those in the enterprise, which, when unlocked, releases energies and adds value ¢ Nurture of non-quantifiable qualities that promote human flourishing ¢ Understandings of how power relations distort the way organisations operate He clearly signposts the link between promoting an environment of value within which these literacies flourish and the added value for the organisation arising from such a culture.

Chapter 1

Smart leadership from the emerging future

‘She were accessible, she were a people person; she weren’t out for money, she were for us.’

Tribute by neighbours who were stunned by their MP, Jo Cox, being slain on the streets of her West Yorkshire town, 16 June 2016.¹

The revolt of unrealistic expectations (leadership in turbulent times)

We are educating children for a society that will be out of date within 15 years. The only technology young people know comes with a twenty-first-century mindset; a frame of reference that has been reshaped and recast in this curious time when technology and nature came together. The social and economic impact of technology is widespread and accelerating. The speed and volume of information have increased exponentially. Experts are predicting that 90 per cent of the entire population will be connected to the Internet within ten years. With the Internet of Things, digital and physical worlds will soon be merged.²

The forces that are driving change, that are reshaping the landscape of culture and society, are both rapid and discontinuous. They are rapid because the pace accelerates with each passing year. They are discontinuous because the transformations are disruptive and unpredictable. Discontinuous change creates situations that challenge our assumptions and mandate different ways of working. The new network economy that is emerging is post-capitalist: the utility is provided through abundant information technology that, in a wired-up world, is social on a global scale.

One of the seven sweeping transformations we will note, the Fourth Industrial Revolution courtesy of the new infrastructure of the Internet, is the first-ever truly two-way media. Amidst its Janus-type quality of facing both ways simultaneously towards both human flourishing and destructiveness, the Internet has brought many new voices to the fore. Instead of sitting back and being broadcast at, we are now active participants and contributors. We place a priority on connection, on being part of the conversation, on participation. This offers potential for human flourishing that has never been seen in world history at the very same time as it threatens de-personalisation.

The plates are shifting. The way the world works is changing rapidly. Change is beginning to stir at a deeper level than that of governments calling the tune. Smart leaders in politics know that pulling the old state levers to make things happen is not going to do the job in the same way. Historical forces are reshaping things. A de-personalised world is experiencing blowback. The blowback takes the form of an assertion of (or retreat into?) identities, translated into populist demands ‘to bring back control’ as Gordon Brown frames it.³ It is an illusion. There is no going back.

When Philip Bobbitt, American lawyer, historian and government adviser, along with other champions of the liberal global order evoked the ‘end of history’ after the end of the cold war they imagined a deepening network of international bodies, running on liberal rules, which would cooperate to tackle such all-embracing problems as climate change, pollution and, of course, residual poverty and disease.⁴ That was all before the 9/11 attacks and the banking crisis of 2008/9, when the scale and speed of China’s recovery to worldwide authority was far from clear. So it has not proved so easy. Globalisation has proved a mixed blessing, with the rise of religious fundamentalist militancy and the mass migration of peoples across the world. The American-led war on terror set out to disrupt and destroy the emerging franchise known as al-Qaeda. But they reckoned without a newly emerging bit of tech known from 2000 as a ‘smartphone’. It was the terrorist organiser’s dream weapon.

The World Economic Forum’s Meta-Council on Emerging Technologies, published in collaboration with Scientific American, highlights technological advances its members believe have the power to improve lives, transform industries and safeguard the planet. It also provides an opportunity to debate any human, societal, economic or environmental risks and concerns that the technologies may pose prior to widespread adoption.

Horizon scanning for emerging technologies is crucial to staying abreast of developments that can radically transform our world, enabling timely expert analysis in preparation for these disruptors. The global community needs to come together and agree on common principles if our society is to reap the benefits and hedge the risks of these technologies.⁵

To give a snapshot of the breathtaking acceleration of the new digital world, the top ten technologies for 2016 were the following.

Nanosensors and the Internet of Nanothings

With the Internet of Things expected to comprise 30 billion connected devices by 2020, one of the most exciting areas of focus today is now on nanosensors capable of circulating in the human body or being embedded in construction materials. Once connected, this Internet of Nanothings could have a huge impact on the future of medicine, architecture, agriculture and drug manufacture.

Next-generation batteries

One of the greatest obstacles holding renewable energy back is matching supply with demand, but recent advances in energy storage using sodium, aluminium and zinc-based batteries makes mini-grids feasible that can provide clean, reliable, round-the-clock energy sources to entire villages.

The blockchain

Much already has been made of the distributed electronic ledger behind the online currency Bitcoin. With related venture investment exceeding $1 billion in 2015 alone, the economic and social impact of a blockchain’s potential to fundamentally change the way markets and governments work is only now emerging.

2D materials

Graphene may be the best-known single-atom-layer material, but it is by no means the only one. Plummeting production costs mean that such 2D materials are emerging in a wide range of applications, from air and water filters to new generations of wearables and batteries.

Autonomous vehicles

Self-driving cars may not yet be fully legal in most geographies, but their potential for saving lives, cutting pollution, boosting economies, and improving quality of life for the elderly and other segments of society has led to rapid deployment of key technology forerunners along the way to full autonomy.

Organs-on-chips

Miniature models of human organs – the size of a memory stick – could revolutionise medical research and drug discovery by allowing researchers to see biological mechanism behaviours in ways never before possible.

Perovskite solar cells

This new photovoltaic material offers three improvements over the classic silicon solar cell: it is easier to make, can be used virtually anywhere and, to date, keeps on generating power more efficiently.

Open AI ecosystem

Shared advances in natural language processing and social awareness algorithms, coupled with an unprecedented availability of data, will soon allow smart digital assistants to help with a vast range of tasks, from keeping track of one’s finances and health to advising on wardrobe choice.

Optogenetics

The use of light and colour to record the activity of neurons in the brain has been around for some time, but recent developments mean light can now be delivered deeper into brain tissue, something that could lead to better treatment for people with brain disorders.

Systems metabolic engineering

Advances in synthetic biology, systems biology and evolutionary engineering mean that the list of building block chemicals that can be manufactured better and more cheaply by using plants rather than fossil fuels is growing every year.⁶

Automation has also enabled the rise of ‘big data’ based on deep-learning. Given enough data, computers can imitate the neural networks of the human brain and undertake tasks like powering search engines. Internet-based firms can experiment with big data, the accumulation and collection of vastly more data than before to analyse and improve performance. The 80–20 rule used to be a management adage; that out of the things that could be changed to make for improvement, working on 20 per cent would drive 80 per cent of what needs to improve. With big data, it becomes possible to analyse all the factors and all the detail rather than work on a few tweaks. Big data is transformative because it produces any amount of small improvements.⁷

Citizens have 24/7 access to high-quality information and inspiration, so they no longer need to go to the regular channels for those things. Slowly but surely, global, societal shifts are changing how things are done. More and more communities are finding creative ways to prioritise connection, dialogue, participation and empowerment. There is a new ‘participative paradigm’. People expect to work collaboratively. Political and economic turbulence have destabilised communities and dislocated individual lives. Faith in many democratic institutions is undermined. In a global economy and rapidly changing business environments, competition and hierarchy are being replaced by collaboration and shared leadership.

As Giddens notes, ‘there are good reasons to believe that we are living through a major period of historical transition. The changes affecting us are not confined to any one area of the globe but stretch almost everywhere.’⁸

First transformation – distance in politics

Across the world, we are entering an era of fragmented politics and multiplicity of party. As witnessed in the 2016 US presidential elections or concurrent debates about the European Union, sentiment against the European project has risen dramatically in recent years. Citizens everywhere seem more fearful of immigration, more distrustful of global actors. This is a pronounced cultural anxiety, widely reported on. The ‘return of the public’ is fraught with both risk and opportunity.

Though citizens hold on to the belief that in theory the state can pull the levers and make things happen, this goes hand in hand with a marked sense of powerlessness in the face of remote forces. The distrust of institutions in general and politicians in particular is strong. Official policy does not seem to take into account the effect it has on ordinary people. As one voice put it, ‘I’m fed up with my representatives doing things that don’t come down to me.’⁹

It has become commonplace to observe that there is a marked ‘anti-politics’ mood across the Western world. What the Tea Party in the US or the Trump candidacy has in common with support at the time of writing with a self-confessed socialist candidate is the same principle as strong grassroots support for a socialist Leader of the Opposition in the UK. Old ways of doing things seem sterile. The stables need drastic cleansing. There is also a broad anti-establishment, anti-politics mood playing out in the European referendum debate in the UK, the 2016 US presidential elections and beyond. People are fed up with politics as usual. Politicians are branded as being too grey, too bland, too unrepresentative of ‘people like us’.

Everywhere, the cry is ‘power to the people’ or ‘Wir sind das Volk’, as the Saxons proclaimed in 1989; the first East Germans to take to the streets crying freedom for a life without communism. We are in an age of critical citizenry demanding authentic politics and politicians. ‘It makes him a whole person, a real person’, declares a supporter of Marco Rubio in the 2016 US presidential election.¹⁰

Post-industrial workers are much less inclined to vote by fixed allegiances. Party managers and activists alike are struggling to grasp why voters are not as excited as they are and how we are to make sense of seemingly contradictory outcomes such as, in the UK, the Labour Party being too ‘left wing’ for England perhaps but too far to the right for Scotland. These trends tell us something about the politics of distance. Westminster is ‘too far away’, just as Europe is too far away for many English voters. Indeed, many Highlanders and Islanders feel Edinburgh is a long way. Distance is the new frontier. There is far greater emphasis on the need to reconnect people and politics, born perhaps from distrust of ‘the system’ run by vested interests and elites. Infantilising the electorate won’t work now. Grassroots activism in economic and political life as people exercise agency shows they are less prepared to be passive observers of what is going on. The debate across Europe about Europe arguably is not about the shape of bananas but remoteness. Along with citizens not identifying so much with their traditional base because it has passed them by – witness the white working-class voting Labour in England or older, middle-class men in Germany anxious about social decline and cultural alienation¹¹ – comes the rise of nationalisms. Just when the post-war generation thought nationalism had lost its potency and fascist overtones, from Greece to Scotland, from UKIP and Tory euro-sceptics to Marine Le Pen, people want a national story. The Scottish National Party stormed to victory in the 2015 British general election because they created a mass movement mobilised at the speed of a smartphone and a text. They drew on the enthusiasm of ordinary voters, on crowd funding and instant donations. Everyone felt part of the project. The decision for Brexit in the EU referendum debate in June 2016 told a similar story.

Beyond doubt, globalisation has, for many people, been a great force for good. Life expectancy has risen by more in the past 50 years than in the previous 1,000. When the Berlin Wall fell, two-fifths of humanity lived in extreme poverty. Yet as Joseph Stiglitz contends, lack of rewards of globalisation being spread evenly is the root cause of the current backlash against globalisation. ‘We’ve never had a democratic globalisation. The lack of transparency and openness has meant that we’ve wound up with a form of globalisation that works for a few, but not for all of us.’ ‘Citizens now are beginning to understand that globalisation matters. They are demanding a voice.’¹² In short, the EU referendum outcome in the UK was about more than the EU. It was a vote of no confidence against globalisation.

The importance of Facebook and other social networks to politics will continue to grow. In the 2016 US presidential election, candidates spent a billion dollars on digital advertising, more than 50 times what they spent in 2008.¹³ Facebook can now generate targeted advertisements. Politicians can say different things to different groups without anyone noticing.

There is a strong sense that politics is not doing what it should be for people and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Setting the scene
• 1. Smart leadership from the emerging future
• 2. Re-conceiving strategy
• 3. Eating strategy for breakfast
• 4. The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the human dimension
• 5. The creation and conversion of shared value
• 6. Three ingredients of a valuing environment: Proposing a construct
• 7. Lifting the LID on your organisation
• 8. Communities with a purpose: Significance with belonging
• 9. Environments of value, systems and the organisations of the future
• 10. The future leadership garden
• 11. Listen to the music (and help change the song): Wise leaders and transformative change
• 12. Leadership with spirit: Wisdom and the black box of power
• Postscript
• Index