Right, let’s move this thing along shall we?

Here’s the second and middle extract from Chapter 2, all about employing Democractic type stuff at work.

The tricky thing is I haven’t got permission of these companies covered yet (though everything I’ve written is in the public domain), so I’m hoping I don’t get in trouble but want to keep the flow of content coming your way so here goes…

(Oh, and where it says ‘TK’ is where I need to do more research – please ignore!).

———

Who can we be inspired by?

To make more sense of these ideas, let’s take a look at some organisations that are already reaping the rewards.

Namaste Solar

Namasté Solar is a rapidly growing solar power business based in Boulder, Colorado. Providing solar energy technologies to both business and residential customers, the business is thriving, ranked #975 in the 2010 Inc Magazine Inc5000, has grown 306% in three years and turns over in the order of $TKm per annum and has TK employees.

That’s about as conventional as Namasté get. For starters, Namasté started as a pure out-and-out co-operative. In a co-operative the business is owned and operated by the same group of people, with no external shareholders, and co-operatives often equally share the equity, and sometimes the salaries and other financial rewards in the company, although that varies from co-op to co-op. Indeed, over time Namasté itself has responded to its own evolution and the changes in the world around it, and continues to adapt how it operates to this present day. These structures do not need to be rigid and inflexible.

Hearing Blake Jones from Namasté Solar talk about their business, their structure and in particular how they manage decision making is refreshingly clear. The Namasté approach has five levels at which decisions are made:

1.    Individual level – ‘On the individual level, the company is a “meritocracy” whereby individuals can assume responsibilities based on proven competencies and feel empowered to make decisions.’
2.    Peer review level – ‘Peer review refers to a process whereby an individual co-owner consults with multiple other co-owners to resolve the issue.’
3.    Committee level – ‘When more in-depth discussion and collaboration is required, the issue is addressed by one of the company’s many “committees” which consist of volunteers, and “teams” which consist of members grouped together based upon job role.’’
4.    Company level – ‘A company-wide vote is required when a new or particularly important issue is introduced. The issue is then addressed by the entire company via a democratic voting process.’
5.    Board level – ‘In the rare event that a resolution is not made at the first four levels of decision-making, the board of directors, which consists of five elected co-owners (any co-owner may nominate themselves for Board elections), is empowered to intervene and provide resolution.’

Can you see how this pushes decision-making power into Namasté’s team of TK people?

Rather than a default of either individual managers or the exec team, the whole company is empowered and people encouraged to resolve issues at the early stage levels wherever possible.

What is also striking about the Namasté model is the breadth of available options in how to get a decision made, without it being overwhelming or cluttered. There is no default decision making location, nor a sense of a particular bottleneck slowing the organisation down.

What would it be like to work in an organisation where the decision making was so clearly expressed and so evenly distributed?

By the way, all of this does not mean to say that the board luxuriate in an easygoing world where no tough decisions ever get to them. Blake, who is voted in as the CEO for TK year terms, has had to deal with redundancies and TK.

Oh, and the board are also voted in. Seriously cool company.

Box copy:
Namasté in 2010: $TKm revenues in 2005, TK co-owners.

HCL Technologies

HCL Technologies is a leading global IT services company that focuses on ‘transformational outsourcing’. Headquartered in TK, the company has over eighty thousand employees located in offices in 26 countries and works with a customer base across many industries including Financial Services, Manufacturing, Consumer Services, Public Services and Healthcare. The business has a turnover in the order of $4bn a year. Not small beer!

Like many people, I hadn’t heard of HCL Technologies story until I came across the book ‘Employees First, Customers Second’ by CEO Vineet Nayar. It’s a great story about a how a big business goes through a transformation to continue to thrive at scale but through radical new management practices and an ethos that flips the traditional ‘customers first’ mindset to a position of ‘if we do the right thing by our people, our customers will thrive as a result’.

What the HCLT story has done is eliminate in one fell swoop the suggestion that participation cannot work at scale in business. It also provides a helpful and grounded perspective of what it is like to take a large existing business on such a journey. Case studies like this are few and far between and the early pioneers deserve kudos and support. (Another example worth looking up is the American healthcare company DaVita).

In ‘Employees First, Customers Second’, Nayar outlines 5 brilliant and practical practices that his substantial business put in place:

1.    360-degree Survey
2.    U&I Portal
3.    MyBlueprint
4.    Smart Service Desk
5.    Employee First Councils

In this book we will look at the first 3 of those 5, and I wholeheartedly recommend buying the book to read the whole HCLT story.

1. 360-degree Survey

In their 360-degree survey, HCLT went much further than the traditional approach in two ways: firstly, any one who felt that a given manager affected their performance could participate in their 360-degree review; secondly, any one participating in the survey could then see the results. You can imagine how this creates massively more transparency around reviews, and fundamentally shifts the responsibility to the managers rather than the employees. In fact, it’s a great example of the application of Linus’ Law by welcoming in outliers and diverse opinions to create the very best possible quality feedback and learning for management. What does this have to do with Democracy and Empowerment? Everything! This approach massively flattens out hierarchy and reintroduces merit, it shifts power to the grassroots and broadens it out to a wider base, and in doing so directly influences the power and decision-making in HCLT.

Is there a way you can start sharing the results of your own performance review with your team, and invite more people in to review your own performance?

2. U&I Portal

Nayar and his team at HCLT designed the U&I platform open up the CEO’s office (and power base) to allow anyone anywhere in the workforce to ask a question. The platform is available for all in HCLT to see, and the question, the questioner and the answer are all visible.

This profoundly shifts the ability of senior management to hide from difficult questions and promotes the ability of anyone in the organisation to ask one.

As Nayar writes, a group of employees told him “this is the biggest change we have seen at HCLT in years”. Powerful culture change by walking the talk and really, genuinely opening up the floor to the issues that people in the organisation care about.

Is there a way you can use simple, lightweight technology (in small teams, open Q&A or email will suffice!) to get the dirt out and get the ‘elephants in the room’ talked about?

3. MyBlueprint

Whereas the first two of these management practices are inherently about becoming more participative through enabling authentic communication and transparency, this third is more fundamental: it is about setting strategy together rather than hierarchically or in silos.

In their MyBlueprint endeavour, HCLT had three hundred managers responsible for business planning in their respective areas produce their individual ‘blueprints’ for the coming year and then share them, together with an audio walk-through, on a Facebook-like platform called MyBlueprint. These plans were then available for a further 8,000 managers to consume, review and feedback on.

The results speak for themselves: “Everyone felt able to contribute to the thinking and planning porocess. People understood the challenges better, owned the plan, and could align themselves with the strategy as I had never seen before”.

This is the power of deep, meaningful participation in the running of our organisations. To get better solutions, more belief, higher levels of engagement. HCL is an inspiring and instructional example of how very large businesses can do just that.

Box copy:
HCL Technologies in 2011: $3bn revenues, 82,000 employees.

Apple and Visionary Leaders – the anti-examples?

One of the great unresolved tensions for me in the democratic model is best summarised in the ‘what about Apple then?’ case. According to the mythology and the literature, Apple was run by Steve Jobs in a tightly controlled and extremely hierarchical way. Whole departments were locked down in secrecy, people worked on tiny segments of the visionary product in development – never seeing the whole of what they were contributing to until the very end, Jobs was himself apparently incredibly harsh in his dealings with people.

If all of this is true, then it really does sound like Apple is a powerful anti-example of the democratic mode of working, truly the antithesis of Linus’ Law: here, rather than many eyeballs, there were just a few of the ‘right’ eyeballs.

And, in that model, the company created some of the greatest product designs of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. It changed the face of the personal computing, music, mobile phone, and (possibly, they gossip at the time of writing) TV industries.

What can be said about this? I do not have the answers, at least not yet. Perhaps there is something about the resilience of a business so dependent on so few. It sounds churlish to say it after Jobs’ death, but  it is true that the company was not just dependent on him but on a few key people. Perhaps also there is then something about an organisation’s life span when it is so dependent on a visionary individual. Perhaps the democratic model can provide a platform for a longing period than the led-by-a-few model.

And beyond Apple and back into the community of democractically-run businesses, there is the common thread of visionary leadership. It seems to be both a paradox and just a fact of life that to involve the many needs to vision and energy of just one or two: Semler at Semco who we are about to meet, Blake at Namasté, Vineet at HCL, and still more – the visionary CEO Kent that turned around DaVita (briefly referenced but not looked at in this book). Or perhaps the world lionizes the few leaders progressive enough to see these opportunities and committed enough to see them through – perhaps that’s it. They are over-celebrated simply because they are so different.

I do not know the answers, but if we are to grow this movement and if you are to carry your own changes through then we must at least glimpse into the dark spots and challenge what we find.

Grandfather and Mother Earth

One of the things that happens when you start to take this alternative approach to business is that your peer group drops from squillions of everyday, conventional businesses to a much smaller, tighter set of organisations. And in that, it can be hard not to feel alone.

But as we have seen there are absolutely others on this journey. The two motherlodes for me, two of the leading lights that I use to help me stay on course I half-jokingly refer to here as the Grandfather, Ricardo Semler of Semco, and Mother Earth, Traci Fenton and her brilliant team at WorldBlu.

Ricardo Semler is the guy that first inspired so many of us in this movement with the possibilities of a different approach through his hilarious, mesmerising books Maverick and The Seven Day Weekend. Semler has walked the talk: he has grown the family business he inherited from his father from a traditional manufacturer of pumps TK into a thriving conglomerate where some of the most radical working practices are at play. People can set their own salaries, if a meeting is boring you can just leave, TK.

Traci Fenton founded WorldBlu with a mission of spreading the concept of democracy at work. This dedicated group of people work tirelessly towards their mission of seeing 1 billion people employed in democractic organisations. Gob-smackingly cool. Talk about a Purpose of Significance.

WorldBlu is without peers in the job that it does connecting up progressive leaders and entrepreneurs. Through its annual WorldBlu List of Most Democratic Companies, the organisation builds pride and profile for the community, but vitally that list is based on a comprehensive surveying tool which is extremely useful in benchmarking where your organisation is on the journey to becoming as democractic as it can be.

——

So the next and final extract is the ‘OK, so how do we do it?’ section.

What do you think of this section? Hit me with comments and feedback please: here, wmcinnes@gmail.com, on twitters @willmcinnes / #cltrshck.

THANKS 🙂

Hi contributizers,

Thank you for your help so far – here’s a list of people who’s changes have helped push the work forward (and will be thanked in the book!) http://willmcinnes.co.uk/book-culture-shock/contributors/

As always, please comment or send me your thoughts.

———

So what does Democracy at work look like?

To make this practical and helpful we need to break this down into four sections:

• Ethos and principles
• Decision making approaches
• Underlying motivations

Ethos and principles

Firstly, to really make this work you have to believe in some basic principles. And the fundamental principle is this: ‘I believe that we can getter results by involving more of the right people’.

If you cannot believe that, you will get stuck here. It really is that simple. You have to believe and to see that opening issues and decisions up to more of the right people will lead to a better end result. Like anything new, it is a leap of faith. And once you’ve leapt, you’ll get the rewards. But to take that first leap you must believe that it can be better.

Secondly, you must put your power into the process and then be willing to live with the consequences. Until you have sat with a decision that is close to being made, that is no longer in your hands, and that is tantalisingly close to being the very opposite outcome to that you had hoped for, you have not truly empowered and fuelled this approach to decision making. It must be real, and every individual must throw themselves into making it real. If there is any hint that you either may not fully back the decision that is made by the group or that you are only chucking soft, easy unimportant issues into group decision making processes then you will fail. It’s gotta be real! That’s where the huge potential lies – in the reality and the excitement and the shared power of carving real decisions together.

These two requirements are by far the hardest, because they are the highest order. Everything else is just detail. Easy, right?

Empowerment is a lighter touch

However, for those that feel scared off by suddenly handing over the keys to their unruly internal mob there are intermediary steps that can be taken on the journey.

In my own company’s experience we have graduated from making relatively unimportant decisions together like ‘shall we shut down the office between Christmas and the New Year’ through to much more impactful and meaningful decisions like ‘shall we reject this potential new client on ethical grounds’ and ‘what should the CEO’s rewards package be this year’.

There is no right or wrong way to go about this. No approved approach. As we go further, you will find ways to take the organisation you are involved with on their own journey.

Decision making approaches

There are a number of decision making approaches that are well evolved and described elsewhere including:

• Democractic
• Sociocratic / Consensus
• Empowered individuals or groups

We will look at how to begin implementing these in more detail after looking at some of the companies leading the way in this area.

Underlying motivations

When you’re operating in an environment where the idea of participation in decision making is the very last thing on anyone’s mind it can be hard to connect with why on earth other people in the organisation might be motivated to get involved in more decision making. From that cynical mindset, it can sound or feel a bit like this: ‘why on earth would our employee want to do that – surely they just want to come in to work, go home and have an easy life’. For some people that may be true, but wouldn’t you say that most people want to enjoy their work and achieve things that they can be proud of?

We have trouble in the business community remembering that there are broader motivations than money alone. Real trouble.

In People, this is something we look at in more detail and in particular the work of Professor Steven Reiss and his 16 basic desires theory. Looking at this list, I believe that at least seven of those basic desires can be powerful motivators to get involved in participative decision-making:
• Idealism, the need for social justice
• Independence, the need for individuality
• Order, the need for organized, stable, predictable environments
• Power, the need for influence of will
• Status, the need for social standing/importance
• Tranquility, the need to be safe
• Vengeance, the need to strike back/to win

‘This is my chance to try and make this unfair company policy so much fairer’. ‘This is our opportunity to exert some control over what goes on around here’. Wouldn’t it be good to tap into deep motivations like these in yourself and the people around you?

—-

This is just a short section before looking in depth in the next extract at some case study/company examples, but really keen to hear whether it works or not – can you let me know?

I am listening in the comments here, on twitter @willmcinnes / #cltrshck and wmcinnes@gmail.com.

Thank you.

Hello again!

So while many of you helped last week with improvements to Chapter 1 on Purpose, I was writing this second chapter on Democracy at work.

If this is your first time here, you can find more the Contents of Culture Shock here.

Again, over this week I plan to release 3 chunks that represent a good 80% of the chapter.

Again, I am very grateful for all and any feedback.

—

Introducing Democracy at Work

In this changed world we now operate in the military paradigm of top-down, command and control is simply too slow and too stupid for the 21st century. Even the military agree with that.

This world is markedly different and any organisation today has to deal with radically different forces to its predecessors from generations before.

We face massive competition from a new set of global competitors, market and organisational disruption from the relentless advance in technology, seismic shifts in the role of institutions in society and the changing attitudes of a changing workforce. Oh, and the unstoppable movement towards greater consciousness about what our actions are doing in the world around us – a search for higher meaning and more sustainable behaviours.

So how we distribute power and make decisions simply must evolve. Contemporary businesses that intuitively get this are creating genuinely innovative methods for decision making and also reviving ancient models that had become pooh-poohd in business circles.

At their very core, these organisations are flipping convention on its head and showing us all smarter, more profitable and way cooler ways to get decisions made at work.

The very idea of ‘democracy’ (did you just say DEMOCRACY?) at work is seen as subversive, ‘participation’ is seen as a nice to have, whilst collaboration is increasingly an empty buzzword, thanks to technology vendors banging on endlessly about how their system will enhance collaboration.

Why make decisions and distribute power differently?

So why do these new more social businesses establish these alternative and seemingly subversive approaches to decision making? This is hippy stuff, right? ‘So you all sit around in a big circle every time you want to make a decision?’ Cue roll of eyes. Love it!

The simple answer is: because it makes sense. Business-sense. Society-sense. People-sense.

And in five or ten years time, this is going to be mainstream. (It is already becoming so and rapidly). And by then, the window of opportunity and advantage for the courageous and the ‘irrational’ – that’s you, I hope – will have passed. Now is the time!

Here are some of the major factors driving our organisations to change how decision making happens:

1. Linus’ Law
2. Gen Y
3. Realtime
4. The Internet

1. Linus’ Law

Why? Because we’re living in a world where great chunks of the internet are run on Open Source software, powering the internet servers your information flows through every day. Software like Apache server, which runs 65% of internet servers, and the Mozilla Firefox browser, contributed to by small and large communities of software developers that have often never physically met. Linus Torvalds, the initiator of Linux – which Google’s Android operating system is based on and which the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world run on – has Linus’ Law named after him which says that ‘with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’. A bug is a problem or glitch that a lone developer gets stuck on and cannot fix. By opening up that problem to broader base of participation as Torvalds did through developing the rock-solid technology Linux all bugs became shallow.

Vitally, Linux and Open Source software in general are seen by the developer community to be more secure, more robust, more reliable than the proprietary alternatives. Because the sunlight of transparency shines into their code, because of Linus’ Law.

Working together in a flat, loosely connected network, in a peer-to-peer fashion, built out the most significant advance in human society in the last thousand years (that’s the internet). What Linus’ Law tells us is how an inclusive approach to management and production can lead to much higher quality end-results.

So the question for us in organisations is are we getting enough of the right eyeballs on this problem, and if not, how can we through a different approach to the decisions we make about our work?

2. Gen Y

Why? Because your team, your organisation is filling up with Gen Y, who are becoming a significant part of the workforce. These guys just will not accept top-down. Having grown up in a different world, they have radically different expectations from work. “In the workplace, Gen Y tends to favor an inclusive style of management, dislike slowness, and desire immediate feedback about performance (Francis-Smith, 2004). And again: “Speed, customization, and interactivity – two-way nonpassive engagement – are likely to help keep Gen Y focused (Martin and Tulgan, 2004).” You will fail if you do not involve these guys. But get them on board, and you’ll fly!

There are two big benefits here. Firstly, by actively involving your teams in the making of decisions you will improve the quality of those decisions (Linus’ Law). Secondly, working with your people and in particular those from Gen Y you will be significantly enhancing their engagement with those better quality decisions, their willingness to follow through, their hearts and minds.

3. Realtime

Why? Because this massively connected and rapidly evolving world is moving at a pace that our organisations are struggling to keep up with. There’s a whole chapter on this later on in the book – see Flexibility & Realtime. But in brief, we simply cannot wait these days for messages to filter up and then back down when the events and information flowing around our markets move so quickly. A PR guy from a major European rail operator said at an event we were both contributing to: “when there was a crisis we used to have twenty minutes before the news broke during which time we could get a handle on the situation; today we have twenty seconds”. Gulp.

Funnily enough often the objection to participative and empowered forms of decision-making is that ‘we don’t have the time!’. Perhaps the real challenge is that we do not have the time to go through the conventional decision making processes, to reach bottlenecks, to wait for a pending decision to ping around the organisation whilst change and disruption happens in the real world? Perhaps it is a bit like the aphorism ‘I couldn’t afford to buy cheap’ – counter-intuitive, speaking to the pressures that are faced, but cutting through the crap?

4. The Internet

And once more, why? Because of the internet! In their prophetic, brilliant work the authors of The Cluetrain Work wrote back in 1999 that ‘Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy’. As they foresaw, in this world where the internet massively connects at all levels, regardless of title and office in the formal hierarchies, our influence and attention flows to the person that can actually fix the problem.

For example, in my first and only proper job, there was a lovely receptionist called Margaret. A long-standing loyal employee, Margaret had little formal power or influence. But once you got to know the business, you knew that there were a whole load of questions and issues to which only Margaret would know the answer.

Today the Margarets of this world are connected to many more people that seek answers: and so we see the rise of the engineer that voluntarily fixes customer problems out of hours on Twitter, the senior manager who listens and joins in with real customers to understand their real and unfiltered feedback anonymously in forums that she just cannot access through conventional means, and the growth of new teams and roles to provide customer service in the social web in response to sub-set of customers who know that they can get the fastest response to their issue by kicking up a fuss in the public social web. Hyperlinks have indeed subverted hierarchy. Today, the most accessible, highest quality and fastest answer wins. Your organisational structure either helps that, or gets in the way.

The prize of participative working

So contemporary organisations are employing smarter ways to decision-making for very powerful and tangible business benefits, including:
• To enlist the highest levels of engagement from their workforce, which is consistently proven to closely drive profitability
• And within that, to get the very best talent and results with the whole workforce, including from Gen Y, the new generation in the workforce who have very different expectations
• To increase collaboration, leading to greater innovation and less over-dependence on a few ‘knowledge hoarders’
• To be able to adapt internally more quickly in an unpredictable and highly adaptive environment
• To be able to effectively communicate at the new speed of business, which is closer and closer to real-time thanks to technology

—–

The next section will look at some of the building blocks of greater participation at work, and then some case studies of best practice and the final section will cover suggested steps on ‘how to make it happen in your organisation’.

Please provide feedback: via comments on this post, via email to wmcinnes@gmail.com, tweets @willmcinnes #cltrshck (no vowels, we’re crazy like that).

Thank you!

Hi helpful contributizers,

What follows is the third and final extract from Chapter 1: Purpose.

Feedback desired:

• Is this section useful, practical and actionable?
• Do you have any additional ideas, comments or edits?

—————————

How can you locate a Purpose of Significance?

Let’s get practical. Put simply, there are three steps in the journey towards uniting a group of people in an organisation behind a shared purpose:

1.    Finding it
2.    Framing it
3.    Living it

1. Finding it

Clearly the first step is to find and agree on a purpose that makes sense to the organisation and its competencies andt can excite and inspire its people. There are two obvious routes to locating a Purpose of Significance:

•    From the individual – commonly a leader’s personal passion or perspective
•    From the group – through a collective effort

In the individual mode, inspiring individuals like Muhammad Yunus from Grameen or Su Hardy from Mooncup stumble upon or are already driven by a cause, a personal mission.
We all have passions burning inside us. Locating our own can feel impossible, it can seem so foggy and far from beliefs about what work is and should be. But the happiest and most successful people are generally doing something they love – they love their work AND they get paid to do it.

Discovering your personal passion and purpose can be as simple as reflecting on what it is you really enjoy, what it is you want to give, what gets you riled up, furious, hysterical and arm-waving, laughing out loud. It’s about locating those embers that are already burning.

Coaching

The coaching world is very good at this, and there are some great ‘visioning’ exercises that an experienced coach can take you from, and in fact helping someone find their higher purpose is what gets most coaches very excited and passionate. The process is enjoyable, relaxed, enlightening and the results can be life-changing. Personally, I have worked with the CTI and found the quality of their coaches (and their coach training) to be incredible.

What’s Your Purpose? by Richard Jacobs

Richard Jacobs’ brilliantly designed work takes you through seven questions to ‘Find Your Answer’. I found the audio book to be an excellent way of consuming the content and working through the simple, enjoyable exercises. I can still remember how, through the course of a 1 hour train journey from Brighton to London in the middle of a frazzled busy working day, I’d sketched out some profoundly useful descriptions of what it is I wanted to give to the world. Highly recommended.

Leadership: Plain and Simple by Steve Radcliffe

In this excellent and very easy to read book on leadership, Steve Radcliffe walks you through a very practical approach to locating your own passions and then bringing others on the journey through his Future, Engage, Deliver model. As with ‘What’s Your Purpose’ there are a really tight set of wonderfully simple, open questions to get you clearly, but matched also with practical approaches to getting a wider team performing too.

In groups

In larger groups, the challenge to find a uniting purpose can feel much harder, but the result is obviously that much more powerful when it engages a whole group – be that a team, a small business, a division or an entire corporation.

My feeling is that again the purpose is lingering in the background, waiting to be dusted off and shared around. That, however hard or poor things have been, teams and organisations are often drawn together by implicit values and a purpose that may be shared but is also buried.

One method for locating a Purpose of Significance here is to run workshop groups of 8 to 15 people in a reasonably quiet and ‘safe’ space away from normal desks and interruptions and to ask some of the same questions covered in the two books mentioned above, but in a group setting.

In my team working for our clients or equally to develop our own company we often use white walls and Post-It notes or stick index cards up so that everyone can see them, providing prompts like:

•    What do we care about?
•    Why do we do the work we do?
•    What really matters?
•    What is the purpose of our organisation?
•    What do we want for the future of this group/team?
•    What can we give that really matters to the world?
And using the initial surge of answers as the start of a collective discussion about what the shared purpose will be.

    2. Framing it

Having identified a purpose, the vital key in this next century is clearly linking this purpose to a matter of significance in the world. For example, whilst working in Denmark I was told the story of a Danish company called Groundfos – a company with a long history of manufacturing excellent pumps for a variety of purposes, producing some 16 million pump units a year. My friend told me that what Groundfos had done in recent times to help lift and guide the whole business was to reframe its matter-of-face production of pumps in the context of a world where have access to clean drinking water is still a huge challenge for millions of people in the developing world, and where sustainability is becoming acutely important.

Today Groundfos frames what it does in this context:’ Grundfos is a global leader in advanced pump solutions and a trendsetter in water technology. We contribute to global sustainability by pioneering technologies that improve quality of life for people and care for the planet.’

So the opportunity here is to link what your company does with something that really, really matters in the 21st century.

    3. Living it

Living the Purpose of Significance is the fun bit. It’s the bit that, having clarified it, will be get easier and more exciting with every day that passes.

It is challenging yourself and those around you to find the link between the work and the purpose.

Living it also means sharing it. This generation of radical businesses are happy to champion and evangelize the issues that they stand for. They share knowledge freely, from seminars to articles and speeches – spreading and championing their cause.

Summary

This chapter about Purpose is deliberately first: it is where everything starts. Engaging with a Purpose of Significance transcends and influences everything else that follows. It is the keys to kingdom, the guiding star, the secret sauce! Without a clear personal and organisational purpose that really matters – a Purpose of Significance – everything else is window dressing and ‘nice to have’. This is where the magic starts. Enjoy it for what it is.

And although it may feel overwhelming and impossible to change, it really is not. Go for it, start soon. You’ll amaze yourself and the people around you.

———

This is the last extract from Chapter 1: Purpose. You can find the previous two on this Contents page.

Next week’s chapter – assuming I finish it in time this weekend – is on Democracy at work.

Thank you so much for your attention:

Please give me your feedback, comments, suggestions and support either in the comments section, tweet @willmcinnes / hashtag #cltrshck or email wmcinnes@gmail.com.

Please all bring others with interesting or strong (and alternative) perspectives into the conversation – forward to a friend and all that.

In the previous extract, I introduced the idea of Purpose of Significance.

Got some great feedback, though I think I need to be clearer: these are EXTRACTS as when I pasted the whole 4,543 words into WordPress it looked shit and overwhelming!!! 🙂

In this extract, I’ve shared 3 of the 7 organisations I’ve picked as examplars, companies that act with real Purpose of Significance.

Feedback desired:

• Does this kind of content make sense?
• Can you see how their Purpose has them act in an unusual, positive ways?
• Do these kind of organisations inspire?
• Also included in the full chapter: Apple, Google, Grameen, Mooncup or People’s Supermarket – how do these look as a full set?

———————————

Who is leading the way?

Let’s look at some examples of pioneering businesses to get under the skin of what is really possible here.

Patagonia, California, USA

Patagonia, the manufacturer of outdoor equipment with a particular heritage in climbing, is a wonderful business. You may have read ‘Let My People Go Surfing’ by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard (if you haven’t, do!). With a long track record in zigging when other businesses zag, and having a consciense that goes beyond box ticking, Patagonia was one of the two original creators of the 1% For The Planet initative – a global movement of over a thousand companies that donate 1% of their sales to a network of environmental organisations worldwide.

In its most recent, and perhaps most inspiring and jaw-dropping move the company has formed an alliance with eBay to actively promote and encourage existing owners of Patagonia equipment and apparel to sell it in a branded shop called the Common Threads Initiative within eBay. It is actively encouraging potential customers to buy second-hand, used equipment. And not just inside eBay: items listed for sale in the Common Threads Initiative are also promoted on the ‘Used Clothing & Gear’ section on Patagonia.com. In conventional thinking, this is plain STUPID! This will, you’d think, negatively impact short-term profits, limit growth, generally not be a good thing to do.

20th century business goes out of its way to encourage as many new sales as possible. But, driven by a higher purpose and with a clear sense of itself and what it stands for, Patagonia intends to tangibly address the issues of global sustainability itself. This not only addresses one of the greatest challenges our society faces, but also leads from the front: I recently met with one of Patagonia’s biggest competitors and he told me, smiling with admiration, that this move ‘changes the game, changes everything’. Brilliant!

This is truly a Purpose of Significance in action. As Chounaird is quoted in a BusinessWeek article from 2006: “”Every time we do the right thing, our profits go up”. Smart business; 21st century business.

Box copy:
Patagonia in 2005: $260m revenues in 2005, 1,250 employees.

Noma and The New Nordic Cuisine, Copenhagen, Denmark

Have you heard of Noma? If you’re a foodie, the answer is of course yes. Noma was ranked as Best Restaurant in the World by Restaurant in 2010 and 2011. Noma isn’t in New York City, Tuscany, the hills of Catalunya, Paris, London or Tokyo. Noma – famous for  dishes and flavours that celebrate the very best of Nordic/Scandinavian produce – is in Copenhagen, the gorgeous capital of Denmark. When you start to look into the story behind Noma there’s a fabulous and inspiring story of how purpose and meaning can fuel incredible achievement, and simultaneously create and empower a whole generation of likeminded changers.

As Claus Meyer, co-owner of Noma, describes on his website: “Less than 10 months after the opening of our restaurant “noma” November 2003, head chef, manager & partner Rene Redzepi and I took the initiative to organize “The Nordic Cuisine Symposium”. The day before the symposium September 2004, at an 18 hour long workshop, some of the greatest chefs in our region formulated the New Nordic Kitchen Manifesto. The Nordic Cuisine Movement was born!”

The movement that Meyer describes goes much further than fancy restaurants for the few. In 2005 the manifesto was adopted by the Nordic Council of Ministers and their extended national development programmes. You can find articles about The New Nordic Cuisine on Denmark.dk the official website of Denmark and Meyer himself participates in a long-term food programme with the Danish government and universities to improve food health including around childhood obesity.

This manifesto is a fantastic example of a group of individuals transcending their own self-interests to put down a marker and describe a Purpose of Significance that inspired and enabled a whole movement.

In doing so Noma created and placed itself in a context of higher meaning. A backdrop that could engage and impassion every would-be employee, every diner, every producer and supplier.

Would this have been possible if it was simply one person’s drive for greatnesss? If it was the same old story about a celebrity TV-friendly chef on their way to millionaire-dom? Ask a Dane what the New Nordic Cuisine has done, and they will tell you: restored pride in our national identity; changed our expectations and habits around eating and food; promoted Denmark to the world. This is what can be done with the power of Purpose of Significance – change that affects millions.

Box copy:
Noma sales, profits, size.

Anonymous, the internet, everywhere

Anonymous is an interesting organisation. For starters, I’m not sure how we’d define or understand it as an organisation, and certainly not as a business – Anonymous is usually referred to as ‘a loose collective of hackers and activists’ or similar. Anonymous is very much of the Zeitgeist: at the heart of recent activism including the Occupy movement; digitally networked; apparently decentralised; powerfully branded; and perhaps most fascinating and relevant here, motivated by a very strong sense of values and justice. And in this very changed world, we need to look at the edges and the radicals to understand how all of our organisations are going to have to change.

At the time of writing Anonymous may have:
•    Hacked the Sony Playstation Network, creating huge reputational damage and heavily impacting the share price of Sony
•    Hacked the Iranian government
•    Threatened a Mexican drug cartel
•    Threatened NATO
•    Taken down 40 child porn websites and published the names of 1,500 frequent visitors to one of the largest of these

It would be easy, thinking with a conventional mindset, to write off Anonymous. What would the old school business person say? ‘Kids, hackers, mindless vandals, people with nothing better to do – lock ‘em up!’. I think that’s missing the point. Anonymous is creating enormously powerful results, and at its core their is this sense of purpose – as they say themselves: “We are fighters for internet freedom”.

If we pay attention there is much the conventional business can learn from this unpaid, volunteer network of loosely connected activists. What Anonymous provides the 21st business person with is an unexpected and powerful example of the real-world results that can be created when people unite behind a shared Purpose of Significance. And Anonymous achieves all of this in a world where there are record numbers of young people unemployed, where technology is increasingly pervasive and disrupting of the status quo, and as Bill Rhodes, the famous banker puts it “new technologies mean that markets move in nano seconds”.
Specifically, how does Anonymous communicate its purpose, its intentions and values? How did Anonymous create these in the first place, or do they just emerge and develop over time? What is that Anonymous does that allows it to transmit its purpose so clearly to the world with so few conventional resources at its disposal? And perhaps what would our organisation look like if it were more Anonymous-like?

Box copy:
Anonymous statistics: unknown!

———

The final extract from this chapter will be on How to get there!, coming later this week.

Thank you so much for your attention:

Please give me your feedback, comments, suggestions and support either in the comments section, tweet @willmcinnes / hashtag #cltrshck or email wmcinnes@gmail.com.

OK, here goes..

The whole chapter was too wieldy at 4,543 words so I am dividing Chapter 1 into 3 extracts that I’ve reduced down and will blog individually through the week:

1. Introducing Purpose of Significance – below
2. Inspiring examples – tomorrow/Weds
3. How to get there! – Weds/Thurs

The kind of feedback I’d value:

• Does the idea of Purpose of Significance work for you?
• Are the two bulleted lists missing anything, or even over-stating things?
• Comments on style
• Typos, grammar stuff
• Does this approach work for you – or would a PDF or shorter extracts be better?

Also: I plan to write the Intro at the very end, so this may start with a jolt – just imagine you’ve read some cool uplifting stuff about how we’re all changing the world!

———————————— <— the line of no return…

Chapter 1: Purpose

Last century we in the world of business lost sight of higher meaning, of purpose beyond simply profits. People – many of us – went to work every day without a sense of a more meaningful contribution beyond the monthly pay packet, the sense of responsibility, slaving away working for the man, for anonymous, financially-driven shareholders, in businesses large and small. The trudge, the wear and tear of everyday business and the bad behaviour of many corporations turned business into a dirty word.

So what do we do now?

This is the opportunity we have before us. To guide our organisations, our teams, our projects towards higher meaning. To be part of the movement that demands a greater contribution from business than just profits. To discover and share real purpose.

A Purpose of Significance

An organisation designed to thrive in this radically different century before us has a very clear purpose that creates meaning way beyond financial results. A purpose that solves big meaningful challenges and opportunities in society. Something that really makes sense. This is a Purpose of Significance.

Why does A Purpose of Significance matter?

The simple truth is that today the accepted wisdom is that the purpose of a business is to increase shareholder value. Purely and simply. This is what is ingrained in business schools and boardrooms, in the minds of so many of us – it is very hard for any of us to stray from this path.

Increasingly we’re realising that where this gets us to isn’t such a pretty place. As the inspiring Umair Haque tweeted: “Making shareholder enrichment the basis of an economy is probably an idea that belongs up there with Cheez Whiz and Donald Trump’s hair.”

Why will a Purpose of Significance make a difference?

In practical terms a clear purpose helps in the following ways:
•    Attracting and then retaining the very best talent in your workforce – see People
•    Unlocking the highest levels of engagement – see People
•    Acquiring and retaining customers in an environment of ruthless competition and the ever-present threat of commoditisation
•    Providing both a compass and a motivation for innovation
•    Gaining competitive advantage from very diverse (and often otherwise disruptive) stakeholders by framing the organisation in a context that truly matters and contributes to society

What does A Purpose of Significance look like?

The thing is, the idea that Purpose really makes a difference in business in not new.

Then what is different with this movement of 21st century businesses? Today, it is the Significance bit.

We can put a man on the moon, we can invent better mousetraps and sell a bajillion plastic bottles of mineral water. To be ‘compelling’ in today’s world, we must work towards the urgent, the difficult, the pressing problems of our time.

The enlightened shareholders, employees, partners and consumers of the 21st century demand a Purpose of Significance.

A Purpose of Significance: the checklist

Here is how to think about how to design a purpose that fits:

•    Does this Purpose address a fundamental problem that is caused or excarcebated by this businesses industry?
•    Does this Purpose lead to decisions which can surpress or limit short-term financial gains for longer-term achievements?
•    Does this Purpose inspire a community to develop?
•    Does this Purpose address a fundamental injustice in the world?
•    Does this Purpose disrupt and positively revolutionize a whole marketplace?
•    Does this Purpose fundamentally make the world a better place?

This is our job. This is how to make business better. This is how business can help to solve the big problems of our time.

Please help make this better through the comments or by email to wmcinnes@gmail.com 🙂

The next extract will be published tomorrow: Chapter 1: Purpose, Inspiring Examples. And then later in the week: Chapter 1: Purpose, How to get there! And we’re off…