A Reconnection is Required
Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay as he is known by his thousands of followers outlines (in a lovely blog on the Guardian how a spiritual revolution is needed if we are going to confront the multitude of environmental challenges.
Yet all too often sustainability conferences remain void of spiritual debate – we prefer, it seems, to be comfortably numb when it comes to getting serious about re-connecting to our life force and nature around us. Instead, we find it more comforting to keep ‘busy’ innovating and debating new technologies, new products, new languages, new strategies – all of which are very important. Yet without the fundamental connection to life they are incomplete and akin to building a house on sand rather than rock.
What spirituality offers, Thay says, is the recognition that we all suffer and the way to overcome that pain is to directly confront it, rather than seeking to hide or bypass it through our obsession with shopping, entertainment, work or the beautification of our bodies. The craving for fame, wealth, power and sex serves to create only the illusion of happiness and ends up exacerbating feelings of disconnection and emptiness.
Change is possible only if there is a recognition that people and planet are ultimately one and the same.
“You carry Mother Earth within you,” says Thay. “She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment.
“In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer. In that kind of relationship you have enough love, strength and awakening in order to change your life.”
Lets hope (and pray) that we sustainability people and the people we seek to change start ‘with the man in the mirror’ and re-connect with nature and our deep, authentic human-nature. Only then can we change the world in a complete, truthful and beautiful way.
I pray for conferences that debate spirituality, that debate ways of re-connecting ourselves with the natural world, that debate how we can build the right foundation for a truly sustainable future. The time is now.
For the original and complete post please go to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/zen-thich-naht-hanh-buddhidm-business-values
Transformating towards a firm of the future
Organizations are increasingly exposed to dynamic change: change upon change upon change. This dynamic change upsets the traditional business paradigm.
Paradoxically, inspiration to overcome the current challenges is all around us. Nature has been dealing with dynamic change for more than 3.8 billion years, and the more we explore nature’s ways the more we find inspiration for operating in a dynamically changing business environment.
Our understanding of nature has evolved over the last few decades. We once viewed it as a battleground of competition to one of dynamic non-equilibrium, where an order within chaos prevails due to unwritten natural patterns, feedback loops, behavioural qualities, interdependencies and collaboration within and throughout ecosystems. But the more we grapple with the challenges our businesses now face, the more we realize that nature’s patterns and qualities inspire approaches and qualities for our own evolutionary success in business and beyond.
Case in point: Biomimicry for Creative Innovation (BCI), a collaboration of business transformation specialists which I helped co-found, has developed a set of business principles for the firm of the future originating from the life principles developed by the Biomimicry Institute in the US. The principles are aimed at creating conditions in business conducive to collaboration, adaptability, creativity, local attunement, multifunctionality and responsiveness; hence, enhancing the evolution of organizations from rigid, tightly managed hierarchies to dynamic living organizations which thrive and flourish within ever-changing business, socio-economic and environmental conditions.
Organizations that understand how to embed these principles from nature into their products, processes, policies and practices create greater abundance for themselves and their business ecosystems in times of rapid change; flourishing rather than perishing in volatile conditions. Organizations inspired by nature are resilient, optimizing, adaptive, systems-based, values-based and life-supporting.
For more on this and the full-length original blog post, please visit: http://nbs.net/lessons-from-the-environment-help-firms-evolve/
The firm of the future is a business inspired by nature
Due to a “perfect storm” of economic, social and environmental factors, our business landscape is becoming more and more volatile.
The pace of change, too, is increasing. To succeed in business we must be agile, creative, alert, spontaneous and responsive – often operating in completely new ways. Today’s rapidly changing business environment calls for businesses that thrive in rapidly changing environments: businesses more akin to living systems. These “Firms of the Future” can learn and adapt; they aren’t structured and siloed, which stifles learning and agility. These firms are also bottom-up, decentralized, interdependent, multifunctional, emergent, self-organizing units– not the centralised, top-down, hierarchically managed monoliths of the 20th century.
Put simply, the business models and management approaches that served us well in the past are no longer fit for purpose in a business context where dynamic change is the new norm.
Professor Michael Porter said a few months ago when addressing business leaders in New York: “The old models of corporate strategy and capitalism are dead. We are witnessing a paradigm shift from hurting to helping.”
Organizations that are able to let go of old business paradigms, having the courage to embrace new ways of operating while dealing with the pressing short-term issues of today, shall be the ones who can weather the storm, adapting to seek out opportunities in these volatile times. Other organizations, fearfully clinging to practices that are no longer fit for purpose for the times within which we now operate, shall struggle to cope with the level of change ahead.
It requires great courage to break rank from a paradigm that is so ingrained in our business mindset; to transform in the face of pressing short-term pain.
The years ahead to 2020, in this decade of creative destruction and reconstruction, shall bear witness to the wheat being separated from the chaff – organizations that “get it” adapting and evolving, and those that do not perishing or being acquired. Bold “Firms of the Future” do not try and tightly manage change; they empower a culture of collaboration to unlock the creative potential of their own workforce, their partners and the communities they serve, initiating positive virtuous cycles of collaboration, innovation and value creation for all stakeholders. The result: more value, bigger margins and higher well-being.
As Dawn Vance, Director of Global Logistics at Nike succinctly puts it:
“Organizations have three options:
- Hit the wall;
- Optimize and delay hitting the wall; or
- Redesign for resilience – simultaneously optimizing existing networks whilst creating disruptive innovations and working collaboratively with partners.”
It is this “redesigning for resilience” that drives the transformation from a Firm of The Past to a Firm of The Future. The Firm of the Future is one that:
- Drives transformation through values-based leadership and stakeholder empowerment using the catalysts of education, innovation, inspiration and collaboration;
- Encourages synergies across its business ecosystem, engaging with multiple stakeholders in an open, transparent way; where common values create connections enabling mutualism;
- Harnesses the power of social networks and the “pull” media; uses crowd sourcing, co-creation, open source collaboration platforms and transparent branding for differentiation;
- Evolves ecological thinking for innovating and new ways of operating and generation value for every stakeholder within the community it serves; where waste equals food and nature inspires the people, processes and products.
The pressure for change is increasing all the time. Well-publicized forward-thinking organizations are already making headway on their transformational journey – Unilever, Puma, InterfaceFLOR, General Electric, Patagonia, Procter & Gamble, John Lewis Partnership and Marks & Spencers, to name a few. Visionary business leaders of today are already making the first steps on this transformational, emergent path for themselves and their businesses.
And it is a journey rather than a destination. Transforming towards a Firm of The Future is not about designing the right business model and implementing it, it is about understanding the ethos, ethics and environment that will allow the organization, individuals and wider stakeholder community to best flourish, adapt and evolve. It’s an emergent journey, a journey that encourages diversity in approaches and outcomes, one where it is good to make mistakes, even fail, as it generates learning to move forward in a more resilient way.
Firm of The Future
We are on the cusp of a paradigm shift in business. It is hoped this blog explores the why and the how of this business paradigm shift.
The Nature of Business 