As Bauman often elucidates, re-invention is the "problem" of the modern condition. If change is the norm then change becomes necessary to maintain our position and meaning in a fluid modern society. Now Will Davies(Potlatch) in conjunction with Demos has taken aim at the models of corporation which were supposed to bring us prosperity in our newly chastened "modern" age – specifically the Plc and its mantra of shareholder value – but patently failed in their governance of risk when it comes to banking at least.
One response from the FT is to question not the models but the fallibility of the individuals which as I mentioned yesterday seems to be where much of the blame is landing currently. I think there is a wider question about the ways (and the whys) in which corporations and individuals take risks for personal and collective advancement and use knowledge to inform those risks. I was having a conversation last night about the experience of a credit card company which took the UK by storm in the 90’s and early Noughties by offering lower rates of interest to encourage people to maintain their credit balances month to month. Their mantra was total re-invention of the business every 5 years. They did this by deliberately replacing their graduate intake completely on a 5 yearly cycle. The rationale was that experience and ‘knowledge’ of how to do things evolved from risk taking to risk avoiding over that period and therefore such individuals were no longer useful to pushing the business forward.
Time and again you meet corporations where the ‘culture’ of the business and its purpose are held in the heads of a relative few (usually the entrepreneur founders – as was the case in Egg )or in the advertising agency (in the case of many large fmcg businesses) where the creative director (usually) lasts longer than the brand manager. Short termism and selfish risk taking becomes a function not of the way in which people are rewarded (i.e. bonuses) but in the way their career progresses. Fluidity of career becomes the norm creating specialization of the workforce not seen since Henry Ford’s time, as people seek their niche and hold on to their very specific experiences as the only way of both protecting their current value and creating their own future value. Generalists are few and far between in such organizations (witness the comments about the current state of the civil service as an example) who can join up knowledge sufficiently to make strategic decisions and understand a more complete picture of what is going on in a particular organization. Employee ownership in itself does not encourage such development, it requires enlightened managers as well as management structures. Although at least such models do encourage a degree of solidity rather than change for change’s sake.
The challenge for both PLC’s and Employee owned business is to see the pursuit of knowledge as a path to creating value for the business not individual power. Weber might state that such a goal is an impossible ideal our capitalist society but without it the lifespan of businesses (and their ability to create long term social value for their employees and society as a whole) will always be limited by their ability to use knowledge to adapt to a changing environment rather than affirm their internal cultural beliefs, prejudices and positions of power.
Grant McCraken is talking a lot about the need for a ‘chief culture officer’ to enable the corporation to maintain some of that perspective on both the meaning it infers and the meaning (and therefore value) it creates. All companies, PLC’s or otherwise, have a culture which tend to turn inward and conservative unless it can produce a critique of its own cultural production and bring about a re-invention of its point of view rather than merely renewing and re-inventing the arrangement of the deck chairs.
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