We have to admit that New Normal Radical Shift is not a humble book, writes Philip Whiteley: this blog is based on his address to participants at the London breakfast briefing on 16 May 2013. It is based on the bold request that organizations should be well run, not badly run – an audacious idea that, we have discovered, runs counter to the dominant political and economic ideas of our age. Management books rarely address such big themes – but the problem is that the big themes won’t leave us alone: as coaches, management writers, busy managers, corporate social responsibility advisers, we inhabit a working world that is held back by limiting beliefs that in order to be successful you can’t be good.
Last September I attended a conference where the guy from Coca Cola responsible for making the supply chain sustainable commented that people keep asking him how you can do that and still be profitable. ‘I get asked that a lot,’ he said.
Just last month I was interviewing a brilliant academic on human capital analysis, Haig Nalbantian, still has to make the case to take people management seriously and strategically. He still gets presented with managers – from big companies – wanting to minimize the wage bill: base a business strategy on what the accounts say – a 500-year-old information technology that omits most of the important matters. He has to explain that cost is a dynamic determined by how people perform.
For decades, there has been evidence that engaged employees help create more successful enterprises, but the dominant forms of organization, reporting, prioritizing and workplace conditions have been – and often still are – designed to crush engagement.
New Normal, Radical Shift is more than just another book about leadership and the evidence base for good leadership. There are thousands of them, many of them with bigger research budgets than ours. But they nearly all suffer from one omission: they don’t address the reasons for the popularity of bad leadership. They don’t critique the case for disengagement and environmental waste; a case that unfortunately is continually being made, often sub-consciously, and indirectly from political and economic theory. So we have sought to do just that.
It is assumed low pay maximizes margins. It doesn’t, but many people still believe this, deep down. Low pay should be as unacceptable as drink-driving. It serves no social or economic or commercial purpose. But for as long as people believe that it maximizes profit margins, it’s going to be around, and legislation is a very inferior way of tackling this problem.
What we’re saying in New Normal, Radical Shift is that we could get rid of pollution, CO2 emissions, environmental waste, low pay and horrid working conditions both while and by creating successful, profitable businesses. The best companies already do it.
We have the evidence and the track record for this better way of working. We have the intelligence. We have the technology. We just don’t have the ideology. And ideology matters. We are what we believe.
Following the discussion, we decided to meet again; to disseminate ideas, and to keep some momentum going. First step is to launch a Linked-in group. It’s called Radical Shift and the link is here.
