Three articles this week, mostly depressing but with a glimmer of hope in one, offer a vivid portrayal of our technologically rich, economically unequal, debt-ridden, politically anachronistic and remarkably conservative and incurious society, writes Philip Whiteley.
In The Independent, a report that use of food banks in the UK has shot up. Inventor Jaron Lanier, in a report that led to a lively discussion on the Radical Shift Linked-in group, noted how social media and other consumer firms are using Big Data to manipulate consumers. Simon Caulkin, spot on as usual, relates how corporations have been captured by the neo-liberal cult of only caring about shareholders, focusing on the short-term, and enriching a few.
The tacit assumption is that extreme inequality and asymmetric information helps the corporation. Over the longer term, especially, this is not consistently true. As discussed repeatedly on this blog, low pay does not maximize profits – this is a cynical myth supported by right-wing and left-wing economics. We have known since at least the 1930s and the Hawthorne experiments, that the way in which you treat workers is the single most important element in enhancing performance and the customer experience. The more ethical employers are also some of the most successful.
We have highly advanced electronic communications yet continue to neglect human communication. We think data is the hard stuff and relationships are the soft stuff. Corporations, keen to apply 21st Century Big Data, have yet to apply management research from the early 20th Century. Some progress.
Now to the glimmer of hope. In Simon Caulkin’s piece, there was a report of a radically different vision of capitalism, one in which all of society stands to benefit. The head of McKinsey, no less, Dominic Barton said that capitalism had 10-30 years to reform itself. The business schools must follow suit. It’s challenging but not impossible. There are highly enlightened practices emerging from many supermarkets and consumer multinationals, especially on sustainability. You can read some examples in New Normal Radical Shift.
- Full version of the blog here.
