For a company to go Beyond Corporate Responsibility as currently conceived, it takes a human and economic interest in the vitality and viabilities of the communities from which they source materials and affect labor.

The key to such human interest is the connecting of each person in the business to the effects of their sourcing  in the work they do each day. Often companies, and therefore individuals using materials, only have a vague notion of the source because they are acquired via intermediaries. For the new responsibility, this will not be acceptable. For materials and labor that are likely to be suspect, it is important to take the next step of knowledge and action.

Two such companies that are moving in that direction are:

[Read more →]

Congo Mining-Enough Project

Co-creators are any player in any part of the value-adding chain contribute to creating of products and services. To avoid conflicting minerals and other such problems, responsibility must go beyond the usually supply chain certification. This week’s blog focus is about responsibility for raw materials and their source by reimagining what corporate responsibility means.

Background: A new US law is targeting smart phone manufacturers to ensure they are not funding rebels and militants, however inadvertently, when purchasing materials that may have originated in Congo particularly. The provision — tucked in the financial reform bill passed this week — requires publicly-traded and electronic companies such as Apple and Intel to submit an annual report outlining what they are doing to ensure their minerals are “conflict-free, including cobalt, gold, copper and tantalum. [Read more →]

Inder Sidhu is the Senior Vice President of Strategy & Planning for Worldwide Operations at Cisco. He sees decentralized decision-making as a culture change to improve business. I agree with that. It is also an act in which a Responsible Corporation engages. People should not be surprised that our political dialogue process has broken down. Democracy requires people who engage in critical systemic thinking and to manage their own personal behavior and thinking. Businesses and other responsible organizations have the best chance of building those capabilities and using them for improved business performance. When people can think effectively they can better understand how a market works and how a governance process of a nation or community works. When they have the ability to see the effects of their actions and words on breaking down civil discourse, we have a chance of building a better democratic process.

Thanks Cisco for building a better democracy by HOW you build your business.

Perspective-Smithsonian

Let’s begin with a caveat. This will seem wrong to many of you. This is because it is not familiar and our brain prefers the familiar so it can conserve energy. Just remember this conservation is a threat to learning and discovery and particularly creativity and innovation. We have to manage our reactions to the new to open doors in the mind. There will be plenty of time and ways to test and validate if it is worth letting go of old molds and frameworks. But be willing to suspend certainty until you have experienced the different approach.

First, one begins with a Whole in mind and works from the whole, all the time. This may seem obvious, but it rarely happens. Lets remind ourselves how we know a whole. A whole is born (e.g. a person or animal) , formed by nature in her work (e.g. a canyon), or created by humans with an intention of being an enduring whole—e.g. a family. This contrasted with planning processes that work with functional aspects such as jobs or incomplete parts of a whole such as task forces . Additional examples here including working with a river, storm water or a city. These are not wholes. An example of a whole is a corporation, a watershed as demarcated by nature, a customer, or a valley. Puget Sound or Cascadia are wholes, not the State of Washington or the Province of British Columbia.

Starting with a whole in mind, enables working with the potential of the whole, as it is revealed by its essence, and the systems that are to be developed in pursuit and achievement of that potential. Understanding the wholes and their systems comes before examining current existence, never ahead, (current existence is understood from examining and assessing the issues, the trends, the challenges , the problems etc. [Read more →]

Go to a conference virtually. I am “speaking at” the Sustainability Virtual Conference in the US, the Europe and then Asia.March 30- April 1. Sponsored by the UN and Cisco Systems. Check it out.

The quality and the potential of a business depends on its people. It isn’t surprising that smart businesses invest a lot in growing people. Unfortunately, most of those investments are costly and ineffective. Although the approaches used are based on sound reasoning and observation, they are too incomplete to work well with real human beings in real business systems.

I group the popular approaches to growing people into four general categories. Here are some of the concerns I have about each category: [Read more →]

Motivation is a subject on which I have spoken, published and consulted for 3 decades. Intrinsic Motivation that is and why Extrinsic motivation is so limiting and damaging to the very things a company holds most dear–especially if it is pursuing corporate responsibility. There has been so little available to stem the tide of misconstrued evidence that has filled organizations and schools with reward, recognition, incentives, and hundreds of other forms of one person seeking to motivate another- or many others. It is contrary to human nature except for our basic survival and tribal connections. We are more alive, creative and contributing when we manage our motivation by connecting with meaningful motives.

Daniel Pink has created an unbroken string of concepts in his writing career, that come form seeing patterns that others miss. And seeing the underlying threads, with research and practices, that explain them. Motivation, his latest subject in Drive, is particularly helpful because it is intended to crush a misconception that has saturated every aspect of our lives for almost a century now. Our current view of motivation is based on the study of rats begun by John Watson (extended by BF Skinner) when he “formulated” behavioral psychology. And that is fine if you are the manger, parent, or teacher of rats. But it is not accurate if you manage, parent or teach humans in all sizes.

In recent decades there has been a great deal of research on humans, not rats or apes, and how motivation works with them, that supplants much of what we have been taught and deeply believe. The message is, “humans are more motivated by intrinsic motivation in significant pursuits. In fact, humans are de-motivated by others seeking to motivate them with money, praise or anything from the outside”. Daniel Pink elegantly pulls this research into a compelling argument for stopping the insanity of trying to manage other’s motivation.

Section II: The Three Element of Motivation
Although I think there is another layer of answers to what to do to reawaken intrinsic motivation, Pink offers an excellent directional set of concepts for managing and teaching or any other situation where you have stewardship for people.
* Autonomy–let people define much of their own path, people are motivated when self-directed and self-organizing
* Mastery–as humans we natural aspire to Mastery and this is blocked when it is only a task without this opportunity to gain mastery
* Purpose–provides the context and connects the autonomous person, who is pursuing mastery to a greater whole or objective.

Section III: Pink in the final section, gives us a way to follow up on the ideas for ourselves and some practical suggestions on how to test the waters if your organization or family is buried in incentive programs. Some are personal, like improving your own motivation to exercise and others, a business manager can use. He surveys what the Gurus like Jim Collins of Good to Great say on the subject and puts in in one section. Section three is a set of examples of what is possible and even tested, to turn over a new leaf with human management and development practices.

If you have known for a long time that current motivation practices do not work, or just figured it out reading and thinking about it recently, DRIVE is a way to get the leaders in your company questioning whether what they are doing is working and start the ball rolling on how to change things that will improve the effectiveness of the organization and the spirit of people in it.

Checklists and Systemic Frameworks are both important approaches to guiding human activity. But they are not interchangeable. Atul Gawande’s new wonderful book, Checklist Manifesto, does not make that clear. There is a real chance, that because of the book’s success and his being a great thinker generally, that many people may get confused about where checklist serve us well and where they cannot. The second half of that equation is “what a Systemic Framework makes possible”, that checklists cannot, and where such depth is overkill.

Life happens on different planes. There are some things where we have figured out how they work, likely because we do them over and over. Or because a book, our education or a recent study reported the best practice for a task, and we adopted them as our own.

In a professional sense, these tasks can include things as complex as surgery. Personally it can be as simple as making our favorite pot roast or pound cake. Some of these tasks have irreversible transforms that result in predictable results, or if an error slips in, it can have devastating consequences. People die. Cakes fall. Not of the same importance, but the same irreversibility. When we have something that we are not, at this moment, working on innovating the next improvement in, then a checklist gives us the ability to basically be on semi-automatic and know we will avoid skipping a critical step or making a life-threatening or destabilizing error. [Read more →]

Many leaders going to Copenhagen conference came to Beirut two weeks before to start the talks. UN Foundation Senior Fellow, Dr. Mohamen Al-Ashry spoke on a panel with me. He was very hopeful at the time. Five parts of my talk on Carbon and then Moving from commodities to value-adding businesses, are now posted on my Youtube channel. My point on carbon is, we can’t be carbon neutral because that means life neutral. Carbon is the basis of life. To say “neutral” is miss the living systems nature. Carbon is “positive” when seen from nature’s shoes. From Carbon Neutral to Carbon Positive is the title of the first talk. [Read more →]

Brain on Praise

I have written and taught for years seeking to stop the “machine” started by 360 degree feedback and building of self-esteem guru Nathaniel Braden. It should be enough to know that it was originated by the German Military. They first began gathering feedback from multiple sources in order to evaluate performance during World War II (Fleenor & Prince, 1997). They lost the war remember and used it for motives that defy imagination. The US Navel Office of Research also tried this out through Sensitivity groups with the intention of understanding how to influence effectively the behavior of others. It is part of the school of behavior modification and not self-organizing systems. Feedback has so many downsides it is hard to list them all. And there are so many better ways to achieve the gains that do emerge. A recent book on child rearing is laying out the neuroscience of part of the damage. Their suggestions about the replacement are not well tested or conceived, but the “literal” brain deformation is clear from cumulative studies. Worth buying: Nurture Shock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. But a better idea to substitute is… [Read more →]