How to make and lead a business the world needs
John Morley
Innovation Consultant & Keynote Speaker helping Teams solve hard problems and generate brand new value | Where people thrive, organizations prosper
Business can do good.
There are opportunities right in front of us to create the types of workplaces and regenerative futures that the world needs. And it's a challenge to try to figure out how to go about it.
Amid the noise of books and podcasts and treatises about complexity and uncertainty, Alan Moore lays out a simple manifesto for the future. One that is human and worth living in, not just for us, but for everyone who comes after. And it's easy to grasp and remember and use ourselves.
Since I first read it two years ago, I find myself coming back to Alan's?Do/Build, How to make and lead a Business the World Needs?repeatedly.
This manifesto works in any setting or context. I try to apply it in our work with teams who want to learn how to be adaptive, flexible and ready for whatever may come. Even as situations evolve rapidly, there are certain elements that will always be timeless and unconditional. Alan lays these out simply in his book.
It’s about who we are and who we can be.
We have to make any future growth compatible with the long-term preservation of the only biosphere we have. (Vaclav Smil)
Here’s the premise:
Business can do good.
The Coronavirus pandemic has brought us to a moment of transformation at great speed. It offered an extraordinary space for us to reimagine what a better future might look like for us all. Now is the moment of opportunity.?
To remake our world, business can seek the good and manifest it in all that we create. If we are to build a future worth living in, we must try to achieve equilibrium between our economy, our ecology and our community. We need a reimagining of the very purpose of business, and the role it plays in regenerating our economy, our environment and our civilization.?
That is what the world needs from business. That is what business needs to give the world.
(From Moore, Alan. Do Build: How to make and lead a business the world needs. Do Book Co.)
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Four Vectors:
To do this, Alan highlights four vectors we need to consider: Foundations, leadership, culture and design.
Building Foundations:
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Generous Leadership:
Your Company Culture:
"Change your mind to change the world."
Products & Services Design Questions:
Alan asks thirteen stunning questions that will help guide every business or team that will make a difference, starting with these three:
Thinking Fast and Slow
To borrow from another book that gets referenced frequently in any exploration of how we cope with rapid complexity – Daniel Kahnemann’s?Thinking Fast and Slow?– we exist with ‘two’ brains: our older, faster-thinking brain and our newer, slower-thinking brain. The first existed to keep us safe from any number of the terrors of nature that we had to be fast to avoid or survive. It’s also our hunter brain. The second evolved as gained control of our surroundings. It’s the more considered, rational, critical thinking brain. The two brains co-exist within us individually and collectively today and we can consider how they play out when we look at the impulses to ‘dominate’ or ‘protect’ that make up much of our prevailing discourse. We need both, of course but we’ve tended to over-index on dominance, extraction and exploitation. But time is up on those behaviors. We simply cannot afford them to be in the ascendance all the time any more. Life is literally no longer sustainable under these conditions.
Starting Small
Do we have to make huge changes? Actually no. We just need to make lots of small ones. And rather than making a big (unending) list of all the changes we need to make, we start by considering a few different things, as Alan suggests:
-????????What are our founding principles?
-????????What is generous leadership?
-????????What is our company culture?
-????????What design questions should we be asking?
Everything else will follow from there.
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With gratitude and appreciation, Alan.
Founder @ Novara Labs | Sustainable Finance, Fintech & Payments Innovation
1 年This lives in the semi-permanent stack of books by my bedside and gets picked up and looked at on e regular basis. And I think I discovered it through you John Morley
Supply Chain + Circular Economy = Performance Economy????
1 年I totally agree and highly recommended??
Deliver projects you are remembered for . . . I help you become a leader people want to be around and achieve 5 years of career growth in 12 months I Author Build Success I Enabler for Change
1 年Thank you for sharing John Morley. I love the concept of being a good ancestor through generous leadership and that design and culture feature in the core principles of any business.
Explores adapted organizational capability with higher impact
1 年Well put. Comes down a bit to daily priorities and informed decisions as a habit. I like it. How do we empower individuals to make those decisions without telling them? It is in line with the dekegated constallation you recommended. I loved it. But hiw do we make decisions. I am sure you read the Undoing Project, by michael Lewis. On the work between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. That combined with the basic concepts of gane thory gives me hope. I believe in math and hence repetitive finite games with Nash Equikibrium. There is alway a game where all can win with no one losing out. To reach that we need to explain what we want. We need to talk. Repetitive Nash games are in a sense goid habits. Thanks for well put review ??