Keeping the flame alive

Ready for when change comes

What The World Needs Now

I went through a real slump a few months ago, I was questioning what the point of doing this was. I was struggling to find the energy and enthusiasm, it all seemed so hopeless.

I had reached the conclusion that the problem with work isn’t that we don’t know how to fix, how to decrapify it. It’s not that we don’t understand the problem either, which is often why things don’t get sorted. It’s not that we lack the methods and practices or that they are unproven. It’s not that we lack the means. The problem is that we lack the will.

When I say ‘we’, I don’t mean you or I. I mean the CEOs, the investors, the opinion formers, the politicians, the business media, the consultancies, the business schools, the vested interests. The ones that benefit in some way from how things are. The ones with something to lose. The ones with the power, status and money.

Business seems to be driven by the worst people with the worst motives and for the worst reasons.

Depressing, right?

And it’s being pushed to it’s logical conclusion, a destructive, exploitative dystopian autocracy, where we are all subjugated to the whims of the plutocrats and oligarchs, living in techno-serfdom.

Like I said, it was a real slump!

And I know lots of good people who are trying to fight against this, who are promoting new approaches, different models, other ways of being and doing. But they are all getting exhausted, swimming against the flow. Is it ever going to change? Or will we all get swept away?

But they say the night is darkest just before the dawn.

Change is possible. It’s happening all the time. It’s not uniform, it’s not always obvious, it’s not consistent but happens in spurts. Even when it all looks negative, there is good stuff happening.

Let’s be more optimistic and look at how change might happen, where it might start, how it mighty spread. Let’s look at the possible shoots of new growth.

Time Passages

One thing that is always changing is the population. Each generation emerges into a different world to their predecessors and brings a different outlook and new thinking. Some generations have more impact than others, so it seems. Now we have Gen Z entering the workforce, whilst Gen Y (millennials) are moving into leadership positions. They are bringing different worldviews and different experiences to bear, they are now starting to shape the world.

One of the problems that we have currently, that I think has fed our sense of drift and stasis, is the prolonged life span and dominance of the ‘Boomer’ generation. Ideas about the world have persisted far longer than they would have previously. Essentially, the same group have held power for the past 50 years - or more. They got their hands on the reins sooner because World War 2 created space for them and because they had enormous economic power. They have held on due to improved life expectancy and health and the wealth and power they amassed during the post-war boom. Boardrooms are full of 70-year olds, the most powerful politician in the world is about to enter his eighth decade and pensioners dominate many electorates in the OECD countries.

But it’s starting to change. Finally, these old men (because it is mostly men) are stepping down or dying off and being replaced by younger leaders. There is also a new cohort of emerging leaders, people in their 30s who are building the companies of tomorrow.

We can see the former at Infosys, where two years ago the founder, N.R. Narayana Murthy, stepped down at the age of 76 to spend more time with his billions. (h/t to Mark C. Crowley for bringing this to my attention in his LinkedIN post).

Murthy had been a keen advocate of working 70 hour weeks and relentless grind and demanded his employees submit to this punishing work ethic. He believed Infosys’ success was built upon this.

However, his successor didn’t see things the same way. He saw that Murthy’s dictat led to increasing staff turnover and soaring health costs due to physical and mental illness it caused. So he changed direction completely.

The new CEO Salil Parekh prioritised employee wellbeing instead. Not just exhorting employees to eat fruit and do yoga and the usual ‘well-washing’ nonsense but

• emailing employees if they work longer than 9 1/4 hours daly

• regularly reminding them to take breaks and disconnect after work hours

• only requiring them to work 10 days a month in an office and for those days to be about strengthening sense of belonging, the top driver of well-being

Policy based on the science of health and performance, and put into action through effective action.

OK, Parekh is not exactly a callow youth, he was 59 when he took over. But he is of a different generation and that change has brought much-needed change.

We see this at the other end too, as research by Nick Bloom shows that companies run by CEOs who are under 30 have higher levels of Working from Home (WfH) than those run by older CEOs. Women CEOs also had higher levels of WfH.

There may be other factors, perhaps these are younger, smaller businesses, but given the Return To Office diehards are all old white guys, it seems likely that the younger CEOs are simply able to see the benefits of more flexible working practices and are comfortable working with distributed teams because that’s what they’ve grown up with.

What is true of work is what is often said of science, it progresses one death at a time. (Retirement being a ‘work death’, if you like!).

Epiphany

Then there is the realisation that sticking to the status quo will lead to ruin and a new approach must be tried. Better to go down fighting than to succumb to a slow death.

This is pretty rare in business. Whilst there may be a recognition that change is needed, the response is normally a tactic like a take-over or merger, or a sell-out to Private Equity, or some financial trickery.

But the pharmaceutical company Bayer did reach this conclusion, that they were in terminal decline unless they took a new approach. They were fortunate in that they could see that Roche, a much smaller competitor, had been through a successful transformation to greater self-organisation, so they had a template. And who better to implement something similar than the man who had already done it at Roche? So they hired him as their CEO and gave him a mandate to implement a similar change.

I’ve written before about what Bill Anderson is doing at Bayer, which he calls ‘Dynamic Shared Ownership’. It’s been enthusiastically received by many employees (although the middle managers most impacted by the change may not be quite so keen) but it’s yet to show in the financials. Other indicators are moving in the right direction though, so it should flow through. It’s not a nailed-on cert but it looks promising.

This was seen as a risky appointment by the Bayer board, a last throw of dice. Most boards would have called in one of the BigCon firms and done what they recommended (which wouldn’t have been self-organising but some other model that’s failed more often than it’s worked), safe in the knowledge that they wouldn’t get criticised for calling in the ‘experts’. But Bayer knew that wouldn’t work.

They took the risk because the risk of doing nothing, or doing ‘the normal thing’, was greater.

There’s an interesting parallel with personal change here. People who go through a mid-life epiphany and make a significant change in their life (often deciding to step off the career treadmill) do so for two reasons, which mostly splits down gender lines.

With men, it is a crisis, such as a heart attack, a divorce, loss of a loved one. It forces them to stop, reflect and reassess.

For women, it is a growing realisation that the path they are on is not leading them to fulfilment and happiness, a sense that they won’t be able to continue. This disenchantment and unease causes them to spend time reflecting, thinking, learning and eventually deciding upon change.

There may be a cultural aspect to this, then. Bayer, a 160-year old German company, will respond differently than one that is rooted in the ultra-competitive, testosterone driven, red meat economy of the US, I suggest.

World On Fire

The other cause of change, then, is crisis.

We’ve recently seen a few. The Global Financial Crisis brought job losses and insecurity, rising asset prices (so housing got more expensive), more power for employers and (who’d have guessed this, eh?) depressed wages and earnings. In the UK they’ve barely risen since, leading to a cost of living crunch.

Then we also had BREXIT, self-imposed economic harm that led to more job losses, lost economic growth and more foreign ownership (a large percentage of UK employees work for US companies). This increased the pressure on employees.

We all got hit by COVID but that actually brought some positive change (every cloud has a silver lining). Working from Home became a reality and ‘hybrid’ working has greatly improved the wellbeing of those who have been able to take advantage of it. It also swung the pendulum of power back towards to employees for a bit and there were some small improvements in the workplace (some of which have been clawed back subsequently).

War, another of the horsemen of the Apocalypse, has put in an appearance with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has had a major impact on trade, particularly in Europe. It has led to a re-assessment of priorities, with a greater emphasis put on self-sustainability, supply chain resilience and defence. The impacts of this are trickling through and will continue for some years.

(I am aware there are other wars, notably in Gaza, but I’m concentrating on ones that have impacted the UK particularly and have led to change).

Trump is his own crisis, not least with his tariff policy (I use that word very loosely) and upsetting of the world order. Most notable for the workplace is the attack on DEI (or EDI, as we Brits put it) and employee rights more generally.

Coming into play is AI, which already seems to be impacting entry-level jobs. Regular readers will know I am sceptical about the impacts, certainly the ones promised, but it is part of the long-term trend of automating tasks and roles away. It will certainly cause some turbulence that could become a crisis for some.

And then we have the broader ecological poly-crisis that is impacting the world through extreme weather, crop failures, species migration and various other effects that will only intensify.

Change is going to happen, that’s for certain. Whether it’s good or bad for the workplace, and for employees, is to be seen and also up for grabs.

At the end of the 1960s, Keynesian economics and the ‘social contract’ forged after World War Two had bi-partisan support and seemed unshakeable. It didn’t even make it until the end of the nnext decade, swept away by Reagan and Thatcher’s free market ideas that became what we know as neo-liberalism.

Neo-liberalism was birthed in the 1950s, specifically as a reaction to the social contract, and was a fringe theory at first. One of its architects, Milton Friedman, said: “someday, there will come a crisis. When the crisis comes, people will look for answers. The answers they choose will be those “ideas lying around” that have been promoted by the status quo’s loudest critics. In that moment, ideas can move from the fringe to the center.”

He was wrong about most things (especially economics) but he was right about this, and very prescient. Neoliberalism was ‘lying around’ and moved from fringe to centre. It has shaped (I prefer blighted, to be honest) the world throughout my lifetime.

So our job is to have the ideas ready. The crisis (or crises) are coming. The old ideas will fail. Let’s shape what comes next.

CODA

This missive was inspired by a comment by Meqa Smith, someone who has got an idea for fixing the broken recruitment process I wrote about last week and has built a business around it. Pushing water uphill is hard work and she’s been feeling it a bit lately, so go and give her a follow on LinkedIN or, better yet, a virtual hug. When we find the others, we need to look after them.