As foreseen by Williams and Creswick (1979) and others, complexity and uncertainty are rising both in our daily lives and in business. In the latter area, many of those accorded guru status, such as Charles Handy (1990) and Henry Mintzberg (1989), are discussing a future with less order and structure, whilst the scientists Jared Diamond (2005) and James Lovelock (2007) have both made strong and well researched cases for this being a tipping point in human history. Diamond concludes that if we as a species are to avoid ecological collapse, we must change our way of thinking and challenge our cultural and economic assumptions about life.
Diamond’s (2005) studies of societal collapse illustrate that it is not so much a society’s organizing ideology that is the fundamental problem, it is more its relevance to the environment off which it feeds. As the Philosopher Andrew Dobson (1990) memorably noted;
…discussion of the respective merits of communism and capitalism is rather like rearranging the chairs on the Titanic….It makes no appreciable difference who owns the means of production if the production process itself is based on the assumption that its development need not be hindered by limits to growth.
Parekh wrote in the January 2008 edition of Resurgence that there are two drivers of our current ecological predicament. First, an “anthropocentric view of the universe. In this view humans are the crown of creation and have absolute right over nature”. Second, consumerism without limits. Together he argues, “these assumptions legitimise and drive modernity”.
However, as the Bishop of Oxford (1913) noted at the beginning of the twentieth century, the marvel of Capitalism is its ability to turn sand into gold. That is to say, that the search for opportunity and advancement allows those with vision to turn disaster and loss into order and profit, or water into wine. The challenge for the business leaders of the future, or what Handy (2004) calls “New Alchemists”, is to convert the current and very immediate threat of ecological collapse into an opportunity.
Mintzberg (1989) says managers’ power over resources and institutions mean that “no job is more vital to our society than that of the manager”. Barnard's belief that “business organizations are more effective instruments of social progress than either Church or State, partly because they were driven by the cooperation of individuals working to a common purpose rather than by authority” (Kennedy 2007) indicates that the key to a sustainable future lies in a redefinition of managers’ conceptual parameters. As Diamond (2005) puts it “ a lower impact society is the most impossible scenario for our future – except for all other conceivable scenarios”.
Mintzberg (1989)has written that adhocracy is the business model of the future, with its knowledge based, project oriented approach that shows little respect for the classical principles of management. It is characterised by its sense of mission and ability to harness intrinsic motivation, out of which revenues and products flow. Adhocracy is most often used to describe the kind of firms coming out of Silicon Valley - young, technology driven, visionary, dot-com in style, such as Google, Apple, etc. Yet The Economist, (2008) has recently noted a growing trend of the best minds migrating from the IT industry of Silicon Valley to clean technology firms. If we were to blend this model of proggressive innovation with progressive values that have dissented from the economic norm in the past, in businesses such as The John Lewis partnership, Rowntree, Cadbury's, Friends Provident, etc. then perhaps we could deliver genuine ecological integrity and maybe change the world....
