THE OTHER SIDE OF COMPLEXITY
A business leader reminded me this week of the words of the great American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes: "I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity."
Running even a part – let alone the whole - of tomorrow’s global company is going to be fiendishly complex – it is not exactly a walk in the park today! Global company leaders face ferocious competition for customers, talented employees, scarce resources, reputation. The Tomorrow’s Global Company report told us that businesses will need values, standards-setting and new metrics of success which can apply across cultures, in very different varieties of capitalism and in very different societies.
Those of us who aspire to help businesses to find “the simplicity on the other side of complexity," which is sustainable commercially, environmentally and socially have ourselves to learn to collaborate much better.
I also listened this week to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the worldwide web, who spoke at Business in the Community’s annual Awards for Excellence dinner in London’s Royal Albert Hall. Sir Tim spoke of his difficulties at the outset, to get anyone at the CERN Laboratories where he worked, to be interested in his ideas for getting computers around the world to talk to each other. A year after he had written a memo about what was to become the worldwide web, and it had been completely ignored, he re-circulated it and this time was given a grudging “orange light” to buy some equipment and experiment. Apparently, one superior had written on Berners-Lee’s memo: “vague but exciting.” Less than a decade later, this “vague but exciting” idea had led to emails and the Internet and transformed the world. Today, over 1.4 billion people – over 20% of the entire world population – are regular users of the Internet.
Berners-Lee succeeded through vision, persistence, – and collaboration. Campaigners for inclusive business and sustainablity need similar attributes. In particular, we need a far greater capacity to build bridges between islands of activity and good practice and creative insights. This includes much stronger linkages between work going on in academia and practice. As a very recent arrival from the campaigner camp, into an international business school, I am discovering both the challenges and opportunities for doing this. This year’s annual colloquium between leading European business schools and businesses – the European Academy for Business in Society: www.eabis2008.info is one such opportunity; but this is a bigger theme I want to return to in future blogs because I hope that www.forceforgood.com can evolve into being one of those bridges which speeds up the search for that “simplicity on the other side of complexity."
David Grayson is director of the new Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility at the Cranfield School of Management: www.doughtycentre.info