Purpose Inspired: by Wayne Visser

In any war, one of the mantras that has been repeatedly chanted by the military and media alike is the so-called “battle for the hearts and minds”. Take the Iraq war for example. The more cynical commentators have dubbed this the “propaganda war”. It strikes me that today’s multinationals are engaged in a very similar battle – to win over the hearts and minds of a growing number of sceptics and critics who are not convinced of the justice of their corporate crusade, the appropriateness of their tactics, or the acceptability of the causalities incurred along the way. This episode examines these parallels in more detail. As with the Iraq war's liberation propaganda, multinationals are zealously preaching the spread of the economic ideology of free-market capitalism, smug in their superiority since the collapse of socialist economies. And yet the growing anti-globalisation movement is unconvinced. For them, the fact that socialism failed in practice does not automatically imply that capitalism is beyond reproach.

It is not uncommon to hear our present global economic system being compared to a predatory natural environment. We might imagine the market as a great African plain where competition for scarce resources dominates the life of every species. We can see successful companies as the supreme hunters in this eat-or-be-eaten world, like the awesome lions of the bushveld. It is certainly a compelling analogy and one that is perpetuated in boardrooms and business schools around the world. But is this lion-king economy really the kind of place that we want to live in? Of course, it’s great if you’re at the top of the food chain, but what about the other, more vulnerable species? Is the free market really working “for the common good”, as it should according to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”? Or are communities and the environment being sacrificed to keep companies well fed?  This episode questions many of the beliefs which dominate economic thinking today, and asks whether we can design an economy “as if people and the planet mattered” – a sustainability-driven elephant economy.

There are a growing number of critics who claim a direct link between the advancement of industrial development based on neo-classical economics thinking and the erosion of communities. This erosion has in turn exacerbated numerous other social problems and created negative effects such as economic dependence, community disempowerment, cultural breakdown, social diseases and environmental destruction. The call by a growing number of new economists is for a more community-centred economics. This includes various concepts, such as person-in-community, self-reliance, counter-development and eco-communitarianism. On a more practical level, the establishment and support of community businesses and other organisations, as well as of local currencies or exchange systems needs to be encouraged. The benefits of this community approach are wealth creation, empowerment, social cohesion, ethical conduct, sustainability and fulfilment of human needs.

Ethical investment – also called social investment, socially responsible investment and green investment – is an international trend which refers broadly to the conscious use of investments to achieve social, ethical and environmental performance objectives, over and above the usual financial returns. The relevance of the ethical investment movement lies in its potential to deliver good financial returns while also helping to deliver on the countries social objectives, like empowerment, good labour practices, and environmentally sustainable development for instance. The phenomenon can be traced back to the beginnings of the corporate social responsibility movement in the United States in the 1930s, although it only really became visible in the 1970s. At this time, church and university groups set up the first funds, such as the Pax World Fund, to avoid investment which supported the Vietnam War and the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Since the political transformation of South Africa is widely regarded as one of the great motivators and success stories of ethical investment, this background is worth recalling. 

The world we live in is exceedingly complex. We use indicators to simplify things. Indicators work in the same way as a map. They are meant to be a guide, a representation of reality, which help us to understand the lie of the land. The scale of the map and what it is trying to measure will determine how accurately and completely it approximates reality. 
It is the same with indicators. Some indicators are high level, global estimates; others are detailed, local measures. Some focus on economic activity; others on social welfare. They help us to understand ‘where we’re at’ and how things have changed over time. Checked against our objectives, indicators tell us whether things are good or bad, better or worse. In this episode we look at:
- Limitations of GDP
- Alternatives to GDP
- Community-Based Indicators

Many see the “failure” of most African economies in terms of a neglect of their peoples to foster home-grown indigenous business cultures that are in harmony with the African soil and soul.  And they are working hard to rekindle native values in business contexts, to provide the sparks needed to transform the economy into a blazing sun of new traditions in Afrocentric management. In this episode we look at:
- Values - Colonial Hangovers and Ubuntu
- Reward/Punishment or Recognition/Rejection?
- Managerial Bureaucracy or Participative Democracy?
- Rituals and Creativity
- An Integrative Vision
- Rainbows and Sunrays

In our modern economies and businesses, unlimited growth is constantly striven for, institutionalised, almost idolised.  We hold it up as the measure of success.  Yet, by doing this, we could be sowing the seeds of our own destruction.  We know this because in nature, unlimited physical growth is almost nowhere to be seen. When it does occur, we call it cancer, or imminent species collapse, or ecosystem decline.  In this episode, we look at lessons we can learn for the economy and business from:
 - Growth in Nature
 - Productivity in Nature
 - Design in Nature

For me, the image of the phoenix from Native American Indian mythology rising up from the ashes of its dead body symbolises our potential to transform the dying metaphor of business as a ‘rational machine’ into a new metaphor:  business as a ‘living whole’. This idea arose out of one of my business lectures at university some years ago in which Peters and Waterman’s famed bestseller, In Search of Excellence (1982), was under discussion.  As it happened, I was concurrently reading Jan Smuts’ scientific and philosophic treatise, Holism and Evolution (1926) and was struck by the conceptual parallels between the ‘rational mode’ of business which Peters and Waterman were criticising and the restrictive ‘mechanism’ which Smuts attributed to the scientific community of the 1920s.  Since Smuts regarded his theory of holism as the “necessary antidote to the analytical methods which prevailed”, I began to wonder about its remedial potential for the ailing business theory of the present day. This episode is the fruit of my contemplation along those lines – namely, how holism might be applied as a new framework for thinking about business.

Although it is heartening to note the growing worldwide interest in building sustainable communities for the future, it is at the same time disconcerting that so many of these community visions provide no place for the potential role of business within their working structure. What shapes and forms might business take if it were to be integrated into the community vision, with its implicit goal of creating a more sustainable, co-operative, meaning-filled future society? Partial answers to these questions can be found among stories of experiments in community business which already exist.  Let’s look at two such stories, although there are many more to tell. The first is an experiment taking place in Mondragon, a small town in the mountainous region of north-eastern Spain. The other experiment is that of the emerging community business culture at the well-known Findhorn Community is northern Scotland. These two examples serve to illustrate that success stories in alternative ways of doing business do exist.  The details of exactly how they are different is explored.

There is a growing body of literature on what could be loosely described as explorations in ‘new paradigm’ thinking. Included in this is an implicit belief about the nature of transformation.  It is that revolutionary change is more often the result of new ways of thinking about things (i.e. changes in perception) than new ways of doing things. This episode attempts to apply this thinking to business, i.e. to explore more deeply the emerging new paradigm in business.  What are the new perspectives which are beginning to challenge the old way of thinking about and doing business?  And is there a common thread or theme which runs through the heart of these new insights?  So what are these basic assumptions about business which have come on trial of late? There are many but this article will focus on only three of the most important, namely profit, competition and rationality.  Discussion of each will be prefaced by a belief statement from the old paradigm and concluded with a suggested new paradigm belief statement.