It seems there are at least two current books on the market with this same title, Spiritual Capitalism, which is evidently designed to stir up some special attention, because these two words are rarely found together.
This first book, by Michael Hendren, looks fascinating, but I have not read it yet. The 2nd book is by Peter Ressler and his wife Monika Mitchell Ressler, and it is subtitled "How 9/11 gave us nine spiritual lessons of work and business." And it is a lovely, very personal story of a dramatic shift this enterpreneurial couple experienced in their business and life-outlook, in the aftermath of the events of 9/11. It is definitely a cry of the heart on one level, but they are also showing how they not only developed a set of new business principles, but learned to live and work by them, as well as support them anecdotally from their obviously extensive business experience.
What makes the book appealing is the fact that it is heart-felt, founded on personal experience, and interwoven with some very poignant--even if anonymous--business anecdotes.
What the book does not provide is an outlook to various business models that have been developed that might fit the category, but it is a powerful wake-up call. And evidently the Resslers are also offering seminars on the topic.
So, the challenge is on. A friend tells me that Jack Stack is old and tired now, and clearly he's been out front, and his is one of the more important practical methods of work place organization. Philosophically the "Great Game" approach is entirely consistent with the consent management system.
Good management accounting is the key to making it all work. More on that later. Another important practical dimension is to find ways to reflect some of the more important "externalities" which tend to get ignored otherwise. To extend the concept of business to include human values is powerful, though also fraught with problems, however there are many productive ways to bring such considerations to life.
(c) 2008, Rogier Fentener van Vlissingen
Friday, April 25, 2008
Thursday, April 24, 2008
The Basics of Consent & A Peek Beyond
The basics of consent management, derived as it is from Quaker practices, lies in a fundamental respect of people for one another, as being "equal before God." Further, the notion is that the objections (reasoned objections) to a proposed solution are actually the raw material for a better solution, and that the process of a collaborative solution is conducive to a high level of buy-in, so that there is no resistance at the time of implementation.
Another fundamental value of the system lies in the organizational learning that only strategy and policy decisions are subject to the consent process (strategy at the top levels, lower down mostly policy), and therefore that implementation is a matter of assigning tasks to people, and execution thus a simple management problem. And if new jobs/tasks need to be assigned, then the consent procedure again ensures that the absolutely optimal decisions are being made.
Through my own experience with implementing the consent model and some limited consulting experience I had in the early 90's as well, I have gradually come to the conclusion that it is however a mistake to implement the consent model, or any other similar management model, without adequate inner growth, to begin with at the top of the organization. This means a level of introspection that is often hard to find in the business world, but it is critical. As I've already pointed out in an earlier blog, if you have an island of empowered management within a hierarchical company, this will ultimately blow up. So it is mandatory to start from the top down.
The issue about introspection is necessary since fear is the one factor which wrecks everything, and "driving out fear," a phrase coined by W. Edwards Deming, cannot ever work unless it starts inside. The insecurity comes from within, and no change of circumstances can ever solve the problem. So the beginning of a solution has to come from a willingness to see how our own insecurities set up the problems, and contribute to dysfunction in our work environments. A variety of methods are available to help get this process under way. There is the forgiveness process of A Course In Miracles, which is the process that I personally find helpful. The huge popular appeal of Eckhart Tolle, through Oprah Winfrey shows clearly that millions of people are eager for this sort of change. There are other practical solutions such as Byron Katie's The Work, which is a very straightforward way to help people see that the only thing that matters, and in fact the only thing they can change, is their own contribution to the problem. That is indeed a turnaround.
My friend Tomas Vieira (co-author with Nouk Sanchez of Take Me To Truth) also has recently done some management trainings, Managing Without Ego, which have been very successful in Australia. In all the time is ready for companies to get into this type of change. Once there is an willingness to be part of the solution, to take responsibility, and to quit blaming others, then structural change also becomes easier, and here concepts like consent management may indeed prove very helpful.
Changing the form first however, is bound to be pointless, and just another way of moving the deck chairs on the Titanic, as everyone knows who has been through too many pointless corporate reorganizations. It is important to recognize that the ego's basic motivation is always to see the problem outside myself, and thus to pretend that changing the circumstances will accomplish anything at all, which invariably just moves the problem around forever, without accomplishing anything.
(c) 2008, Rogier Fentener van Vlissingen
Another fundamental value of the system lies in the organizational learning that only strategy and policy decisions are subject to the consent process (strategy at the top levels, lower down mostly policy), and therefore that implementation is a matter of assigning tasks to people, and execution thus a simple management problem. And if new jobs/tasks need to be assigned, then the consent procedure again ensures that the absolutely optimal decisions are being made.
Through my own experience with implementing the consent model and some limited consulting experience I had in the early 90's as well, I have gradually come to the conclusion that it is however a mistake to implement the consent model, or any other similar management model, without adequate inner growth, to begin with at the top of the organization. This means a level of introspection that is often hard to find in the business world, but it is critical. As I've already pointed out in an earlier blog, if you have an island of empowered management within a hierarchical company, this will ultimately blow up. So it is mandatory to start from the top down.
The issue about introspection is necessary since fear is the one factor which wrecks everything, and "driving out fear," a phrase coined by W. Edwards Deming, cannot ever work unless it starts inside. The insecurity comes from within, and no change of circumstances can ever solve the problem. So the beginning of a solution has to come from a willingness to see how our own insecurities set up the problems, and contribute to dysfunction in our work environments. A variety of methods are available to help get this process under way. There is the forgiveness process of A Course In Miracles, which is the process that I personally find helpful. The huge popular appeal of Eckhart Tolle, through Oprah Winfrey shows clearly that millions of people are eager for this sort of change. There are other practical solutions such as Byron Katie's The Work, which is a very straightforward way to help people see that the only thing that matters, and in fact the only thing they can change, is their own contribution to the problem. That is indeed a turnaround.
My friend Tomas Vieira (co-author with Nouk Sanchez of Take Me To Truth) also has recently done some management trainings, Managing Without Ego, which have been very successful in Australia. In all the time is ready for companies to get into this type of change. Once there is an willingness to be part of the solution, to take responsibility, and to quit blaming others, then structural change also becomes easier, and here concepts like consent management may indeed prove very helpful.
Changing the form first however, is bound to be pointless, and just another way of moving the deck chairs on the Titanic, as everyone knows who has been through too many pointless corporate reorganizations. It is important to recognize that the ego's basic motivation is always to see the problem outside myself, and thus to pretend that changing the circumstances will accomplish anything at all, which invariably just moves the problem around forever, without accomplishing anything.
(c) 2008, Rogier Fentener van Vlissingen
Thursday, April 17, 2008
The Steering Committee - about top down commitment
The seeming contradiction of consent management is that it MUST be implemented from the top, by an autocratic decision, in order to work.
I had always understood this, but in one situation I decided that even with those limitations it was worth trying an experiment when I was made responsible for running a steering committee for IT resources in a largish company (Stolt-Nielsen). The principle of reasoned objections certainly worked its magic, and started leading to better compromises, and a more comprehensive ortientation towards value add to the company as a whole, rather than short term politics. But that does not mean there were not challenges. At one time one of the members actively lobbied the CFO to get a decision of the committee overturned, which would have destroyed the effectiveness of the committee. In that particular case, I managed to prevent the problem, but in a hierarchical organization, you can never guarantee those outcomes, and thus if you start creating an island of empowered management in a hierarchical organization, you are asking for trouble, as the very effectiveness of it will upset the apple cart of the political power in the organization.
More recently I listend to Michael Hugos and indeed he had a success story of similar empowered management in an IT department within a large corporation, and on a break (he was on a book tour for his book Essentials of Supply Chain Management, I told him that his very success meant that he would have to go, and within a year after that he called me to tell me I had been right.
Fortunately, things seem to have worked out well for him subsequently, but it was another sad comment on the inertia in organizations, and fundamental change will not happen, unless it starts from the top.
(c) 2008, Rogier Fentener van Vlissingen
I had always understood this, but in one situation I decided that even with those limitations it was worth trying an experiment when I was made responsible for running a steering committee for IT resources in a largish company (Stolt-Nielsen). The principle of reasoned objections certainly worked its magic, and started leading to better compromises, and a more comprehensive ortientation towards value add to the company as a whole, rather than short term politics. But that does not mean there were not challenges. At one time one of the members actively lobbied the CFO to get a decision of the committee overturned, which would have destroyed the effectiveness of the committee. In that particular case, I managed to prevent the problem, but in a hierarchical organization, you can never guarantee those outcomes, and thus if you start creating an island of empowered management in a hierarchical organization, you are asking for trouble, as the very effectiveness of it will upset the apple cart of the political power in the organization.
More recently I listend to Michael Hugos and indeed he had a success story of similar empowered management in an IT department within a large corporation, and on a break (he was on a book tour for his book Essentials of Supply Chain Management, I told him that his very success meant that he would have to go, and within a year after that he called me to tell me I had been right.
Fortunately, things seem to have worked out well for him subsequently, but it was another sad comment on the inertia in organizations, and fundamental change will not happen, unless it starts from the top.
(c) 2008, Rogier Fentener van Vlissingen
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
From Quaker Meeting to Management System
The management concept which I like to call Consent Management, was developed by a long route of gradual evolution from Quaker meetings, so memories of the Remonstrance of Flushing come flooding back. Quaker meetings decide based on a deeply understood principle that all are equal before God.
Dutch educator Kees Boeke developed a secular version of Quaker Decision Making for his school in Holland in the Netherlands, "De Werkplaats," (The Work Place), in Bilthoven, and called it "sociocracy," which in his original manifestation was purely an internal management system for a community where students famously developed their own curriculum collaboratively with their teachers, and everyone was on a first name basis with one another. Now Boeke was also a bit of a socialist dreamer, who did not see the downsides of that system too clearly. One of his students however, Gerard Endenburg, who went on to become an electrical engineer, later developed the system, and first deployed his notions in a business his family acquired (they had an electrical contracting business in my native city of Rotterdam), and was so successful with it-turning the company around in short order-that it was subsequently merged into the family business, Endenburg Electrotechniek, when he took over the management from his parents, and it went on to grow. I learned a lot of these developments in the 70's when it started to be published, but also the company was the electrical contractor who did work in the house I grew up in, so we knew the company quite well.
As the practice proved itself, procuring the company even an exception from the Dutch rule of having a labor board, a consulting activity was gradually spun off to teach other companies how to use what in Dutch was called "sociocratie," or "sociocracy" in English. In 1989 I went to Holland to study the system in practice in the company for a month, having myself practiced the system to a limited degree in an company steering committee that I ran, and which allocated IT resources across the organization. The effort was quite successful, and became the effective backbone to achieve the development of major strategic systems within that company over a few years, but I also saw the shortcomings, in that if this type of empowerment is not practiced from the top on down, it is doomed to fail. I published an article on my experiences in Holland in Human Systems Management in 1991, of which Prof. Milan Zeleny of Fordham University was the editor at that time (HSM 10 (1991) pp. 149-154).
One major thing I decided on at the time that in my view the name Consent Management was more useful, and also I did not aspire to the think of political applications, like some people, Boeke included, had done. Apply it at the company, or community level, however and you are automatically creating a dynamic learning organization. And that is what the world is more and more interested in today, and moreover today's communication technology enables this form of management like never before. The essence of the consent model is that decisions are made only in the absence of reasoned objections. And it is the need to provide reasoning, which leads to invariably superior decisions, and better buy-in, because by overcoming the reasons, improved decisions result, and with total support of the group.
Rogier van Vlissingen (c) 2008
Dutch educator Kees Boeke developed a secular version of Quaker Decision Making for his school in Holland in the Netherlands, "De Werkplaats," (The Work Place), in Bilthoven, and called it "sociocracy," which in his original manifestation was purely an internal management system for a community where students famously developed their own curriculum collaboratively with their teachers, and everyone was on a first name basis with one another. Now Boeke was also a bit of a socialist dreamer, who did not see the downsides of that system too clearly. One of his students however, Gerard Endenburg, who went on to become an electrical engineer, later developed the system, and first deployed his notions in a business his family acquired (they had an electrical contracting business in my native city of Rotterdam), and was so successful with it-turning the company around in short order-that it was subsequently merged into the family business, Endenburg Electrotechniek, when he took over the management from his parents, and it went on to grow. I learned a lot of these developments in the 70's when it started to be published, but also the company was the electrical contractor who did work in the house I grew up in, so we knew the company quite well.
As the practice proved itself, procuring the company even an exception from the Dutch rule of having a labor board, a consulting activity was gradually spun off to teach other companies how to use what in Dutch was called "sociocratie," or "sociocracy" in English. In 1989 I went to Holland to study the system in practice in the company for a month, having myself practiced the system to a limited degree in an company steering committee that I ran, and which allocated IT resources across the organization. The effort was quite successful, and became the effective backbone to achieve the development of major strategic systems within that company over a few years, but I also saw the shortcomings, in that if this type of empowerment is not practiced from the top on down, it is doomed to fail. I published an article on my experiences in Holland in Human Systems Management in 1991, of which Prof. Milan Zeleny of Fordham University was the editor at that time (HSM 10 (1991) pp. 149-154).
One major thing I decided on at the time that in my view the name Consent Management was more useful, and also I did not aspire to the think of political applications, like some people, Boeke included, had done. Apply it at the company, or community level, however and you are automatically creating a dynamic learning organization. And that is what the world is more and more interested in today, and moreover today's communication technology enables this form of management like never before. The essence of the consent model is that decisions are made only in the absence of reasoned objections. And it is the need to provide reasoning, which leads to invariably superior decisions, and better buy-in, because by overcoming the reasons, improved decisions result, and with total support of the group.
Rogier van Vlissingen (c) 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)