BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
L et us start with two run; and equally no difficulty in expressing their great ideas about how it should be run. Second, when we have had the opportunity to return to these organisations a year later and ask the same question – 'what are your frustrations and thwarted ambitions?' – we are met with the same list we heard a year earlier. Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor, Jeffrey Pfeffer, refers to this as the ‘knowing-doing gap’ – most of us know that things should be and could be much better, but few of us do anything about it. The knowing-doing gap, coupled with observations. First, almost every executive and management team with which we’ve ever worked has had no difficulty in articulating numerous frustrations about how their organisation is the two observations above, provoked us to initiate a research project. Why? Because we also observed that while most of us simply moan about how bad things are, some of us actually do something about it. And the question we wanted to explore is, what differentiates those of us that recognise incompetence, inadequacy and lack of ambition, but do little about it, from those of us that dedicate
win, to the point of business as being to create ‘a better world for people and planet’. This became Rik’s life philosophy. He asked a new and different question – instead of the question being, ‘how can I win?’, Rik asked himself, ‘how can I make carpets in a sustainable way in terms of the planet, the use of resources, and the way in which we work?’. In research, published in our book, Mavericks , we interviewed more than 30 people like Rik – people from all walks of life and from across the world, to discover what it takes to persist and succeed in making the world a better place. Making better use of brains and technology There are no shortage of challenges that need our attention to make the world a better place: the World Bank has estimated that nearly half the world’s population live on less than $5.50 USD a day; 2.8 million adults die each year as a result of being overweight or obese, according to the World Health Organization; and in a period of unprecedented wealth creation, prison populations have doubled, trebled and, in some countries, quintupled. We could go on. Yet, more than at any time in our history, we have the resources, the ingenuity and the technology to enable everyone to live a fulfilling and flourishing life. The question is, where are these resources and why are they not being fully deployed for the benefit of us all? Where are our best brains? Who owns the latest technology? To what extent is our human ingenuity, creativity and innovation being used? The answer is that the best brains are your brains, the best technology resides in your organisations. The question is how we can make better use of our brains and technology to make the world a better place. This is not a question to be outsourced to a supplier, the government, or shareholders… or whoever else you want to make responsible; it is a question for you. So, what are you doing to make best use of those resources? And the question we want to explore here is how can Business Schools help people to make best use of those resources and create more worthy value? Business Schools have traditionally taken an accountancy view of what we mean by ‘value’ and ‘cost’. The problem is accountancy does not take into ‘account’ many of the costs involved in creating value – the unintended negative value created for one group in pursuit of creating value for another, referred to by economists as externalities. Externalities are unpriced effects that arise from the production and sale of goods and services. Air pollution from vehicles, aircraft
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our lives to making positive transformational change for the betterment of others? Rik Vera is one such person. Rik started his career as a teacher, but after being made redundant because the school at which he taught was closed down, he started a career in carpet sales. In Rik's own words, he saw sales as a competition: 'How can I win against my competitors?' The classic model of
‘We have the resources, the ingenuity and the technology to enable everyone to live
a fulfilling and flourishing life’
business competition. Then he was asked to take over and run the carpet manufacturing plant. On the first day, when he walked into the factory and saw the inefficiencies, the pollution and the inhumane working conditions, Rik was shocked. As a result of being asked to run the factory – the place where the product is made – his mindset changed from seeing the point of business as to
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