Expectations of Business
6 years, 9 months, 13 days, 4 hours
9 October 2022
What will make organisations successful in the future is very different from what has made them successful in the past.
Sometimes I question myself whether that is real, or just groupthink by a small business elite. And I ask whether we can discern some objective evidence of what has changed that rests on more than supposed collective values.
An article by Gillian Tett, published in this quarter’s journal of The RSA (The Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), provides some pretty good answers. First she argues that ‘a universal feature of human society is that we always assume the way we see the world is natural, inevitable and unchanging’. So we are pre-wired to believe our beliefs are constant.
Second she posits that what has changed for businesses today is due to shifting assumptions in society being empowered and amplified by technology. Much greater levels of digital transparency mean that organisations are now under a spotlight, in real time. And ‘the power of cyber crowds’ enables that transparency to be translated into extraordinary pressure on businesses that are found wanting. As an example Gillian notes the webpage created after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to track which Western companies were remaining involved with Russia and which were withdrawing. After a few months the number of companies withdrawing accelerated rapidly until more than 80% of those on the list had done so.
I would argue that the spotlight is now more intensely on organisations’ impact on planet and society than on their financial performance. Financial performance remains for most companies closely guarded until revealed in quarterly market updates or annual reports, and is only of interest to a relatively limited audience of investors and financial commentators. Whereas a company’s employment conditions in its supply chain, its contribution to plastic pollution, its gender and racial diversity and its carbon emissions are all now under constant surveillance, with a large swathe of society potentially ready to boycott if what is revealed is egregiously bad.
This leads to what Paul Polman, in the same journal, argues is ‘a new model of business success’. ‘It is purpose-driven, builds trust through transparency, and sets big goals based on what the world needs, not just what it thinks it can do’.
I think it is only right that we keep questioning what is presented to us as new realities. But the more I look at the evidence the more it seems to me clear that Gillian and Paul are right and what will make organisations successful in the future is very different from what made them successful in the past.