http://milepostzero.homestead.com/tdv.html

Since we've not had time to compile our own list of local centuries yet, here is a link to the Blue Ridge Bicycle Clubs list:

http://www.brbcva.org/OutOfTownRides.asp

Charlottesville Bike Club has another good list:

http://www.cvillebikeclub.org/local.htm

See you on the roads.

The listserv will link you to info about upcoming rides, meetings, updates, and everything you don't want to miss...

Saturday, August 30th.  Roll out from the Graveyard at 10am.  Riders of all abilities welcome, we will split into two or three similarly paced groups.  This is a great way to meet future riding buddies and get to know the roads around Charlottesville.

Team Meeting

Monday, September 1st.  7pm, Clarke 101.

I asked everyone to think of what these individuals DID which made them so good at relationships. We came up with the following characteristic behaviours:

The Relational Manager - What did they DO?

• saw me beyond my role - reacted to me as ME
• I felt cared for
• tailored response to what I needed
• straight answers leading to clarity
• very present and open to what is without judgement
• accepted people where THEY were
• respected differences
• they were loving and loved
• tailored response to me and I could choose my action - they offered an opinion; they were attached to ME but not to the outcome
• gave me an independent choice
• used 'power-with' not 'power-over': I didn’t feel manipulated
• gave me freedom within clear boundaries
• we had an open flow of shared information.

From this small sample it was striking to me how many of us had known such managers - or other individuals. From this list of behaviours, some common themes stand out. Some of the common elements we identified included:

1. being seen as a unique individual human, not as an employee or as a role
2. being treated as an individual, with responses suited to our individual needs
3. an attitude of equality, co-creation and power-sharing
4. a free and open flow of information
5. being present to what is, without judgement.

Following this, I invited colleagues at the meeting to say what impact being treated in this way had on them. This is what they said:

The Relational Manager - What was their impact?

• I was more creative - I felt I had something to offer
• I was more confident in myself
• I felt protected
• I felt boundaried, adult to adult
• I could take difficult situations
• It made my practice safer
• I gave more
• my boundaries were respected
• I felt I would do my most, my best: I was invested in the job
• I felt loyalty
• I felt inspired
• I felt more motivated
• I felt we were working in partnership
• I felt connected at a deep level.

What stands out from this is how the managers' relational behaviour called forth something of the best of us. The common themes which emerged were:

1. feeling more motivated, doing our best and willing to give more as a result
2. feeling more creative, inspired and confident
3. feeling safe, protected and loved
4. feeling connected

It seems that being managed relationally evokes far higher performance from staff; being managed relationally seems to tap into some of our deep needs as individuals to be seen and valued for ourselves.

I was working in a busy environmental organisation as a team manager. I enjoyed the work and loved my colleagues, including my boss, David. Generally I counted myself as pretty able to manage my workload, to sort out priorities and set goals for the team.

Except for one week. I looked at my to-do list on a Monday morning. Conferences, trips out of London, deadlines, evening meetings, others' demands to meet. I realised I couldn't physically manage to achieve all that I had set myself that week and, what was worse, there seemed to me to be no obvious priorities. Everything was important - and urgent. My gut churned in panic: how could I get out of this mess?

Only one thing to do. I took my to-do list and walked across the corridor to David's office.

'David, have you got a minute? I've been looking at my to-do list and I don't see how I can possibly get through all the things I need to do this week.'

David was sitting at his desk, working through a pile of papers. Without a word, he turned to me, took the proffered to-do list out of my hand and picked up a pen. One by one he went through the items on my list.

'What's this? Well you can do that next week... And that? Why do you have to go to that meeting? Well phone them and tell them you can't - I'll phone if you like...'

And so on through my list, item after item his red pen scored through each one.

'Hmm. Well that looks pretty vital. Yep, you'd better do that.'

Within a few minutes I was left with three or four key actions to achieve that week. The rest had been scored out in thick red ink.

I can't now remember what I said to David as I left his office, but I recall exactly how I felt. My stomach was no longer churning, I felt light and springy as I walked back to my office.

David had handled my dilemma perfectly. He hadn't quibbled about my workload, whether I could just squeeze something extra in, whether I couldn't maybe work late or take work home. He'd taken me at my word, recognised that I was indeed struggling and acted instantly to lighten my load, even offering to take action himself.

Why does this small instant stay with me over a decade later? For me, it's because at that moment I felt utterly believed, completely trusted, helped and - above all, perhaps - seen as full human being, not an employee in a work role.

I assume that David's reaction was because he knew that I was reliable and a hard worker. I wouldn't have come to him unless I'd had a genuine problem. Nevertheless, the generosity and humanity of his response, his willingness to put the person ahead of the task, really touched me. The trust levels between us were high.

Of course David had his flaws. Funny, warm and generous as he was, he could be stubborn and unyielding in arguments. He could occasionally be dismissive of others if they didn't agree with his view or meet his high standards. So what was it about his reaction which so touched me?

Clearly, it's not about being perfect. Rather, the warmth and humanity of his response were what stayed with me. I felt truly 'met', valued, completely trusted, understood. I knew he was on my side. David's style is what I would now call relational.

How would it be if all managers could respond in this way? If all our workplaces operated with this degree of humanity and fellow-feeling? It's not that we paid attention to looking after people at the expense of achieving our organisational goals. On the contrary, our team (and the others in the organisation) achieved huge amounts - far more than we would have done, I believe, if we'd been operating in another managerial culture.

This blog is dedicated to my belief in the value of the Relational Manager for our workers and workplaces. Through it, I hope to explore the behaviours and values which go to make a Relational Manager. I hope that the insights I gain from writing the blog, and maybe from being in dialogue with others as a result, will inform my work as an organisational consultant and coach.

For more about how I work, please visit our website at framework.org.uk

The paper argues that creativity is a tension between the group and the individual, and that successful creative teams share four creative characteristics: porousness, persistence, partnerships, and opportunism. It draws on examples from across creative media, from Orson Welles to Gene Kelly, from Bob Dylan to the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen, from Charlie Parker to his radio producer namesake Charles Parker. And look out for the cameo appearance from Marie Osmond.

http://vikramkarve.sulekha.com/blog/post/2007/12/catwoe.htm

Vikram Karve

Some people believe that ethics is of little concern to business people. “Ethics is ethics” and “business is business” they say. Thus many upwardly mobile managers of today tend to rationalize when faced with an ethical dilemma and take the position that they must wear two hats and cloak themselves with two separate but conflicting codes of ethics:  one code applicable to the professional or technical aspects of their work (Professional or Technical Ethics), and another for their business behavior (Business Ethics). This leads to the development of schizophrenic professional personality wherein a manager may strive for professional excellence and high ethical standards for one’s own self and within one’s organization, but resort to unethical practices to succeed in business at all costs.

This Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde approach is at the heart of many ethical dilemmas in managerial decision-making.

  Each person, entity, group, institution or constituency that is likely to be affected by the decision is a “stakeholder” with a moral claim on the decision maker. This stakeholder concept provides a systematic way of perceiving and resolving the various interests involved in our ethical decision making. There is an ethical dimension to every decision. Thus any of your decisions, which affect other persons, have ethical implications, and virtually all of your important decisions reflect your sensitivity and commitment to ethics. In summary, as you perform your job in your workplace, what are the ethical dimensions as you deal with your superiors, peers? Subordinates and others connected with your work. Different stakeholders have different ethical perspectives. For example, take the case of organizational romance. Whereas, some organizations [and stakeholders] may feel that there is nothing ethically wrong with workplace romance and many even encourage organizational romance / marriage among colleagues by giving various perks / incentives, some others may discourage or even prohibit workplace-romance. Of course, sexual harassment would be universally considered unethical.  One useful technique to resolve such ethical dilemmas is the CATWOE model adapted from Systems Management. Ethical dilemma occurs due to mismatch in ethical perspectives of various stakeholders involved in the ethical situation. A CATWOE analysis helps the manager identify all stakeholders involved in a decision and their respective ethical perspectives. CATWOE is an acronym to categorize various stakeholders:  CATWOE MODEL  C = CUSTOMERS, OR CLIENTS OF THE DECISIONA = ACTORS, OR AGENTS WHO CARRY OUT THE DECISIONT = TRANSFORMATION PROCESS, THE DECISION MAKERW =WELTANSCHAUUNG, WORLD VIEW PREDOMINATLY HELD  O = OWNERS / OWNERSHIPE = ENVIRONMENT / ENVIRONMENTAL IMPOSITIONS  To elaborate a bit: C:   The ‘customers of the system’. In this context, ‘customers’ means those who are on the receiving end of whatever it is that the system does. Is it clear from your definition of “C” as to who will gain or lose from your decision?  A:   The ‘actors’, meaning those who would actually carry out the activities envisaged in the notional system being defined.  T:   The ‘transformation process’. What does the system do to the inputs to convert them into the outputs?  W:   Weltanschauung - The ‘world view’ that lies behind the root definition. Putting the system into its wider context can highlight the consequences of the overall system. For example the system may be in place to assist in making the world environmentally safer, and the consequences of system failure could be significant pollution.  O:   The ‘owner(s)’ – i.e. those who have sufficient formal power over the system to stop it existing if they so wished (though they won’t usually want to do this).  E:   The ‘environmental constraints’. These include things such as ethical limits, regulations, financial constraints, resource limitations, limits set by terms of reference, and so on.   CARDINAL ASPECTS OF ETHICAL DECISION MAKING   All decisions must take into account and reflect a concern for the interest and well being of all stakeholders. Ethical values and principles always take precedence over non-ethical and unethical values and principles  It is ethically proper to violate an ethical principle only when it is clearly necessary to advance another true ethical principle which, according to the decision maker’s conscience, will produce the greatest balance of good in the long run  THE FIVE STEP ETHICAL DECISION MAKING APPROACH Step           Action 1        Identify and classify the stakeholders in the situation using CATWOE and understand their ethical perspectives  2        Identify their dominant ethical perspectives 3        Construct an ethical conflict web, mapping different ethical perspectives [CATWOE – six nodes] 4        Identify those strands of the web where no significant conflict may be assumed to exist. These may be removed from the ethical decision making model. 5        Concentrate on those strands where conflict does exist. Use a conflict resolution techniques to achieve the “overall good” for the system    Ethical decision-making involves the process by which a person evaluates and chooses among alternatives in a manner consistent with his or her core ethical values or principles. Thus when you make an ethical decision you: (a) Perceive and eliminate unethical options(b) Select the best from several competing ethical alternatives. 

Ethical decision-making requires more than a belief in the importance of ethics. It also requires sensitivity to perceive the ethical implications of your decisions; the ability to evaluate complex, ambiguous and incomplete facts and the skill to implement ethical decision making without jeopardizing your career. Ethical decision-making requires three things; ethical commitment, ethical consciousness and ethical competence. The CATWOE model will help you in Ethical Decision-making.

    VIKRAM KARVE  http://www.linkedin.com/in/karve  http://www.ryze.com/go/karve  http://vikramkarve.sulekha.com  vikramkarve@sify.com  vikramkarve@hotmail.com 

Shibboleth, for those who haven't seen it or read about it, is a crack in the floor which runs the full length of the (large) Turbine Hall at the base of the Tate Modern. It is designed (I paraphrase) to make people think about the instability of the foundations of what we take for granted, and of the cracks between different peoples and different cultures. As a piece of art, I found it unsettling. However, even though it can - at most - be 20-25cm wide at its widest point, no fewer than fifteen people have - according to news reports - managed to injure themselves on it. Easy for me to say that maybe they weren't looking; it's impossible to enter the gallery without being confronted by signs saying there is a crack in the floor and that care should be taken.

But also, of course, because of the way in which health and safety culture works, together with its first cousin public liability, the Tate's health and safety manager is required to respond by outlining concerns and measures rather than saying they should have been paying attention to their surroundings or that by entering a large space in which the only possible purpose of being there is to look at a crack in the floor they were clearly accepting some level of exposure to risk. Instead (and I quote here from the story in This is London):

Dennis Ahern, head of safety and security at the Tate, told colleagues in an internal email that people could easily trip or fall if not paying attention, "with the potential for significant leg injury". He added that if existing safety features such as lighting and use of signs were not sufficient, the museum should consider applying extra measures. "Such options could include, but are not limited to, higher levels of control of entry, barrier or demarcation lines, Perspex bridging over certain sections or other physical interventions which may become required."

Since this isn't an arts blog, not for me to suggest that a perspex bridge might negate much of the point of the work. Instead, there seem to be similarities with the work of Kendell Greers at the BALTIC. Greers' work is also about risk and danger. There are pieces (on open display) made from razor wire. One exhibit is of a glass case into which a stone appears to have been thrown, with the sharp edges of the broken glass potentially exposed to the touch. Of course, entering the gallery is a challenge; one has to navigate one's way through staff whose job it is to ensure that you have read a statement acknowledging the risks of entering such a dangerous space. (There is a video podcast of Greers talking about his work on the BALTIC site.)

What does this tell us, from a futures perspective? Art is often a weak signal of change. The health and safety culture, and the regulatory environment that provides its discourse, almost certainly has some way to run yet. But it perhaps suggests that its surge into the mainstream of public life is reaching its cusp.

Hamel's view on what the new model of management is goes like this:

"The outlines of the 21st-century management model are already clear. Decision-making will be more peer based; the tools of creativity will be widely distributed in organizations. Ideas will compete on an equal footing. Strategies will be built from the bottom up. Power will be a function of competence rather than of position. In terms of the future of management, we’re at the beginning of what will be a fairly long journey. You can see some of the pieces starting to come together, but we’re not there yet."

This is fine as far as it goes, if only descriptive. Hamel thinks its necessary because of the pace of change has been transformed by technology (the 'it's sped up and it's going to keep getting faster' argument). But I think this is a little prescriptive - and descriptive. It doesn't help get to the 'why'.

The conventional wisdom on why the modern firm exists in the form that it does derives from the economics of Ronald Coase, who won the Nodel Prize for his theory. In the 1930s, Coase argued - in effect - that by putting a boundary around a group of workers and defining them as 'employees' firms reduced the transactions costs between those people; they didn't need to make an individual agreement, for example, every time they wanted to share an idea.

Technology, the internet in particular, has reduced transaction costs significantly. And at the same time, the literature of open systems has increasingly embraced the organisation. Emery and Trist wrote their influential paper on The Causal Texture of Organisational Environments more than 40 years ago. Recent popularisers such as Margaret Wheatley and Richard Pascale have connected this to notions of complexity and organisations as complex adaptive systems.

In contrast, the existing models of management, which originally derived from the innovations of people like Frederick Taylor and his notions of "scientific management" are effectively about defining and constructing the organisation as a closed system in order to manage it efficiently.

So: the reason that management has to change is that transaction costs have fallen at the same time as the costs of hearing complex environments and adapting to them have risen. Which means that managers are doing something different.

In fact, Hamel has a more radical take on this elsewhere in the conversation with McKinsey:

"I think we’re on the verge of what I would call a postmanagerial society. The idea that you mobilize human labor through a hierarchy of overseers and bureaucrats and administrators is going to look extraordinarily antiquated a decade or two from now."

Some of the emerging models of the firm are radical; they put the managers at the service of the other staff, and do so because the staff are closer to the customers, and are able to listen better to the external environment. Interestingly the best examples aren't in the affluent North, but in places such as Brazil (Semco) and India (HCL Technologies).

In contrast to these genuinely radical examples, Lowell Bryan, a McKinsey consultant whose just written a book on mobilising talent to promote innovation, who took part in the conversation with Gary Hamel, still believes that you can deploy centralised models to achieve this goal. But maybe that's still where the consultancy bucks are to be found:

I like the notion of designing a managing concept or master plan—a master architecture, if you will—for every company. Such a master plan should lay out the big foundational elements to get your organization to work differently, including, for example, what is your fundamental metric for performance? Should it be return on capital or profit per employee? Once you’ve designed your master plan, you can launch a series of initiatives aimed at achieving your goals.

One of the features that Hamel notes is that transformational change usually happens in companies only after a crisis. The academic in him would clearly like companies to manage their own transformations before they have to. But the reason that it takes a crisis is because the leaders are usually those most insulated from the external environment. In this respect, it is revealing that - in the quote I used at the start of this post - he uses the metaphor of "bottom up" to describe the future of the organisation. This is still a metaphor about organisation as machine. In the world of complex environments, strategies have to be built from the outside in.

[There are excerpts from Hamel's book here and a blog posting on managing in an online world here (with some fairly rich discussion in the comments).]

Related posts: Apple and the 'strategic moment'; The future of recruitment and of work

Phase 1 was reducing their energy consumption by cleaning up their own direct consumption. Phase 2 was trying to encourage their consumers to clean up their consumption (albeitoften by selling them more stuff. Now Phase 3 is about addressing the carbon impacts of their supply chain.

A couple of quotes from the article give a flavour of it:

“Carbon footprint is absolutely new territory,” said W. Drew Schramm, a senior vice president at the furnishings company Herman Miller and a member of the committee on social responsibility at the Institute for Supply Management, a trade group. “We’re not sure how we’ll measure it, we’re not sure how we’ll deal with it, but we’ve told our suppliers, ‘Get ready, because we’re going to ask you a lot of questions.’”

And again:

In September, Wal-Mart announced a pilot program with suppliers of seven common items — DVDs, toothpaste, soap, milk, beer, vacuum cleaners and soda — to measure and reduce the amount of energy used in making and distributing them. In marketing and store displays, Home Depot gives preferences to its EcoOptions line of environmentally friendly products, and the company has said it would favor suppliers that came up with a new category of green product, like a recyclable power tool.

I'm probably willing to give Herman Miller slightly more credence here, since their business model doesn't involve exporting environmental impact (e.g. by driving to the store) to their customers, and because it's generally in the business of long-life products rather than encouraging consumption. (Its Mirra chair is currently 96% reusable on the cradle-to-cradle model, and it was engaging with its supply chain five years ago). But it is still good, obviously, that companies are wrestling with this.

From a 'greened business' perspective, of course, the emissions created by your suppliers in your sertvice would be included in your porudcts as a matter of course. Otherwise you get the current 'China Syndrowm' of exporting your dirty secrets to someione else, along with the absurdity of being able to green your footprint by simply outsourcing everything.

In fragmented supply chains that is difficult, and the excuses are already starting to be made:

General Electric, for one, does not include supply-chain emissions when it calculates its carbon footprint. “We’ve drawn the boundary around activities over which we have operational control, and our reduction efforts are focused within that boundary,” said Peter O’Toole, a G.E. spokesman.

But that's not a long-term response; either sectors will end up collaborating to create common industry standards, or - certainly in Europe - they will be regulated, if governments are serious about carbon reduction. The NYT quote Hewlett-Packard's Bonnie Nixon Gardner:

If you’re going to make a real difference, you have to let go of your corporate ego... Many of us are operating in the same regions, with the same suppliers, even in the same factories, so our voice together is going to be much more powerful.”

Timberland, likewise, is working with competitors to “create a common means of evaluating the supplier’s carbon footprint.”

Fast Company, meanwhile, has a list of 50 things business are doing to green themselves. They're snapshots, obviously, but they give a sense of the current landscape.

In case that cheers you up, it's worth turning to the Guardian's Green Guide, the paper's annual survey of environmental progress. It's clear that business is heading in the right direction, but probably not at the right speed. Some quick points: only 68 of the FTSE 100 firms were willing (or able) to disclose their carbon emissions (there's data attached to the article); while six of the world's ten largest companies are in the oil or the car sector, and are likely to make environmental haste slowly. 75% of NGOs and the general public agree (according to a MORI poll) that "industry and commerce do not pay enough attention to their social responsibilities" while 48% of investors and 30% of 'captains of industry' agree. (And only 26% of Conservative MPs; maybe David Cameron has a tougher task then he anticipates in creating a 'green Conservatism').

On the positive side, the same MORI poll reports that 45% of businesses say that environmental degradation is the most important issue facing business - placing it top of the list. (A recent Shaping Tomorrow poll which I can't currently find had a different result, to my surprise but not theirs). And the two articles on initiatives by London, and by individual American states, suggest that more local approaches may be more effective than waiting on governments. Businesses wanting a 'no excuses' approach to ethics and environmentalism can check in with the Co-op.

Business Voice, the CBI's monthly magazine, asks if the UK can be the "world's green champion?" [No links, since site was down at timw of writing]. There are profiles of various 'cleantech' (environmental technology) companies, all of which seem small and fairly early stage to me. The answer seems to be 'up to a point', especially in marine energy technology (all that sea and all that technical North Sea oil expertise), providing the government will back the industry with appropriate investment. The role of government - as a regulator or enabler - is critical to getting to green business on a sufficiently quick timescale. But Business Voice, and the corporate lobby in the US, would be complaining loudly if the government suggested that regulation or sanctions were necessary to reduce carbon emissions rapidly enough to bring global warming under control.

Related posts: Countering greenwash and DOTT 07 - sustainable design for communities.

Thanks to Core 77 for the NYT lead.

In the article, Rumelt recalls how in the 1990s he had interviewed 20 to 30 CEOs while researching strategy in the global electronics industry. He asked questions about market leadership and so on:

Most executives easily explained how companies became market leaders: some sort of window of opportunity opened, and the leader was the company that was the first to successfully jump through that window. Not exactly the first mover but the first to get it right.

But when I asked these same executives about their own strategies, I heard a lot about doorknob polishing. They were doing 360-degree feedback, forming alliances, outsourcing, cutting costs, and so on. None of them even mentioned taking a good position quickly when the industry changes.

Then, a few years later, he had the opportunity to speak to Steve Jobs, who had returned to Apple and had turned it around. He asked him about Jobs' long-term strategy as a niche computer company which was never likely to disrupt the Intel/Windows 'standard.

He didn’t agree or disagree with my assessment of the market. He just smiled and said, “I am going to wait for the next big thing."... He was waiting until the right moment for that predatory leap, which for him was Pixar and then, in an even bigger way, the iPod. That very predatory approach of leaping through the window of opportunity and staying focused on those big wins—not on maintenance activities—is what distinguishes a real entrepreneurial strategy.

Rumelt observes that the changes which Apple exploited in the music industry were clear to everyone. "You couldn't pick up a magazine without reading about Napster. And people knew that MP3 players were coming along." Jobs was perfectly positioned - 'a bit of an insider' in the entertainment industry, but without asset positions which were threatened by digital music. He didn't have to cannibalise his own business.

The comments on Jobs link to a broader observation - that all businesses seek "a pathway to substantially improved performance", but there are really only two routes to this: inventing your way to success - which is unreliable - or exploiting some change in your environment, "and riding that change with quickness and skill":

Strategic thinking is essentially a substitute for having clear connections between the positions we take and their economic outcomes. [It] helps us take positions in a world that is confusing and uncertain. You can’t get rid of ambiguity and uncertainty—they are the flip side of opportunity.

Which obviously connects to two of the rationales for futures work: that it enables organisations to contemplate multiple possible futures - and therefore manage for uncertainty and ambiguity - and that it requires organisations to pay much more considered attention to their external environment.

Rumelt's tips for good strategy: small groups of smart people, and no Powerpoint ("it drives out thinking"). Instead, ask people to write down three coherent paragraphs about what is changing and why. Bigger groups should be engaged later, to get to the best solutions, and earn commitment.

Update [04-12-07]: Adam Penenberg has a recent article in Fast Company on Apple's prospects which suggests that the iPod 'moment is unlikely to be repeated. Extended extract here: worth reading the article in full.

It's worth remembering that Apple lost money in 2001, the year the iPod was introduced, and had smallish profits in 2002 and 2003, when iTunes was created and the iPod took off. In other words, the iPod's success didn't come solely from elegant, simple, novel design, but also from the fact that the iPod and iTunes appeared together and, essentially, in a vacuum. The market in MP3 players was small at the time, and there were few legal ways to obtain music for them; Jobs was able to exploit both factors in taking control, then cemented that position by making iTunes available to Windows users. Today, Apple commands about 70% of music downloads.

The iPod-iTunes pairing was the product of a historical moment that may never be reproduced. It was an ideal closed system:an utterly new music machine and something exclusive to load into it, something very hard (or illegal) to obtain otherwise. The device and the service together became the basis of a subculture, an iPod aesthetic. The perfect business storm they generated allowed Apple to build a near-monopoly.

But if iTunes is the driver for iPod sales (which, in turn, boost Mac sales), then Jobs's chair sits on a floor he doesn't own. The content that launched the iPod isn't his. And now the music industry is striking back.

He makes three main points in the piece:

1. That when traditional companies consider the benefits of sustainability they think of the green dimension as being the primary dimension. Instead, the sustainable perspective should be included in the offer - but the whole offer needs to be distinctive.
2. Green stories can be fantastically effective in terms of building narratives - but fake green stories can be fatal. "Faking it means you will be outed on the Internet by people who believe being green requires full commitment. They will find you out and destroy you."
3. In the more complex world of sustainable development, design needs to play a central role in connecting different parts of the business: "to ensure that issues of sustainability, recylability, reusability, re-purpose, secondary use, and constant loop lifecycles are as equally considered in developing products as price, distribution and manufacturing costs." I see in this a suggestion that some of the traditional assumptions about the composition of the senior management teams of companies need shaking up.

He also points out - with reference to work done by the UK's Design Council - that it is easier than ever to demonstrate, measurably, that good design is his good business. It's no longer a case of pointing vaguely in the general direction of Apple.

Thanks to Core 77.

Related posts include include: DOTT’s top design/sustainability books, and Designs that framed the way we see technologies.

The CMI surveyed 42,000 individuals, so there's unlikely to be much in the way of sample error. They found that

• Women are more likely to be promoted through management ranks more quickly (this is true at each level from team leader through to director - detail in the summary)
• But on average they are paid more than £6,000 less than their male counterparts (£6067, to be precise), and this gap has grown in percentage terms since last year (up from 11.8% to 12.2%). At board level the salary differentials are almost 30% of salary, up from a quarter last year.
• And although they are more likely to receive a bonus than male counterparts, the actual size of the bonus is likely to be smaller, both as a proportion of income and in actual terms)
• So perhaps it's not surprising that women are more likely to resign than men.

At the same time, the proportion of female managers has grown year on year, from 31% to more than 35% (perhaps because of the rapid promotion.) The CMI's Corporate Affairs director Jo Causon, seems quite mild in her comments: "Despite the weight of legislation and the reality that reward should match responsibility, gender bias seems to be getting worse, not better.”

The averages conceal some revealing differences, at least to judge from an article by Madeleine Bunting, who seems to have had access to the full report. In the food and drink sector the pay gap runs at 46%, almost four times the average; in financial services, it's 40%, or more than three times the average. But in the public sector, which takes this seriously, the pay gap is now less than 1%. Unsurprisingly, her interviewees were less restrained. Professor Linda Grattan, of the London Business School, is quoted as follows:

Why aren't more women taking their employers to court? Women are getting a really bad deal, yet we know from the research that they are just as high performers as men."

The answer is that they are going to court, and in rapidly increasing numbers, and the tribunals system is apparently straining at the seams as a result. Since Labour came to power, the gender pay gap has narrowed by only 3%. I blogged in July about the Equality Opportunities Commission's final report. It reckoned that pay equality was 20 years away. Time to revise that figure upwards, I'd say - unless the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights wants to try to address it.

What happens with faults is this: third party re-seller reports fault to BT (which has a wholesaling division which is supposed to maintain a level playing field for all service providers, BT retail included). BT analyses it and sorts it out. In my case they weren't very good at this: they breached their service level agreement with my provider, in terms of the length of time they took to restore the service, and one of the reasons for this was having accepted that the fault was at the exchange, it turned round and decided that the problem was some unidentified (and non-existent) equipment attached to the my line.

Maybe the detail isn't important. But from a customer point of view, I can't tell whether this is just because BT is inept or whether it is monopolistic behaviour (yes, they are supposed to keep a level playing field, but when it comes to re-sellers maybe they just don't care that much whether there are some bumps and ruts on the pitch).

What's lying beneath this is a change in view about how competition works. Originally, when BT was privatised, the rigours of the market was supposed to do it, together with a modestly sized competitor (Mercury). Now we think it takes more than that, and also understand the importance of open infrastructure in enabling competition. The current 'level playing field' model is effectively a lash-up by the regulator to try to open up the infrastructure. (There are physical problems - since a lot of the equipment is in BT buildings). But it's not going to work fairly until the infrastructure is run by a genuinely independent infrastructure company - along the model of Railtrack for the rail industry. At least then you know that if you get poor service it's because they company is incompetent.

The first is that although he was speaking at a conference, it was clearly carefully planned - The Times and the Guardian have identical quotes - and it doesn't appear to be a statement about job cuts.

The second is about discourse: the language he used was about framing flexible working as something modern and progressive businesses would want to do as a matter of course:

"I don’t think we’re a really progressive, perceptive company if 8,000 people have to get up every day at an unearthly hour and go back again. Technology should change our thought process.”

The third reason that there are signs that flexible working could be at an inflection point. Some soon-to-be-published research we've done at Henley for Orange's Future Enterprise Coalition suggests that the flexible working data is good at capturing hardcore (full-time/based at home) flexiworkers but not so good at seeing people who work from home a day a week or a day or fortnight, or when it makes business sense - and there are far more of these than has been previously suspected. A relatively small shift in their behaviour could give significant critical mass to flexible working. If HSBC designs its process so that it's seen as a positive and progressive move by the workforce, rather than being cost-cutting wrapped in velvet soundbites, it is the sort of decision which will accelerate the social shift around flexible working.

(The Orange research is due to be published on 26th June. I'll blog more around then.)

The flexible working report was unveiled at a conference run by Working Families called 'Hours to Suit' (see what they just did there?). The actual report doesn't seem to have been published yet but the research appears to be based on depth interviews with senior managers in companies such as Lehmann Brothers (who sponsored the conference), Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Microsoft, Shell, BT, Hewlett Packard and so on. Business cultures, it concludes, have shifted over the last three years, to accept and adapt to different working patterns. Technology has helped to enable this.

One important conclusion - mirrored by some work in this area which Henley is currently doing with Orange and its Future Enterprise Coalition -  is summarised in a quote in a Guardian article by Pam Walton:

"Organisations are beginning to accept that in many of these jobs it is outputs that matter; where and how you do it should not be the issue."

The second report, “The Costs of Transport on the Environment – The Role of Teleworking in Reducing Carbon Emissions" was sponsored by BT Conferencing and Giritech (remote working security solutions) so perhaps it's no surprise that it concludes that "teleworking" (maybe not the most helpful label) is likely to reduce emissions.

It has been written by - among others - Professor David Banister, of Oxford University's Centre for the Environment, and the methodology is a review of existing Government, academic, and technology research. Again, it's not apparently available (yet?), so the best guide is a story by Bill Andad on the daniweb blog for IT specialists.

A couple of wrinkles in the story: significant savings seem to kick in when people start to work from home more than one day a week, and any climate change savings can disappear if employers don't change the way they manage their offices.

From the (fairly rich) data summary at the end of the daniweb story, three points stand out for me:

•  The number of commuting trips has fallen by 8% from 1995-2005, but travel to work distances have risen slightly.
• The frequency of homeworking amongst full-time employees is rising, but 83% still say that it is not possible to work at home.
• But 65% of those in work in the UK are “very” or “somewhat” interested in at least one type of telework - and 33% regard their job as feasible for home teleworking at least one day per week.

This type of latent desire, between where the market is now, and what people would like to be able to do, usually suggests that change is gonna happen, sooner or later. And if more senior managers are working more flexibly, it suggests that barriers will start to fall away as well.

But Blood's analysis is more interesting. He has an inside track on this, since he was formerly Goldman Sachs' Head of Asset Management. There are interesting points about corporations' need to shift to a systems' view of their markets; the role of pension companies (often sympathetic) in taking a long-term view, for obvious reasons; and the fact that GIM assesses remuneration structures when looking at a company - for perverse and unsustainable incentives.

Click below for a selection of key quotes.

The most profound shift indicated in the interview, for anyone who's spent any time watching the City of London, or Wall Street, at work is a way of looking at investment - within corporate investment parameters - that is long-term rather than short-term, as David Blood explains:

The first principle, categorically, is that it is best practice to
take a long-term approach to investing. We think that the focus on “short termism” in the marketplace is detrimental to economies, detrimental to value creation, detrimental to capital markets, and a bad investment strategy. It’s common corporate-finance knowledge that 60 to 80 percent of the value of a business lies in its long term cash flows.

Which raises the question of why board directors, or come to that institutional investors, haven't acted on that common knowledge. Blood's view is that this is a blindspot - and one which is about to catch out business leaders who aren't looking in the right place.

In effect what’s happening, unbeknownst to many corporate
leaders, is that the goalposts for their businesses’ license to operate have moved. There are higher expectations and more serious consequences, and the implications go way beyond protecting your reputation or managing costs... In the end, that’s the holy grail of sustainability investing—to seize the opportunities, not just avoid the risks.

All of which leads him on to an interesting and far wider point, which he's very explicit about: that in effect sustainability turns investment research into systems research.

Sustainability research is complicated because it requires you to think long term and to think about the first- and second-order effects of an issue. We like to describe our approach to sustainability research as taking a systems view. What that means is, if you’re thinking about climate change you first need to understand the physical, regulatory, and behavioral impacts on business. But you also need to understand what a changing climate means for disease migration and public health, what it means for poor populations in developing countries, what it means for water scarcity or demographic and urbanization trends. The most important and challenging research is trying to determine how all these factors interact.

Gore's part in the interview is more muted, but he offers a data point and a weak signal, both from Europe, which may or may not be significant.

The data point is from a recent conference in Copenhagen, a reprise of an event held a year earlier: As part of an internal survey, attendees were asked how many of them had internalized their “carbon budget” and begun to drive down their internal emissions. A year ago it was 15 percent. This year it was 65 per cent.

The weak signal: "If I were on the board of a company doing business
primarily in the European Union, I would ask questions about how long it will be before my aggressive management of carbon."

The problem is, the larger an organisation gets these days, the harder and more expensive it becomes to coordinate people working together... In fact, the rise of management consultancy itself can be seen as a function of the growing impossibility of understanding these gigantic, modern organisations.