Without a thorough overhaul in our thinking on the ecology and climate change, we’ll keep on getting the results we’re already getting. And it’s going to take some special entrepreneurial initiatives to pull it off. The question we should ask is where are they going to come from, and is there anything the rest of us can do to make a contribution?
In the foreword to the revised 2007 edition of Peter Drucker’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship*, Christopher Bones, the principal of the United Kingdom’s Henley Management College, suggests that Drucker was “clear from the outset that an entrepreneur is not necessarily a capitalist, does not have to have invented anything and does not necessarily start and own a small business”.
Drucker believed that, “Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship can be found in all parts of society, not just in that part defined as economic. What defines an entrepreneur in a business or in a school or hospital or non-business organisation is their attitude to change.”
Let’s give Drucker’s definition of entrepreneurship the benefit of the doubt here. If we interpret it as meaning that those with this gene can lead us into a world no longer blighted by threats to the climate or the environment, then such attitudes are surely those we most need to embrace in our businesses.
But as we head into a downturn in most businesses theirs are also likely the spirits on which the lid is to be most closely tightened now.
There’s plenty of evidence in the management literature that in the worst of times, the worse things get, the more managers become rusted to their existing strategies – even if they are failing them.
Jeffrey Phillips wrote recently in “A virtuous cycle” at Thinking Faster :
… in any system, the status quo is usually reinforced … we get from the organization what we expect and reinforce.
If we resist change, an organization learns to resist new ideas, regardless of their impact or possibility. If, on the other hand, we demonstrate a desire for change and innovation, and reinforce the best ideas, then the organization will seek out and bring new change to light.
It underlines the paradox of need versus what actually happens. What we need are companies which will advance us up the Dunphy scale; what we get is timidity and a lack of comprehension that despite the downturn, there is advantage to be seized.
My own recent attempts, with my journalist’s hat on, to draw a response from companies in the S&P/ASX 200, the index of Australia’s leading companies, on what they are doing to innovate in response to the threat of climate change seems to prove the point. I drew a null response.
Trying to identify those senior executives who believe that on matters of climate change and environment their companies should become the breakaway act in their own industries seems similarly futile. Yet, we know they must exist.
This suggests that nothing is happening, because a bona fide business journalist is someone to whom most businesses wish to crow when they are doing something of worth. We’d all like to read of it. But combine the words “innovation” and “climate change” and: nothing. No one speaks up. It seems like everyone is waiting for someone else to move first.
It’s a backdrop against which an entrepreneur working purposefully with method to change the way an organise thinks and behaves could really overturn the status quo in many industries. It’s not as if the technologies to facilitate this aren’t readily available. And the fear they’d instil in turn in their competitors could itself inspire a major wave of change.
So, how about it if we turn this thing around?
Students of innovation might already be familiar with a management discipline known as “time pacing”, through which leading organisations such as Intel are dictating their own, and therefore also their industries’, paces of change.
Authors Weiner and Brown, in FutureThink* cite a 1998 Harvard Business Review piece by Kathleen Eisenhardt and Shona Brown**, describing it as the “next big management tool”.
In the original piece, Eisenhardt and Brown proposed that in event pacing – the norm – “companies change in response to events such as moves by the competition, shifts in technology, poor financial performance, or new customer demands … creating a new product when a promising technology comes out of the R&D laboratory … in response to a move by a competitor, or making an acquisition because an attractive target becomes available…”
“In markets that are stable, event pacing is an opportunistic and effective way to deal with change,” they say.
Time pacing, though, is about running a business through regular deadlines to which managers synchronise the speed and intensity of their efforts. This also drives the innovation and new product development effort. They set the pace, determining a predictable rhythm for change in a company, which creates a relentless sense of urgency that concentrates individual and team energy around common goals and deadlines.
Gordon Moore, Intel’s co-founder is famous for his prophesy that the capacity of a microprocessor computer chip would double every 18 months. Yet, Moore's Law, as it is known, set in train the very treadmill of activity that proved his prophesy self-fulfilling.
Weiner and Brown suggest time pacing will become a norm in many industries, not least because in this way incumbents can erect and maintain increasingly substantial defensive barriers around their businesses.
In this world, Weiner and Brown suggest that management’s role will, “increasingly become the facilitation, acceleration, and evaluation of the evolution of the organization and its people”. In other words, a huge focus will be on the development and replenishment of a company’s human capital.
When we look at the ways in which we need a co-ordinated innovation response to climate change by industry and government, perhaps what we need is a cross-industry time-pacing program. We certainly need new thinking across broad swathes of commercial activity.
One can only speculate as to its form but mutually reinforcing actions on innovation across a set of related strategic supply chains could even deliver regional, even national advantage. Moreover, even the most recalcitrant of incumbents would be pulled into line.
This sounds like the most massive of undertakings, destined for failure in a bureaucratic nightmare.
Perversely, I believe it could take just the gentlest of nudges in the right place. The question is, do we have the entrepreneur who is going to step forward to make it happen?
I have in mind some ideas as to how this might occur. Have you? I’ll expand on my own in future posts.
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Innovation and Entrepreneurship*, Peter Drucker, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1985
FutureThink: How to Think Clearly in a Time of Change, Edie Weiner, Arnold Brown, Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006
Time pacing - Competing in Markets That Won’t Stand Still, Eisenhardt KM & Brown SL, Harvard Business Review, 1998
