So, from now on I will be posting all my blogs to my new consolidated blog titled “Musings of a Business Engineer”, which you can find here. My new blog will still be covering off all of the aspects that I was covering in the Business Detox blog, just now as elements of a broader theme about “all things business”.

I hope you enjoy the new blog — please don’t hesitate to send lots of comments. Happy reading!

Steve’s article (When It’s Darkest, Men See the Stars) is well worth reading. In my view, it does a great job of capturing how many of the barriers to entry of building new businesses have been reduced to rubble, clearing the way for inspired people to get out and do their own thing, creating new business successes in their wake. I generally subscribe to his belief that we are entering a new golden age — as with all golden age introductions I suspect we’re talking 20 or 30 years before the dust settles and we clearly see we’re on a different path.

The main take-away — the institutionalized approach to western-style education needs a radical overhaul, which won’t come from the same people & power base that currently run and fund those same institutions…

In this case he is exploring human motivation and he comes down firmly on the side of  intrinsic motivators (Type I) being superior (in most cases, and specifically when the work is creative and not extremely mechanistic) to the more classical “carrot and stick” (punishment or reward) extrinsic motivators (Type X). Not surprisingly, Pink introduces his readers to the new methodologies of ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) which is something I have blogged about previously as the natural evolution of modern work…

Here is a great 10 minute video of his book and work that is as entertaining as it is informative — in my view the take-aways are:

• for businesses — think hard about redesigning your employee engagement processes and your incentive systems to get better motivation;
• for individuals — concentrate on some of Pink’s questions and approaches to help you determine when you are “in flow” and what things you really like doing. Then do an inventory of current “motivators” that are in place in your work environment and decide for yourself whether they are in fact truly motivating you to higher performance.

Perhaps not surprisingly, his opening statement was “…I thought your brief was a bit radical, in a Naomi Klein kind of way…”. Basically his take was that “business detox” as a positioning statement will immediately be taken by business and policy leaders as an anti-business statement and so only serves to turn people off who might otherwise be aligned with what the project is really about.

Of course, that is not my intention — I’m a strong believer in the free-market economy and its associated corporate business structure, and believe that reforming it (or re-engineering it?) will only serve to enhance society by letting business get on and do what it is incredibly good at doing; innovating, solving problems, creating wealth, and supporting productive lives for millions of people.

Interestingly, it did in fact turn out that much of his and my thinking was highly aligned and that he did recognize the strong desirability of driving change in our current system to improve society’s outcomes — and we both agreed that business and business leaders could and should be major players in driving this change.

So my question: does branding this initiative as “The Business Detox Project” actually get in the way of making real headway by turning off the key constituent of serious business minded people?

Specific to one of your “lessons learned”, I find it remarkable that our gold standard in ethical crisis management is still Johnson & Johnson with Tylenol in 1982. Essentially, a company that chose to “do the right thing” is a significant outlier from standard business practices today. What would our world look like if this performance was actually considered to be “standard operating procedure” for companies, and where we as society demanded the tools & rules to hold companies to account?

I don’t want to take anything away from Johnson & Johnson circa 1982, and my sense is that they must have had a remarkable internal culture and some very strong, passionate leaders to resist the urge to (i) not take responsibility; (ii) limit their financial exposure by minimizing the recall, and; (iii) to try to conduct “business as usual” and hide behind some babble about “caring passionately” while not doing anything tangible. I’m quite confident that internally at the executive level and at the board level there must have been some knock-em-down-and-drag-em-out fights about the “prudent way” to respond and it is somewhat remarkable that the “take full responsibility now, remove the risk, make it right, and don’t look back” crowd ultimately won the day….

I did a bit of  searching to see if I could gain some insights, and I came across this article entitled J&J’s Tylenol Recalls Boost Dissident’s Alternate History of the 1982 Cyanide Crisis, which basically states that J&J wasn’t so quick off the mark as all that, and that J&J has done a lot of PR work to recast the story to their advantage. Having said that, in the end J&J did the right thing, which says a lot about the company.

Has anybody out there read the book that this article mentions: “Damage Control”? Any comments on the book from those that have read it…?

Andrew,
I like your wheel concept and I think it could find much use as a strategizing tool for businesses that want to be proactive in developing relevant sustainability practices…… In a nutshell, I applaud any business that takes “sustainability” seriously and uses it as an opportunity to fundamentally rethink their approach to business (eg: Ray Anderson & Interface). However, I believe that to reach a real tipping point we need to concretely address the structural/legal aspects of how businesses are “allowed” to operate — this is the thrust of the Business Detox Project initiative.

Any comments? Do you see a strong level of alignment between Andrew’s tool and the Detox focus? Could tools like Andrew proposes be used effectively by a companies to better “detox” their companies?

So here they are: three straightforward — and far-reaching — strategies for detoxifying your business:

1. Recognize the costs that your business externalizes, and build a first-order model to approximate and better understand the extent, nature, and potential liability of those costs. Respond to this new information set accordingly;
2. Don’t provide any commitments – whether explicit or implicit – that take on future liabilities owed to your employees. Make no commitments or promises that you cannot afford or deliver within your standard budget planning cycle; Work to evolve your talent management system from a traditional employee model towards a model that engages around accomplishing “business outcomes”. This will drive improved business discipline, provide significant cost advantages, and unleash your talent to truly innovate and prosper;
3. Provide full transparency to your consumers about the origins and risk profile of your products. You will be able to do this only once you yourself have full transparency of your own global supply chain and are able to verify that all downstream contractors and subcontractors are meeting their obligations.

Of course, these are not easy things to do, although conceptually they are very straightforward. The larger and more complex the business is, the more challenging moving on each of these strategies is. The good news is that these actions align very well with a number of accepted “business strategies” that currently exist in the business world.

Based on these, it would seem to be fairly straightforward to develop some kind of rating/measuring scheme about both (i) the toxicity of specific businesses and industries, and (ii) the degree to which specific companies (and whole industries) are committed to detoxifying, based on their annual progress in measuring and managing toxicity levels. I think this would align very nicely with a lot of the current voluntary schemes for measuring CSR (corporate social responsibility) performance of companies.

Any comments on the applicability and value of such a measurement scheme?

“Chris — thanks for pointing out the article. I have to say that this is not surprising in the least. Any company that is in the situation BP is in now would operate in exactly the same fashion (although they might be a little bit more savvy at managing the public relations part of things…).

BP knows their liabilities run into the billions of dollars and a strong legal defense will be necessary to minimize those liabilities. As I pointed out in an earlier post in my “Business Detox Project” blog, “It is instructional to note that after 19 years of ongoing legal activities the fines imposed on Exxon after the Valdez incident have been reduced from $2.5B to around $500M. It cost Exxon about $188M in legal fees to achieve this outcome — which from a business perspective is money well spent.”

From BP’s perspective, I would think a few million thrown around in the research community to secure expert positions and limit data from being more publicly available than it otherwise would be is money well-spent.

I’m not arguing that we might question how ethical this all is — the real issue is that businesses don’t have an overriding ethical/social responsibility mission and we should probably quit being “surprised and outraged” when they prove that to us over and over again.”

Any comments or observations about this? Am I being overly cynical about how business actually works, or just painfully realistic? Your thoughts and feedback are most welcome…

If you are interested in the specifics of the proposed changes to the UK food and health landscape, then  read the complete article — in my mind there is no question that Monbiot definitely has a bead on what will actually happen if this misguided attempt to have corporations driven by “social responsibility, not state regulation” continues unabated… Monbiot sums it up as:

“So here’s what’s going to happen. The failure of big business to police itself will cause a series of crises: in public health, social provision, quality of life, the environment. The state will have to shell out billions to put them right. Eventually (think of BSE, the railways, tobacco advertising) the government will be forced to re-regulate, but not before large numbers of people have been hurt. In the meantime we’ll be instructed to pull our socks up and take responsibility for issues out of our control. It’s an age-old story from which governments learn the square root of nothing. It happens as predictably as a punch-up when the referee quits the pitch.”

Unfortunately, he is right on the mark. Whether it is the banking industry, the oil industry, or any other profit-driven business like the food industry, the ongoing approach should not be  blind adherence and pandering  to  “deregulation” ideologies but a more nuanced understanding of the critical balancing role of regulation and oversight with profit-oriented risk-taking and innovation.

Time to focus on re-stating and re-committing to the “rules of the game”….