It's Time for Some New Habits--the Year of the Meaning Organization

This time of year we tend to subject ourselves to tough review. We zero in on our practices and tendencies and resolve to take up new, positive habits--and, more importantly, to break the bad. It can be a productive exercise if approached with a clear eye and dedicated follow-through. My question: why don't we subject our institutions to the same ritualistic rigor?

As I've argued in my new book, instead of creating enduring, authentic value for people, our institutions--corporations, banks, governments--consistently, systematically, one might say, habitually, extract wealth from them. The result is the game of musical chairs that is the crisis, writ large.

What, then, are the habits of this set of industrial age institutions? They're the stuff we live and breathe, practice and do: strategy, marketing, finance, and the rest of the drear, dismal, passionless stuff that makes most of us snooze through meetings, dread Monday mornings, and that embezzles joy, plenitude, and significance from our days. When you think about it, those habits were deliberately designed to reduce our emotional, creative, and ethical intelligence, our sense of bigger purpose and our shared, enduring ideals.

Argue with me if you like, but I'd suggest the economic historians of the 23rd century are going to look back on the economies, markets, and organizations of the 20th the way we look back on those of the 18th  (remember debtors' prisons, indentured servitude, and mercantile colonialism?)--with a mixture of fascination and horror. "How," I bet they'll ask themselves, "could they spend their time, energy, and resources--their very lives--in pursuit of the trivial and the inconsequential, the pedestrian and the pointless, the predatory and the predictable? Especially when confronted by a Great Stagnation, why didn't they rethink their self-destructive habits?"

The fact is, it's well past time to begin imagining an organization of a radically different kind--one that doesn't just "do" banal strategy, marketing, and finance--but takes a quantum leap way, way beyond them, into a novel galaxy of unexplored, untapped economic possibilities.

Here's what I think that organization might look like.

Its brain wouldn't be the office, department, or strategy team--but something I call the "wisdom group." The strategy group's job is to ensure that the organization is maximizing its payoffs, thus creating value for shareholders. The reason most organizations can't create thick, authentic, shared value is because...well, they're not really interested in it. You can't argue that you're taking it seriously when the only person thinking about it is shunted off to some "CSR" ghetto, and reports to the baby-faced junior associate intern of the strategy group--whose only job is to put near-term profit first. 

Hence, the wisdom group. The wisdom group's job would be, first and foremost, to ensure that the organization is creating authentic, thick, shared value that's enjoyed by all its key stakeholders--people, nature, the future, society. Its responsibilities would begin with measuring, monitoring, and managing that value creation--but end up shepherding, guiding, and nurturing it. Wisdom, as in: doing stuff that matters to our great-great-great-grandkids, that ennobles us, that develops our better selves, and that honors our bigger purpose.

Because it's concerned with thick, value, shared among and between all of an organization's stakeholders, the next-generation organization must to think bigger--and better--than purely debt and equity, and what they're worth to today's investors. 

Instead, it's going to have to get lethally serious about creating an enduring, meaningful, resonant, positive, proliferating set of impacts--whether social, human, intellectual, spiritual, creative, or relational. "Profit" is defunct as an internal combustion engine: it's an industrial age construct that's built to trivialize everything but what a firm owes its "owners." 

In the 21st century, we're discovering the hard way just how barren a prosperity that  stale idea led to. Hence, the wisdom team, concerned foremost with creating and delivering benefits that matter in human terms. Outcomes, not income--that's the difference between industrial age "finance", and the nascent art of significance. 

Its nerve center wouldn't be marketing--but what you might call humanizing.  Today, marketing is the equivalent of the corporate ghetto--with good reason. In too many boardrooms, marketers are minions, flunkies, and sidekicks who refuse to stand up to the CEO, CFO, or board, and say "No! In the long-run, it's really not a good idea for us to push a lowest-common-denominator that sucks--and sucks health, wealth, and character out of our society." 

Marketing's role has become to find slightly cleverer ways to convince "consumers" to buy more--more rapidly-depreciating, mass-produced, joyless, drab stuff. Humanizing's role? Just about the opposite in every way. It's about helping people to stop mindlessly (over)consuming and to start enjoying, improving, bettering; to help people maximize the authentic, long-run value of a product or service; and to stop organizations from hard-selling the overconsumption of toxic, socially- and personally-destructive junk. 

Marketing's about making markets--humanizing's about helping people blossom, flourish, and grow.

Hopelessly naive, thoroughly idealistic, offensively simple-minded? Sure--I'll be the first to admit that the habits I've discussed with you here are far from the only ones, or even the "best" ones. 

They're just a starting point--like every resolution. To take us just a step further in to the new year (and the new age or organizations) here's the first draft of what I call the Meaning Organization. It's built not just to learn--and then to do business--but, more deeply, to redraw the boundaries of prosperity by doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. If you're thinking about changing your habits this year, perhaps that's not a bad place to begin.

This time of year we tend to subject ourselves to tough review. We zero in on our practices and tendencies and resolve to take up new, positive habits--and, more importantly, to break the bad. It can be a productive exercise if approached with a clear eye and dedicated follow-through. My question: why don't we subject our institutions to the same ritualistic rigor?