Bryan O’Rourke shares his thoughts on technology, business, and consumer trends in health, fitness and more.
Our rapidly changing world includes many new realities. Many institutions are failing and most leadership is unable to manage let alone lead through this change. However, great opportunities exist with the potential for a new ethic of openness, sharing and collaboration. Check out http://www.e3unlimited.com for more information after you see their video.
In Lencioni's book on the five dysfunctions of organizations, several critical and relevant points pertaining to the realities of revolutionary change for a company by adoption of his principals of leadership are missing. Therefore, by failing to keep these important points in mind, even the best intended leaders trying to accelerate competitive effectiveness via application of Lencioni's disciplines will fail to achieve positive outcomes.
The first missed point is the need for leaders and managers to have relevant specific abilities (relevant talent) and the second is that an alignment of the values among managers and ownership surrounding the five dysfunctions and how they can be overcome must exist. The author overly simplifies the solutions he proposes by leaving these critical and common challenges out of his analysis. It is sad but true that most organizations cannot navigate change well because they do not have the right people talent and their ownership or stakeholders do not have the proper view of what it takes to succeed in the new world of competition.
On the first missing point, without exceptional talent and skill among the team, functionality will rarely be achieved. Start with people first, as Collins established in his perennial work "Good to Great." The world has become increasingly complex and the skill sets required of managers and leaders for an organization to achieve greatness are becoming more unique and difficult to find. In order for a team to be successful its team members must have a rare set of competencies to deal with a global world. Without these talents, it does not matter how much trust a business instills in its team at a given time because attention to results will lead to attempts to hold people accountable for outcomes they cannot achieve - no matter how functional the group. Soon any temporary functionality will be undermined by failures that point to members' ineptitudes at execution or even vision because the world is changing faster than the team or important team members can comprehend: many team members are just not capable of it.
When assessing the matter of having relevant talent, one must understand that it is largely a function of the nature of the industry the organization operates in. It is why many organizations go "outside" their industries at some point when cataclysmic change ensues. Industries that have been more effected by the revolution, for example global retail clothing production which has been greatly impacted over the past decade by significant upheavals, possess a large number of individuals more experienced in rapid change and the deployment of proven cutting edge methods required of the new economy. Creating and utilizing network orchestration is but one example of what I would term as a cutting edge method and demonstrates a specific ability of "relevant talent". However, in industries that have to date avoided as significant an evolution, stakeholders, leaders and managers still remain whom are largely unscathed by the impact of changes in technologies, production methods, and many other pervasive new modes of competing. Many of these businesses leaders cannot even fathom the impact that awaits them. They are among the remaining dinosaurs waiting for their demise. Thus, there is not the degree of talent relevant to success in the new economy in these industries and until similar upheaval descends upon these businesses over time to punish those who have not been sharpening their swords, the depth of people available to navigate the challenges will be shallow. It is a cycle that has impacted many an industry over the past several decades.
The second challenge for leaders that was not addressed by Lencioni deals with the fundamental matter of stakeholder control and the realistic role of leaders to manage expectations of owners amid markets that are rapidly and unpredictably changing. The ultimate impact of this dynamic is that stakeholders behaviors do not align in many instances with the behaviors required to overcome the five dysfunctions themselves. Near term performance is not the appropriate measure when embracing the five dysfunctions, particularly when considering the first item above. Consider this: the average life cycle of an S&P 500 company today is less than 15 years. CEO's are routinely hired to address complex challenges as are other senior managers, only to be terminated within short order. In reality ownership, particularly among businesses that have experienced some modicum of success in legacy industries, often has unrealistic expectations based on past success and do not understand the relevant risks they truly face, at least not until they start losing significant market share, corresponding value and the results affect their pocketbook - often at that point its too late.
Past success is a stakeholders worse enemy and ultimately a leader cannot engage in behavior that builds trust organizationally when majority stakeholders give lip service to the long view while firing managers and leaders who do not deliver in the short term or pay their outdated strategies homage. It is the pervasive doom loop mentality which sits at the feet of many a shareholder and it is inherently contrary to building trust because the implication is that ownership knows better, despite their often being largely uninvolved and basing their thinking on long expired paradigms. It is the nature of humans to recall the glory days and conclude that challenges being experienced financially are the result of failure to do what was done before, a common misconception, leading to short cited conclusions and reactions. Recall that now days long past can be but a year ago. These businesses and their shareholders are grist for the revolutionary mill. Risking wealth or often times ego is just not worth it for them. However in the new world it is an opportunity for those who know better and this dynamic of the founder, owner or group of stakeholders separate and apart from the leader striving to advance a business organizationally is not effectively addressed in the book despite the ubiquity of the dynamic in many companies.
In conclusion, the five dysfunctions and the behaviors required to overcome them, while well developed in their conceptualization and valuable in their consideration, are an unrealistic methodology to apply without first more openly acknowledging that having the proper and relevant talent (think Collins Good to Great - People first) and second with ownership and stakeholders willing to be as trusting and aligned with Lencioni's principals along with the leadership they engage to enact it.
In Pink's book, A Whole New Mind, the author correctly identifies a series of trends and changes, many of which have been previously addressed here, that predict a shift from left brain to right brain humans being the source of advancing society in the coming years. The book explores the nature of personal fulfillment and humanity as well as shifts and the related revolution. An oustanding book where some of the concepts speak to organizational issues and trends regarding the nature of the consumer or member participant and how relationships with these players and various shifts in demography are creating radical change. Highly recommended is the 2004 Bentley College lectrures on Does Marketing Need Reform ?, which expertly reflects on these issues with well regarded philosophers versed on the topic. 
In a recent CNN Report, “Food Crisis, a Silent Tsunami” , Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations' World Food Program, claims bio-fuel promotion is unintentionally adding to skyrocketing world food prices and threatening to “ plunge more than 100 million people on every continent into hunger." Sheeran attended a Food summit hosted by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, aimed at determining ways to boost food supplies and identify deterrents as commodity inflation of the past year is contributing to increasing consumer food prices and a food crisis in unindustrialized countries. Yet the debate between fuel or food is really misplaced. As my friend Phillip Mills pointed out to me some time ago during the publishing of his and his better half's book "Fighting Globesity" Our method of industrial food production is at its roots inefficient, inextricably tied to fossil fuels as a base for its production and that is the real problem and basis of the challenge. How sad more people do not realize how untenable the unsustainable nature of the human food supply chain is.
The views expressed by an increasing number of well meaning educated people, like Sheehan, are an example of how broken the global and industrial food system is and illustrates the lack of understanding surrounding it. The method of industrial global crop production is unsustainable; therefore to incorporate the debate of rising cost of food with bio-fuel competition is akin to worrying about how the furniture on the deck of the Titanic is arranged. The global food system is very inefficient and dysfunctional. How we are processing energy for human consumption is vastly problematic and is why we are experiencing both large jumps in fossil fuel costs and food commodities at the same time. The reality is we use vast amounts of fossil fuels to grow soy, corn and wheat - the core components of the global industrial food system. Wether we use those crops to feed people or alternatively to grow "bio-fuel" is irrelevant in the long view simply because the manner in which global grop production is occuring is so damn inefficient.
As Pollan points out in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, “when you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry and transport the corn, you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow – or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn.” Simply put it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food. That is the real problem, which people like Sheeran, among others, fail to grasp. Even the surge in "organic" foods does not help - it costs over 70 calories of fuel to transport 1 calorie of organic lettuce from California to the central U.S. This does not even begin to address other side effects of our food system - the permeation of corn and its contribution to obesity and the adverse consequences of industrial farming to the environment are but a few of many other ill affects. As the world becomes more industrialized and developed the reality of the unsustainable nature of the system is exacerabted.
How can this change? How can we help avoid the situation where the industrialized world is becoming increasingly obese while one child is dying every five seconds from hunger-related causes? How can we reconcile that one of the most productive base of farms and a key food basket for the world, Iowa, is a food dessert that only produces feed grade corn and soy and must import 80% of what the population there consumes as food? While complex, the solution is truly basic. We must decentralize our food chain and make it sustainable as nature intended. We must go back to our roots. This relates directly to the revolution – our centralized modes of production do not work any longer. It will take more people making more informed and better choices to drive the change. Unfortunately, this requires that things break before they get better and many unfortunate will suffer the consequences of change.
In recent decades both central planning and the mechanical worldview that justified it have lost their practical and philosophical appeal because they increasingly do not work and our food supply is but one example. The emerging worldview, now becoming more widespread in business as well as in countless other fields, has replaced the mechanical, reductionist model with the organic and the relational. This is the basis of sustainability. Whether the subject of study is a living thing, a society of living things, or a corporate re-organization, the new focus is on the sum of inter-relationships of its members rather than the isolated members themselves. When the centralized industrial era segregated animals from crop production by replacing naturally occurring manure that nourished crops with petroleum based fertilizer and substituted grains grown on the farm to feed the livestock with subsidized corn in feedlots, we created short term gains while eroding rational systems, creating the unsustainable.
The new systems worldview accepts and respects the voluntary, natural order as well as the inborn character of its constituent components, whose natural interactions create that order, an order that is more durable and flexible than one imposed from the outside, no matter how many PhDs helped conceive it. The systems view teaches that all working systems succeed because they comprise smaller, self-organizing sub-systems that retain some degree of autonomy, which enables the overall system to remain adaptable and robust. This view not only restores respectability for the naturally occurring, traditional order, but philosophic legitimacy for local autonomy and decision-making. It is the foundation of the revolution both in how we live, and how we eat.
Copyright © 2021, Bryan K. O'Rourke. All rights reserved.
