Are You Concerned About The Future?

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”  Dr. Seuss

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: culture, ethics, responsibility, accountability and the future – Part I

Competencies: visionary leadership, political leadership, engenders trust, ethics, employee involvement, empowering others

Who benefits: everyone

Consultant Usage: every consultant, trainer, and leader should be setting the tone and driving the core competencies listed above through their organizations and with individual employees

What’s it about? Today is the first of a three part series. Let me set the table for today’s posting and the next two.  I have been corresponding with someone I will introduce to you in next week’s posting.  Our exchanges are about the future of the United States and the world.  Our focus is on culture, since it seems to drive everything else.

Countries have always faced big problems.  Today’s problems look even bigger, but that just may be because we are living through them in the present.  What is somewhat clearer is while we have the knowhow and technology to fix most of the problems ahead, we seem more likely to exacerbate these problems than find solutions. 

The reasons we fail to make progress can often be found in some generic but real defects.  First, there is an enormous gap between “information” and understanding.  In the last few decades for the first time ever we have information overload.  But much of the “information” isn’t trustworthy.  “Facts” are often created to propose or defend a position.  “Truth” is in the eyes of the sender.  Second, our national understanding of ethical behavior is on the slide, be it money in the fridge or sex on the side.  Third, we tend to only support change in those areas that don’t affect us personally.  Anyone today who stood up and proposed “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” would likely be mocked.

Is this Blog a proper forum for these issues?  I strongly hope so.  Envisa Learning is an organization that has identified competencies that make a difference in organizational effectiveness.  If you look again at the top of this posting you will see the competencies supported that apply to the topic I am proposing.  And who are you readers?  Many, if not a majority of you are practitioners in organizational or individual improvement areas, and many of the rest of you are leaders, managers, employees also interested in organizational improvement.

In a nutshell, folks like us are the ones who can push for the kind of change and changes that are necessary to alter the current mindsets that hold back organizations and even countries.  We can push ourselves and our organizations wherever we are to take a critical look at “Who are we?” and “What do we stand for?”

The great business guru Peter Drucker once reminded us that our focus should be on “Doing the right thing”, not “doing a thing right”.  Never have those words been truer.

Once, centuries ago when I first entered the field of training and development, there were vast amounts of time and energy being invested in fixing the problems of education systems.  In both government and private sectors I taught a lot of writing classes.  I hire specialists to help individuals and groups with their reading ability.  Same with math.

Now I submit that we are needed to do much the same with education within organizations to promote ethics, trustworthiness, real accountability, appropriate rewards for (real) work performed.  Our most crucial work will be done at the highest levels of the organization; but there much to be done at all levels.  Again, we must pick up where the education system left off.

Am I just a nutcase going off some crazy direction?  Well I will give you the possibility that I am a nutcase, but I am not alone.  The wakeup call has gone out to some of our most prestigious universities.  Here are but a few samples:

The Stanford Executive Program – Core Course: The Importance of Ethics in Business 

The Stanford Graduate School of Business and their European partner ESADE Business School: Corporate Social Responsibility: Strategic Integration and Competitiveness

USC Marshall Business School: Social and Business Ethics in Business

Michigan Ross School of Business incorporates ethics in its Senior Executive Program in Hong Kong  

Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship: Institute on Corporate Citizenship

Next week I want you to read directly from the words of a CEO who wrestles daily with the questions of culture, ethics, business standards, responsibility and accountability and his company’s quest to do the right thing and survive in the process.

Week after next, I want to summarize a new blockbuster book and the revolution regarding ethics that is coming out of Harvard and in particular, it’s MBA program.

Catch you later.

[tags]business standards, visionary leadership, political leadership, engenders trust, ethics, employee involvement, empowering others, corporate citizenship, organizational improvement, drucker, peter drucker,bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.