The ECSM conference last week in London was a great hit. And so it should be with speakers like Michael Eisner of Disney and gurus Peter Senge and CK Prahalad. Nice to see someone going full out for quality of content rather than pandering to the sponsors.
One of the highlights for me was that CK, the “world’s premier strategy guru” talked about co-creation of business value and new virtual organisations being the powerful place to be. Having being delayed by British Rail I only know this because Phil Dourado intro’d my talk, on Amazon’s Skyline and WOCAS processes, by explaining how we in Budd and LimeBridge already did what CK was predicting. We created a global organisation of immense value to clients in the UK and overseas without traditional thinking or structures.
I really looked forward to seeing Peter Senge talk. His book ‘The Fifth Discipline” is the absolutely seminal work on systems thinking – thinking about the whole rather than 20th century management’s habit of breaking things into accountable pieces. Then wondering why the whole doesn’t work to customers satisfaction ie why dumb things happen. He created a language for explaining gut feel, for intuition, for delayed reaction and for personal performance.
“To measure is to fragment” was one of his mantras.
His plea was that “It’s all about the customer” is far too simple a statement. Its about everything if you are to be about the customer. He touched briefly on the importance of passion and purpose – the topic I spoke about later. In fact we should soon have some video clips from this talk on our passion, from the PPF event in Dublin a few weeks ago.
His major message was to foster 3 core learning capabilities to succeed in a world where complexity is acceptable :
Aspiration: personal mastery and shared vision
Reflective conversation: mental models and team learning
Understanding complexity: systems thinking
He did get a bit carried away on the world being at a tipping point, there being 40x more CO2 than at any time in the last half million years. It could be all about to end but heh don’t say he’s right til its over….. Luckily, as the saying goes ‘you can relax, the world’s not going to end today, its already tomorrow in Australia’
