Jonathan Wilson is a member of our advisory board and has been involved with Budd since its inception. He delivers executive coaching for Budd clients and is particularly interested in group behaviours and their impact on business and personal performance. Jonathan was involved in many start ups including Laker, Virgin Atlantic and City Airport.
I’d like to share his thoughts on “social business” and his views on the future of consulting.
“One of the many delights of of being part of this Board is the quality of the occasional dialogues.
As you note, Pete, richness and success (however we define those things) are very much about values. Like you, I feel that transparency, honesty and sharing are core values. They are core because they lead to very practical benefits themselves and because they are integral (whole in themselves). A practical benefit of transparency is that it enables awareness. A benefit of honesty is that it adds reliability to that awareness. Transparency and honesty interweave in that making things transparent which encourages honesty. The two together lead towards integrity. Sharing is vital because it is an intrinsic part of relationship building and sound relationships are life sustaining for people, organisations and communities.
Other key factors that grow relationships are trust, reciprocity, fairness, patience and pace. Many relationships grow (climb, spread, deepen) over time. A key piece of learning, that many people forget in the hurly-burly of ‘busyness’, is that relationships last longer and grow out of transactions. So a purpose of each transaction as well as hopefully adding value in itself, is first that it develops the relationship and second it develops the skill and abilities of the people involved to form more, better, relationships.
Business relationships & communities are a particular kind of relationship in which agents of the business are usually relating for a definable – usually financially quantifiable purpose – usually in a competitive environment in which there are other contenders both for value proposition and the relationship. This distinguishes them from some (not all) communities.
A few propositions have been suggested in the course of this dialogue that I think I see it a little differently. Tim writes elegantly about problems and opportunities in organisations. He writes “because they are complex, they have no accountability”. I agree-ish. I wonder if it is as much because they are complicated and opaque that they have little accountability. I might add that because few managers understand complexity, between them in their organisations they produce more and more complicated procedures to try to control the complex and uncontrollable. They quite quickly focus most of their energy on their complicated procedures and misleading key performance indicators and lose sight of the ‘real’ performance in front of them.
I wonder sometimes whether business organisations do anything except provide the context for people to relate in. They often provide a way for people to evade their responsibilities as in, “The organisation has decided…”. I wonder if organisations can decide or do anything? People decide and do things together in the name of their organisations and an art of leadership is growing and, as Tim says, nudging things along.
David [Jaffe] brings out the richness of the Board, agreeing and disagreeing with the core proposition. He notes the double challenge that most managers have produced for others. We are terrified that we may miss something important and we are overwhelmed by unendingly increasing torrents of information hitting us through more and more media. We know we are going to get soaked. Probably while trying to work out the make up of the Niagara Falls of our current data and while we don’t notice that we are being swept over the Victoria Falls of strategic change.
So what can we do? Much more to suggest but, Limebridge, Budd, you Pete and all our close colleagues share fractal, self-similar, scalable qualities. We can help people by using our experiences and our way of internalising and externalising those experiences to help managers/organisations to become more self-aware and thus in much greater ‘control’ or more powerful.
We can write and publish about that as David and Bill have done so well. Managers would like to think that they can learn for themselves and they can extensively or slowly. Our engagement and presence, our ability to ask the right question in the right way of the right people at the right time is the result of years of learning and experience. It looks much easier than it was to learn. That deludes people into thinking it easy.
So our, your, Budd’s, Limebridge’s, David’s, Tim’s rare if not unique, added value is authentic presence to help people learn how to do what seems much easier to do than it actually is.”
