They win.

A recent study quoted by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker in May 2009 says that when underdogs acknowledge their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy, they are likely to win, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”

A mix of innovation, boldness and irreverence, particularly when applied to a self serving industry like recruitment, are set to be the winning ingredients behind the unconventional business model of Playfair & Noble (www.playfairandnoble.com), a ground breaking company which embraces the spirit of Web 2.0, allowing employers and professionals to communicate directly and discreetly, without the interference and prohibitive costs of traditional recruitment agencies.

The founder Alex Crovetti, an Edinburgh-based entrepreneur who after several years of project management ~ his last project was the city’s £30m flagship Missoni Hotel ~ has switched professions, feels so strongly that the present agency-driven system has become outmoded that he has launched Playfair & Noble.

“The present system has led to a growing dissatisfaction amongst employers and employees. There is an urgent need for a more transparent and rewarding recruitment service that provides substantial cost savings and facilitates communication.  It must be stressed that P&N is not a recruitment agency and it is not a social networking site either”.

Employers can post all their job adverts and view CVs for free.  If an employer is not looking for people they can still use the website to showcase their company, completely free of charge. By registering, an employer is under no fee obligation until the company hires a professional.

Further, whilst traditional recruitment agencies charge employers in the region of 25% of a professional’s first year salary, Playfair & Noble only charge 7% and share half of the fee with the professional who finds a job through the website; the system also rewards referrers with 10% of the fee.  Alex says: “We feel that such a fees system is fair play for all parties involved, a sentiment echoed by employers and professionals alike”.

Crucially, from an ethical point of view, privacy and discretion remain of paramount concern, prompting P&N to introduce a system with controlled visibility.  CVs are only made available to registered employers; recruitment agencies are not allowed to register with the website; and in addition professionals can control who views their CV, for example by blocking their current employer.

“P&N empowers all involved by giving them the freedom to speak to each other. This represents a fundamental value that the recruitment industry, acting as a self-serving entity, has prevented.”

Furthermore, if a professional does not complete the probationary period, P&N refunds 100 per cent of the fee. It will never spam job seekers with e-mails or bombard employers with CVs, advertise phantom jobs or cold call prospective professionals.

Also, everyone can earn rewards if they refer professionals or employers to the website, and one method of achieving this is by leveraging social networks like Facebook and Linkedin.

Although they only launched this summer, established organisations are already supporting the P&N’s model and are on board. “We are being recommended from firm to firm and in order to succeed the common objective is to have the key players, in all sectors, registered.  This is happening”.

The global financial collapse is not just about the failure of the invisible hand of the market (à la Adam Smith) but the end of the road for the technocratic model of management. Changing the rules, or even organizing another committee to add a little bit of regulation here and there, will not change the fact the business world is between a rock and a hard place. And doing more of the same even better than before, will not work.

All bets are off as the $700bn loan, err, gift, err don’t ask questions is now seen politically as “socialism for the rich” in the US (see the hilarious Jon Stewart on the daily Show). And as the rest of the world looks to support the collapse of the global banking system then these strategies seem more like a PR announcement from the chief executives of Alice in Wonderland inc. and Groundhog Day Industries. Nobody seems to know which way is up, everybody is going round in circles, and real leadership, leadership through ideas seems to have gone missing in action.

Right now we stand at the threshold of a paradigm change. And real change, world change comes about from lived ideas, not optimization. The business world must surrender its dominant model of management which confuses man and machine. Human dreams, feelings, thoughts, experiences cannot be irreducibly reduced to figures. The meltdown of the global financial institutions and their “tyranny of numbers” offers a window of opportunity for the business world to make a step change and embrace leadership with ideas, real ideas that require courage and endeavor to grow human potential.

Strategic innovation is not about cutting costs, or lean work processes… or any of that mumbo jumbo language so favored by large consultancies singularly bereft of ideas and born with a DNA in which everybody avoids risk or real responsibility. Changing the game is about courage, it is about individual responsibility, IT IS ABOUT TAKING RISKS, it is about Noble Leadership, Noble Business, which puts human values, human rights, the world we live in  before the buck and sees value propositions not in $$ terms but in shared meaning :)))) and human experience.

These two attached quadrants show four questions of strategic importance. They reveal the real truth behind organizational innovation and collaboration. These questions show that game changing ideas cannot be subsumed under technocratic camouflage which skillfully avoids real innovation. I am sorry but changing the title of Quality Director to innovation director only leads to discovering new and imaginative ways of cutting costs whose proposals we see littering billboards in most major airports. Innovation has been reduced to a mechanistic structure akin to the re-organization models of the 90’s, swop a few names, change a few titles, pepper your speeches with the latest lingo and Bob’s your Uncle we have the new fashion of the business of “innovation” which ensures you do nothing new.

You see questions, real questions are anathema to business executives because this means that you have to think, and thinking is not something they are paid for, they are paid for doing. And you see the business of management is the business of being right and doing the right thing[i] while the business of innovation is discovering the right question and through trial and error discovering new things. Noble leadership is about helping, encouraging and fighting with the organizational emotional gravity, the learned incapacity[ii], which keeps people circling the status quo.

Noble leadership begins with ideas, ideas which move the human heart, ideas which help people step in the direction of change and transformation. Sharing these ideas, prototyping, testing, failing and their co creation through collaboration is the platform for innovation. The new social technologies provide the framework from which collaborative experiments can begin and find traction and avoid the hierarchical controls of vertical organizations. It is funny but in a recent telephone conference with a top VP of innovation at a consulting firm he constantly missed the point of our reference to “horizontal collaboration” and kept being drawn back to the concept of flat organizations. He said that there are inefficiencies in flat organizations. Not what we meant. We mean the horizontal digital revolution out there, which your kids are playing in, listening to and growing. Man, tell that to the music and video businesses executives who are still struggling with an online revolution that is still killing their business model. It gets worse, when asked to define what “thinking out of the box” meant he said that they don’t use that phrase because nobody knows what it means and ended the conversation on trying to keep things in “frames…  but this is not the same as boxes.”

Thinking in boxes is the root cause of our problems. And because we pay scant attention to the fact that our experience is organized into emotional pre established patterns… words, labels, duh, hence boxes we remain locked in experience by the power of these boxes. It is simple, if you think in straight lines well you are going to keep going round in circles. The technocratic model is about “business at the speed of thought”[iii]… this is the mantra of the knowledge economy, get it right, get it quick. Bada-bum. Well the Lotus economy is about business in the space between thoughts. You what. Yep. Between thoughts. Now this is going to come as a bit of shock to you people who have been living six feet away from your body and mind. But yes, you can observe experience. And yes there are different levels of skill involved. And yes it hurts. Finding that space between your thoughts is the personal journey of leadership to create and foster new ideas, to create, to live, to find meaning. It is the whole of the artistic endeavor writ large and then some. It is not about attending a two day workshop at Art school. It is about turning Art and life into one as the co creation of your life and dream. It’s the real work. The real day job. And the power of the real day job, the job of dream making, is that we can transform the other world of work and change the world.

Our technocratic model of management recognizes the need for creative thinking and new ways of releasing and deploying imagination but it doesn’t have a philosophical basis which includes personal experience. Technocratic management structures are held together by bureaucratic process and supported by data driven technologies that turn the wheel of productivity. People are numbers, subject to market forces, to which they keep getting released to. Hehe. That’s the economist’s definition of freedom. You got released to the market. You got fired. The whole job of management is to be more productive and then as if by magic all problems will be solved.

Copying Web 2.0 technologies will not help your business drive innovation because Social technologies are not data driven; they are emotionally fuelled by human beings not bloody machines. Just using Facebook or Youtube or any of those will not guarantee you success, you have to have ideas… great ideas, huge ideas.

And to those business schools who still don’t get it… human good and ethics and emotion and learning and transformation are the products of tomorrow not a sideline for executives busy getting rich and then doing a bit of good… to keep you in good stead with your conscious and “him” upstairs.

Those consumer groups who are hunting the “bucks before health” global pharmaceuticals, bucks before nourishment, food companies… and the sickening thing is this list is endless, had better be aware that this is just the tip of the iceberg as people really realize just how empowered they are and the power they can wield.  Somehow the technocratic mindset has fused the brains of the world of politics and business in that they see ethics as just a subject of PR, a utilitarian mindset, which puts pragmatism before philosophy. In truth the word value in business parlance is inseparable from dollar benefits and human ethics. One of the most Kafkaesque business statements ever has got to be we are a “value driven business”. It gives new meaning to the principles of double-think. Human ethics cannot be reduced to economics. Business executives need a wakeup call. They just cannot see that their rational business model is destroying lives. Just check out the history of the tobacco industry and oil industry then scan how the business world deals with their products and people and their environment.

The business world needs to wake up because young people will seek change, and when you harness their need for change and the change that is needed in the world with computer power and networking capabilities greater at home than in the work office then standby. Normal service will not resume. You haven’t seen anything yet.

Imagine. If one young man can come out of Burma horrified by the brutal government reaction to the saffron revolution of the monks and nuns and within six months of setting up a Facebook page have half a million members, protests self-organized in a very major city of the world, 30 odd Noble prize winners, and Gordon Brown, prime minister UK writing a keynote address… then the door lies open to a whole range of possibilities. Barak Obama is a Presidential candidate whose appeal is emotionally based on hope and the need for change, individual responsibility and a fostering of new relationships in the world and at home. His campaign is one of the first in the history of presidential campaigns to make such use of online technologies strategically and driven by the young people in his campaign offices which has given him such a superiority in connecting with people, securing funds and donations via individuals and driving an unsurpassed supporter base.

So will the real leaders please stand up! You know the ones with ideas and passion. The ones who have been excluded by business schools that churn out bureaucratic clones whose only concept of adventure is scaling the heights of organization charts. The ones in the business schools who want to get a life. The ones in the world of business who haven’t lost touch with day dreaming. Because the world of business needs you, and your ideas, and your passion and drive, and willingness to have a go. The world of business needs leaders with ideas who can think and act without frontiers. Change the world of business; change the business of the world. Roll on the Lotus Economy please.

[i] Kevin Roberts Saatchi and Saatchi

[ii] Karl Albrecht, Intelligent Organisations
[iii]Bill Gates, Business at the Speed of thought

unfrozenmind new brochure launched….

Please click on the posting and then click on the link to see the interactive pages…

have fun lets us know what you think…

The landscape of organisational and leadership development is being radically transformed by three major trends: The first, “Globalisation”, has opened the doors to new markets, new revenues and new growth opportunities. But it has brought in its wake a level of complexity both on a micro scale (dealing with the tactical and operational processes and decisions that make the business more efficient and effective) and on a macro scale dealing with the socio-political context of your business- that places Talent development and Organisational Design in the forefront of developing competitive advantage.

Whilst globalisation is a word that may seem to have lost some of its currency in business executives circles, without a doubt your competitive advantage will be eroded or dented severely because of this major force. Having a “quality” driven organisation focused on getting things right is your entrance ticket into today’s marketplace, not the end result. The conclusion in business terms is that “The World is Flat” (i): the “bottom-line” has dropped out of externally-based business strategies. The concept of “economic value” has mutated in the marketplace from a quantitative measurement of success, to a qualitative hierarchy of ideas. This transition from economic value to economic creativity marks a paradigm shift from the “Box-Economy”, measured by the optimisation of moving boxes, thinking in boxes, putting people in boxes and exchanging boxes, to the “Ideas-Economy”. “Quality” has morphed from a technical and mechanical emphasis to a subjective one. It is the qualities of your people in driving creativity, innovation, communication, and collaboration that will transform your competitive advantage. (ii)

Technical and or numerical advantages will only have a limited life span in this context. Corporations seeking to out-manoeuvre each other by squeezing the last juice out of their supply chains have unknowingly become ensnared by the inherent fault-line of the digital information race.

As the information playing field becomes levelled out by the speed-trap of technology, “Business @ the speed of thought” paradoxically results in a technological “groundhog day”. Speed has now become commoditised, reducing “efficiency” and “effectiveness” to “table-stakes”(iii). Thinking in straight lines, digitally or otherwise, will keep you going round in circles.

The second trend is the move towards “Distributed Teams”, which refers to the way business teams are spread across the globe communicating and meeting virtually when the situation demands it. Hierarchical line management has been replaced by flexible project management structures whose characteristics are based on the fitness and relevance of skills. Power and positional leadership models are now replaced by situational leadership styles in which people step up or are chosen by the team on the basis of skills- such as planning, collaboration, communication and problem solving. Leadership skills are faced off against the “task” and as such may require different leaders for different projects and even multiple leaders within the same project.

These abilities and skills stand in stark contrast to the vertical machinery that holds most organisations together. As the driving force of business moves from marshalling numbers to innovation, central tenet of its pedagogy moves from the logic of control and management, to the logic of collaboration and situational leadership. The model of business has been transformed from a mechanical structure focused on optimising delivery, to a horizontal structure focused on collaborative breakthroughs and situational leadership.

The third trend is the virtualization of the worlds of B2B and B2C. The key forces driving Web 2.0 are about user-created content and experiences across collaborative networks. Social networking, 3D immersive environments and online role-playing games (MMORPG) are providing the examples and tools to enable business organisations transform their competitive advantage through collaboration. Leaders and organisations enmeshed in vertical managed cultures will find these changes both threatening and incomprehensible. Ask yourself the question, “How much experience have you of second-life, social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, Age of Conan and Eve?” The in-built cultural models of senior management thinking which decide what is right and wrong are being fundamentally challenged by experiences being driven by technology which digitally connects people across communities and cultures, transforming meaning and identity. Revolutions have been started using these technologies, from Burma to Columbia. US and French Presidential elections have seen parties and candidates supporting and connecting with people in ways previously considered impossible. Organisations like Shell, Michelin or IBM recognise that 3D immersive environments will transform their capacity to deliver new value models, new ways of doing business that transcend the traditional analytical models now in use.

Understanding, experiencing and gaming in these virtual worlds is a training ground for the senior management teams of today and the future.

i. Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat, FSG, 2005

ii. Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat, FSG, 2005; Tom Peters, Re Imagine, DK, 2003; Michael Newman, Creative Leaps, Wiley, 2003; Kevin Roberts, Love Marks, Powerhouse Books, 2004; W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy, HBS, 2006.

iii. Michael Newman, Creative Leaps, Wiley, 2003, see Kevin Roberts, CEO Saatchi & Saatchi, presentation on CD included with book.

“To its credit, the Catholic Church did formally acknowledge that it had badly mistreated Galileo Galilei, and that it had made a grave mistake when it forced him to recant, under threat of death, his belief that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. And it said so in a formal proclamation – in 1983.” (1)

An idea is by definition dangerous. It is dangerous because if it is worthy of its name it threatens the status quo. When new ideas are introduced into the board room or in fact any part of the organisation they are tried by the three principles of skilled unawareness: consensus, self-censure and compromise these are in turn held in place through fear, uncertainty and doubt, an emotional mechanism which hamstrings an organisation’s ability to function.

Skilled unawareness/Blind Emotion is the emotional matrix of afflictive emotions which holds Blind Vision in place. What we discover is that any information, conversation or action which threatens the status quo is ejected both privately in our own mental decision-making processes and socially in group/team processes. This is what Aries de Guess calls the organisation’s auto immune system.

The organisation rejects new information and skilfully seals it-self back up in its protective cocoon of convergence. It is also very important to understand that skilled unawareness/Blind Emotion runs across an organisation’s network of clients, advisors, and key stakeholders. This means that the generally accepted rules that define successful outcomes across Strategy, Communication and Performance are channelled into a set of internal tramlines that lead to commoditisation. The organisation’s collective awareness operates on blind, skilfully maintaining convergent thinking and emotions, whilst convinced that their strategic intention is otherwise.

Good management and good communication are bad for business. Designing Emotion, that is transforming this learned incapacity, the emotional and cognitive pre-established patterns that keep organisations and individuals in orbit around the status quo, is a pre requisite for creating great ideas.

1) Karl Albrecht, The Power of Minds at Work, Organisations Intelligence in action, Amacom, 2003 p125.