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

“You must be the change you wish to in the world”, is a quote from Gandhi used as a banner headline by business professionals and NGO’s to show the fundamental characteristics required of top leaders.[i] Yet I would argue that it is misunderstood and used widely without analysis and forethought.

Our current scientific models have excluded subjectivity as a domain open to the scientific method, and our world of experience is seen to only to have its origination in the external environment. Science has little to say about what it means to be human.[ii] So when people read Gandhi’s message they focus on delivering external change and changing the external environment to improve the lot of the world and avoid the real premise of his invitation to start the journey of all journeys, which to examine who you are. And in a business world where human imagination and human potential are the foundation of competitive advantage then I would suggest that the business world needs to put the mind back in business.[iii] Because not doing so could put you, us and the world out of business.

At the heart of Gandhi’s message is a call, an invitation to deeply examine the nature of your internal experience, your dreams, your aspirations and the world we live in. And yet through what lens do we do this? Time after time we miss this internal turning and follow the highways and byways of groupthink which maintain us in a state of “learned incapacity.”[iv]

One way in which to unpack Gandhi’s message is through the use of a story. Clarisa Pinkola Estes the Jungian analyst and Cantadora (keeper of stories) uses stories to unlock and explore internal landscapes. So though the story takes place on an external plane… the first task is to move it to an internal plane and through a Socratic process of questioning, map the story to your world of experience, to how you think, talk and act. And it is through using each character and interaction within the story as an internal symbol or archetype that you can uncover human truths and human insights.

The Lost Keys is a famous story and appears in many different places and cultures. And it is a story that reveals and unravels the principles embedded in Gandhi’s message.

The Lost Keys
It is night, and a passer-by is walking down a lamp lit street.
He stops at a lamppost, where he sees someone crawling about on the floor looking for something. He asks:  “have you lost something? Is there anything I can do to help?” “I have lost my keys,” replies the person. “Where were you when you last had them?” “I was over there,” says the man, pointing over into the darkness beyond the lamppost. “So why are you looking over here?” asks the puzzled passer-by. “Because it’s light over here.”

The first thing to do is fix the story internally. So who is the “passer-by” and who is the person “crawling” on the floor?  When personal disaster strikes us, illness, relationship, work, loss, regret they can put us in a position where we feel like we have been cut in two. The emotional intensity breaks the bubble of ordinary life and allows for a sincere moment of reflection.

Here the passerby can be seen as the archetype protector of your mind and the person crawling about is the “you”, the subject that is experiencing the crap and looking frantically for an answer, a way out, a solution to the intensity of the pain and desperation. You are observing you. Some writers say these moments are to be treasured because they are like internal calling cards, a wake-up call if you will to see the opportunity for real change. I have to say that it requires courage to do that. To transform suffering into golden opportunity requires you to really seek out the nature and origination of the pain. So the next question is what have you lost? You have lost your keys and you are knowingly looking for them in a place where you didn’t lose them. Confusing.  Paradoxical.  You bet. It is meant to be.

Light and darkness are metaphors for what? Well light can mean good and darkness bad. But that is a bit easy. It still doesn’t get to the heart of the paradox. Why are you looking for something in a place where you didn’t lose them because it’s easier to look in the light? Right? It is nuts.

Light can be seen from another perspective. Here light can be  a metaphor for status quo, comfort zone the place where you can hide from yourself.

So what is the dark? Bad. Evil. No. It is our fear. Our fear of what?  Our fear that haunts our daily life. Our fear of being different, of making mistakes, of getting it wrong, of being wrong, of not making it, of being rejected, of being excluded, of being embarrassed, of not knowing enough, of knowing too little… In organizational culture fear, uncertainty and doubt are the forces of emotional blackmail which bloat into “group-think”. And we can see that from the Bay of Pigs, to Enron, to the current set of Wall Street disasters, from the particular to the general these examples demonstrate that staying in the light is where it is safe, where it is comfortable. In fact, one of the major rules of groupthink is to reject any information that may threaten your first principles, like how got here in the first place.

Chris Argyris, in his seminal work on skilled unawareness and the Left hand page exercise described the process of how business executives get really good at remaining skillfully unaware of reality, while all the time thinking that what they are doing is in fact the opposite.

In the Left hand page experiment you think of a major problem that you face at work, or at home and then having split a piece of paper in two and marking  one side a. and one side b. On side b. you write down what you said and the other person’s responses to what you said rather like a film script. And having completed this you then go back and write down your unsaid thoughts and feelings on side a. alongside what you actually said.

Boy does that open a can of worms; people don’t really say what they feel. There are three principles of communication at work that maintain skilled unawareness, consensus, self-censure and self compromise. What does this mean?  It means that where possible we get everybody to think the same, agree the same, talk the same, and so as a result no one genuinely thinks, or talks or acts.

This is the world of the light, where  Groundhog Day meets Alice in Wonderland, where everybody is skillfully not looking, while all the time looking in the wrong place while everyone thinks that they are looking because to really think, talk and act is to confront the  land of the dark, where fear, uncertainty and doubt reign.  And we don’t want to go there. Too much like hard work. So we maintain a schedule of active laziness, draw dropping busyness that ensures we never stay still long enough to “turn around to face ourselves” (à la Dave Bowie)

Earlier this week I was with two top advertising professionals who told me how careful they must be in talking about organizational innovation and strategy with their top directors. Because if they really told them what they felt and thought they would get sacked. Their ideas would be considered heretical so they must be re packaged, deconstructed so that it in its newly emasculated form they can continue on with business as usual. In another example they pointed to a presentation on new technologies that they give to clients, which mapped out new technologies such as RSS, Wordpress and Twitter, and they said that not one of the executives in hundreds of presentation could explain what these technologies do. And yet these very technologies are the disruptive technologies which will change their business future. It reminds me of the highly successful typewriter company in the USA called SCM who in the late 90’s were still making typewriters with no plans to diversify or change. Karl Albrecht, in his book The Power of Minds at Work, wonders what the conversation must have been like at SCM corporate HQ as they discussed those new fangled devices being created by Gates and Jobs, Microsoft and Apple respectively.

So what is it you’re looking for, okay  a “key”?  Well what do keys do? They open things… what sort of things, well boxes, windows and doors. Right.  Well what could the archetype for key be here. Well it could be a question. And not just any question, but a question of vital importance. Well then what type of opening, what type of door could the key open. Well there was once a time when the only doors that could be found were the doors to funeral mounds. Well the key could be the question “who am I” and that by using this key to open the door of death then, then a real journey of self-discovery can begin. Tough huh. Not easy stuff. Well it doesn’t get better.

Imagine yourself dying, really dying, dying in the next two minutes, and then as your life ebbs away ask yourself what did you regret not being, what did you regret not doing with your life? For Clarisa in the story of the skeleton woman true human potential cannot unfold unless you have made love to the skeleton woman. Made love to death. The objective in facing death is to face the king of all fears and in doing so, in mastering death, then you master fear. Most martial arts hold this as their sacred truth that the real enemy to be defeated is yourself and that the path the “Do” is by facing and defeating death. And then you are alive again. Breathing. Living. Kicking. How would you live your life now? What North Star would you now follow? Would you go back to the old self? Well some do and are forever bitter and disappointed.

You will discover that opening the door to death and asking the question who am I, cuts the umbilical cord which fastens us to skillful unawareness. That death, the question of death, and the question of who am I, when joined in our minds unravels our habitual modes of thinking and talking and reveals a wholly different landscape of potential and fulfillment. When you meet people who travel this path then you just know where they are coming from. Your internal radar tells you whether you are facing an authentic human being, ready to live their mistakes in the full glare of life, or whether they are playing with masks and trigger your bullshit detector..

Gandhi’s call to connect being and change has to be seen in the context a journey of self-investigation from which the iron clad habits of indifference and selfishness - our groundhog day - are shed by rediscovering genuine thought, speech and action. “You must be…” means that right now, right here we are not being, being what, being ourselves. Moving from skilled unawareness to skilled awareness means to change your orientation to the world and a fundamental re-orientation of the values by which you live your life. It is about moving from consensus, to learning to be different, from self compromise, to living your dream, from self censure to a refusal to accept a distorted truth masquerading as practical reality. “You must be the change you wish to see in the world” comes from a man who transformed himself from a timid colonial lawyer to someone who embodied the highest values of human life and changed the course of history. Gandhi’s message is a call to affect a personal revolution, an everyday individual heresy, a call to create real change, huge change, world change. The business challenge of the future is to move from a naïve model of economic determinism from which freedoms trickle down, to a model of organizational change that actually frees human beings from learned incapacity and co-create their futures and design legends.

Tom Peter (Re-imagine) has often used this quote in his slides as have many others… just Google it.
“If we examine the current situation today, with the exception of a few largely academic discussions cognitive science has had virtually nothing to say about what it means to be human in everyday, lived situation”, Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson & Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: cognitive science and human experience, MIT Press, 1993, p.15.