The Living Company

"I like this book for several reasons: it’s very short, so when people come into the Futures Company and say ‘what should I read to get a flavour of futures work?’ I tell them to read this. While it’s written by Arie de Geus, Art Kleiner – who’s probably the best business writer in the world – worked on it. So it’s fantastically cleanly written. He links a futures sense of the wider world with a sense of learning and very humane psychological models about the purpose of the business. It has this very open model of change. One of the things he talks about is a famous paper by David Ingvar, where he talks about the fact that we’ve always got images of the future in our heads. That might be something quite trivial like, ‘I’m going to a meeting later on and I’ll need to get the Tube or the Metro or whatever’, to something much larger, like ‘if that happens, I’ll have to react like that’. He talks about how you create that awareness of change inside a business, how you get that sense of reading the newspapers differently. The real value of this book is it links that sense of a wider system – a wider view of the world – with how organisations learn. There’s a lot of stuff around how organisations learn in here, which is a really valuable connection between futures and learning, and then how they respond in a way that admits to some humility. I think mostly it’s about acknowledging their limits. De Geus was quite a senior Shell executive, he ran the Brazil organisation, he ran parts of Africa for a time before he went into learning and planning. There’s quite a long discussion in here about why they didn’t pull out of South Africa, when they were under pressure to divest from South Africa. He talks about that in the context of a meeting in Angola, where they did pull out. In one of the private conversations the most senior person in the Marxist government said ‘you were a bunch of cowards, you ran away, and once you’d gone everybody else went as well, and you should have stayed.’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And then he tells a story about – this is the learning thing – how in Ethiopia when a Marxist regime came to power, because of the Angola experience they decided to stay. It was quite risky being an employee of a Western-owned business in Ethiopia in the revolution. The red committees would take people away, so they effectively told the head of their unit in Shell: if someone didn’t show up to work find out what’s happened to them, if they’re still not there at lunchtime go and talk to the government and say ‘if we don’t have our employee back by the end of the day, we’re going to turn the oil off’. Quite a high-stakes game. Where that led Shell is that when a group of South African businesses approached and said, ‘We want to do some scenarios for post-Apartheid Africa,’ Shell seconded one of their scenario team to go and run some scenarios, which effectively created a set of stories for possible futures for South Africa, with members of different ethnic groups, different political groups and white business people – nobody from the government. Although there’s a bit of mythology about those scenarios, the Mont Fleur scenarios, I think it’s probably fair to say that they did influence the way in which the ANC thought about the transition, because there was a set of shared stories about failed transitions and successful transitions which had come out of that week-long scenarios process."