Reframing Business

"I’m not a big fan generally of strategy books. I think there’s probably fewer than five good strategy books out there. But certainly, when people say ‘can you give me a book that’s good to read on strategy’ I recommend this, maybe also Good Strategy, Bad Strategy , maybe John Kay , that’s it. Richard Normann was a business consultant for a long time. This book sums up his life’s thinking. He was involved in futures work all through his career and had a very strong futures sensibility. What I liked about this book was it applies a lot of futures thinking and futures ideas in a slightly indirect way to the way businesses think about markets and the way they think about acting to make markets. It’s a fantastically rich read, he’s very broadly read, a huge fan of music – suddenly you’ll get a little music reference popping in. He has a relatively simple model of the big change shaping the business landscape. His way of putting it was really ugly, it was service-ification, e-ification, and experience-ification. Frankly, he could have probably done with Art Kleiner to edit that bit for him. But that idea that you’re seeing different forms of service, different forms of digital behaviour, and different forms of experience behaviour in markets is a simple way of thinking about how markets are changing. We’re fourteen years on from when he wrote it and those are still the three things which are really shaping the way in which people behave in markets. He also talks about the way in which businesses can use that understanding of big changes to re-make markets. So he talks about prime-movers who don’t just compete, they reshape the entire market so everybody else has to follow. Being Scandinvian, he’s a huge fan of Ikea. Ikea changed the economic relationship, they changed the place the thing got made, they changed the way it got put together, they changed the people who assemble the furniture – that effectively re-designed the entire market. He also talks about Ryder Services, an American logistics business. They were one of the first businesses to say, rather than just moving your stuff in trucks, we will manage your logistics business for you: embedding all of the logistics data into a new business which became a service business for logistics. He talks about Tetra Pak, the way that they effectively re-designed the carton to reshape milk distribution. It’s probably the best example of somebody who has taken a futures sensibility and applied it to the way in which businesses operate strategically. He has this model of the conceptual past – and why he says conceptual past rather than the past is obviously because the past is a construction – the present (which is arguably a construction as well) and the conceptual future. This three-by-three model has the ‘everyday discourse’ other futurists talk about, but it also has unconscious thinking and the official story: the consciously extracted domain. He talks about the way in which you need to understand all of those things. It’s quite cerebral. But it fits with quite a lot of other futures. There’s a wonderful model called ‘Causal Layered Analysis ‘, which talks about different layers of change, including metaphor, including world view, including systems. That sense that when we’re thinking about the world we’re not just thinking about it on one level we’re thinking about it on multiple levels and we need to be conscious of all of those levels is another futures model called ‘ Integral Futures ‘, which was developed in Australia by Richard Slaughter , based on the work of Ken Wilber , and one of its boxes is about the individual unconscious, which tends to get overlooked in futures work. I like this book because it’s quite demanding of the reader. It’s not an airport read. It’s a very dense book. But also it rewards the reader, it’s very rich, it’s got a lot of tools in it, it allows you to think about business and the way leading businesses behave in a different way from a lot of the everyday discourse about that, which is often associated with heroic chief executives. Corporate unconscious as well. Companies always have a corporate unconscious. If you think about corporate culture, the classic phrase about corporate culture is ‘the way we do things round here’. But what tends to sit behind ‘the way we do things round here’ is a set of assumptions which came from somewhere, but nobody really knows where any more. Art Kleiner keeps popping up, he’s written a fantastic book about the Core Group . Because this interview is about futures and not about business I didn’t put it on the list. What he talked about there was that quite often the core group in a business is not the people who you’d expect from the list, the people who end up influencing the way a business behaves may not always be people who work for the business, they may be people who used to work for the business. He doesn’t quite psychoanalyse the business there, but he certainly talks about the way in which the assumptions of the core group, the history of the core group, the views of the core group end up influencing the whole business in a way that people don’t often realise. That’s not quite an answer to your question but I certainly think it’s true that you can understand businesses at that – not necessarily psychoanalytical layer, but certainly at a psychological layer: in the way they think and the way they behave and the way they act."