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Reign of Depth and Content - Toward Holacracy

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The world "has gone nuts" some critics say and the reign of confidence, implying behaviour that goes beyond a rational approach of decision making, indicates why in today's agendas we lose or obtain so much. To achieve success is no longer such a big fuss; you have to be internet addict, fast in typing, overwhelming in appetite, rigid in emotion, lazy in spirit and eager to learn new marketing tricks and voila, tomorrow you can be a bestselling success story, a new cyber millionaire! Young, pretty and rich. With or without content and depth.

Passion for life: why stories win

Nowadays, 'passion' is just a word with new references. If we dedicate our life to achievements we learn so much, especially when we have an open eye, warm heart and cool mind. Being an entrepreneur is probably the most challenging role we can choose; not just do we need to be confident, sometimes cocky, as well as rational, pragmatic and holistic, we ought to be psychic and predicting the future. Since business is all about this moment and its influence on the future, just ordinary knowledge won't do.

Passion for life is probably the motto of those who achieved admirable success, not just in numbers but also in impact. Life is all about what is not systemised or is just a little bit. It is more about joy, colours, meaning, happiness and willingness to feel good, to create and enjoy the fruits of endeavour. About random, not ruled. But, real business is so many times far from life! It is still generally considered unprofessional for economists to base their analysis on intuition, hope and ethics, i.e. 'stories'. We are supposed to stick to the facts, merely the facts based on optimisation of economic variables but we know the economy is much more than numbers. It is more about passion, stories and content. And what do stories really tell? They are inscriptions of subconscious values, expectations and desires, notions that drive the economy that we can see, investigate and measure.

Are we ready to observe the invisible but totally touchable? Are we ready to touch humane singularity? To see things as anthropologists do, unconventionally? We have to be ready - even if we are not.

To be successful in today's economy we have to understand how the human mind functions. We no longer have just rational, there is also the emotional and cyber economy, where stories play a crucial role. Full of adventures, passion and yes, probably picturesque facts, ballooned solutions and fairytale details, stories masterly intertwined with the core ideas they create. The Human being - and individual - is a creator of stories, especially in the "developed IT world", where objectivity is no longer as objective as it was and stories are crucial mechanisms of today's trade. Are we able to predict, see, smell and co-create future stories? We live in an era of virtual, spontaneous, hybrid, cyber, cyborg, spatial and optional - where we create more than we can imagine and manage. This is the reason why we have to constantly evolve, which is also the reason why we need to be ready!

In selling our knowledge we need to sell problems along with solutions, woven into the idea of the immediate future that we can imagine and manage. Management is the key and comprehending crypto language, subconscious codes of human behaviour and our influence on both, is crucial for tomorrow's opportunities and the future wellbeing of us all. 

Passion for business: why do we burnout?

Workaholics, visionaries, bravehearts and all great minds of passion do stumble and sometimes fall. What leaders and managers today are most afraid of is the increasing complexity as demonstrated above. This suggests that the more complex the environment, the more complex the management has to be. In pursuing the goal of collective happiness and satisfaction, managers and leaders have too great a burden and go down the long road of total exhaustion!

Leaders should, alongside business goals and corporate strategy, address the collective imagination of their people and create a collective identity bringing together four dimensions: body (healthy living), mind (smart decisions), heart (relationships) and spirit (contribution to the benefit of all) (Buytendijk, 2009: 55). Or, as we explain in Budnjani 4Q, we need to connect the rational mind (IQ), the emotional (EQ), spirit (SQ) and body (PQ). Stress erupts in our minds, hearts, and memories and at the subconscious level we cannot redirect the oppressed redundant energies that are a part of our collective behaviours, which is reason why we need paradigm shifts in the explanatory and solution phases. From job descriptions to managing roles we are playing; from visible to invisible subtle forms of authority that are distributed amongst teams and no longer allocated in the delegated vision of minority authority. 

Since social and economic realities are too complex to comprehend, we have to create models o what is optimal behaviour in given circumstances. We know that confidence is not just the emotional state of an individual, but a social state of co-reflection of other people's perceptions of other people's confidence. A holistic vision where we interconnect and evolve minimises collective stress and the loss of confidence that leads to stress and burnout syndromes. Now, with no passion, there is no gain, with no content there are no stories, just empty and shallow PR trying to create something of what died long ago. We have to take care of ourselves, take care of our businesses in our permanent quest for meaning, integrity and depth, leading to greatness of content and to sustain the impact for a new era - the future.
We simply cannot just relax as thinkers, mind and emotional workers which is what managers, entrepreneurs and leaders really are. We have to be addressed with hard core arguments to be able to open up to the subtle and spontaneous - this article attempts to address both.

Multicapitality or Budnjani 4Q connecting intelligences

The understanding of management has changed gradually: how we hire, promote and identify leaders, and allocate resources are the future challenges we must answer. Since we are in an economic shift from control towards creativity, skills and competencies vary. Not just consistency is needed; divergent creative process and thriving to achieve holacracy is what is crucial for "predicting" the future.

According to this, we propose introducing into the theory of management the concept of 'multicapitality' or connecting intelligences. This implies merging the various types of capital and not only financial gains. Financial capital has to be connected with spiritual, emotional and social in order to persevere and increase in value. We must realise that macro subsystems develop and change but that the pace of transition is nonlinear or even singular; it can be random or most likely spontaneous. Today it is technology that changes most rapidly, while social values lag behind. This gap creates socioeconomic divides that cause systemic problems and this is the crucial element of up-to-date factor analysis in management excellence for the 21st century and most of all, the reason why most appreciated companies hire sociologists and anthropologists and other people with a lot of expertise in human behaviour. 'Contemporary societies most of all need social leaders - people who can recognise the developing cultural and social needs and trends, and who are able to mobilise resources and social forces to create a better future' (Adizes in Schein 2011: 15). Some data suggests that even the most successful company managers only manage to mobilise 40 percent of their employees' potential. What a social manager needs is not just creativity, determination and the courage to take risks, as in the past. On the contrary, a manager needs values and the capacity to know right and wrong. Lessons from history demonstrate that financial systems are most vulnerable when they are not supported by all of the other social systems. This is the essence of multicapitality: bringing together financial, social, emotional and spiritual capital. What is more, the concept suggests gradation of capital, it presupposes that financial capital without the social and spiritual to back it up is essentially unstable or to put it differently, the underpinning of business success is not financial capital per se but rather it's merging with social and spiritual capital.

When passion for growth, content and depth are united, a new era of business approaches. We are in transition from an economy of products to an economy of insight, meaning and experience. As Gary Hamel says "I think we need an ideological revolution in business. The ideology for the last 100 years has been 'controlism', and the tangible form of that ideology was bureaucracy. As we move from the industrial economy through the service economy to the knowledge economy, and now the creative economy, the relative value of control as a source of competitive advantage is going down." As Perry Timms says, we need to reimagine careers and reinvent work - and Budnjani 4Q addresses both. We are shifting from the ideology of control to HE anthropology, business anthropology and eventually a collaborative economy.

References:

  • Akerlof, A.G., Shiller, J.B. (2009): Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology drives the Economy. And why it matters for Global Capitalism, Princeton University Press.
  • Buytendijk, F. (2009) Performance leadership: The next practices to motivate your people, align stakeholders, and lead your industry. New York: McGraw Hill.
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