New Model of Business Leadership
“ This is business, not personal!! ”
How many of us have heard this at work? It is as if we are expected to set aside our real being and put on our business persona when we enter through the corporate door. For that matter, how many of us ever talk of being in the workplace? Instead, almost all models of business leadership are typically about doing and having, that is, what should business leaders do in terms of actions and have in terms of capabilities to succeed? Yet these conventional models of leadership are failing us now as we careen from one global crisis to another.
We are at a turning point in our history, as our science and instincts tell us. What we do in the next twenty years in business will determine our future way of life, our children’s heritage, and the fate of many species on Earth. It is hard to imagine that for our entire history until the 1800s, a person could expect to live for less than thirty years on average (while now that number is seventy). Indeed, for much of human history, our lives were “poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” in the philosopher Hobbes’s memorable phrase.
Capitalism and business (by which I mean modern industrial and services corporations) enabled the large-scale production of goods and services that lifted entire countries out of this misery in just two centuries. As a result, global per capita income increased tenfold between 1800 and today, with a hundredfold increase in America alone. All this progress was achieved despite the world’s population increasing sevenfold, rising from 1 billion to 7 billion, in the same period. It is an economic achievement without parallel in the history of the world.
Yet this growth in human prosperity has come at a great cost to the larger context that is foundational to business, such as nature, humanity, and the credibility of the economic institutions of capitalism. Over twenty thousand children die every day from poverty, hunger, preventable diseases, and related causes. The vast majority of the 100 million people who are expected to die by 2030 from pollution, hunger, disease, and natural disasters if the world does not act fast on climate change will be the world’s poor.
Yet these statistics have done little to fundamentally change business. Even worse, they seem to have numbed the public. Here’s another statistic as proof: in a survey of twenty two thousand people in twenty two countries, the percentage of people who thought ecological problems were “very serious” had dipped to its lowest in twenty years. We desperately need a different approach for making the case for change.
While people tune out as numbers foretell a dire future, narratives cling to the mind. We instinctively know what psychology research has concluded: real change happens not through the practices of the reason-driven mind, which rationalizes what we have already decided, but through the invisible routines of the emotion-driven mind, which is moved by the images that stories and other narratives evoke deeply.