RIP?

As ‘pink’ papers go, the Financial Times is a jolly good read. It often seems to me that the FT has the right mix of news and views, a pretty global worldview, good reporting, inspired editing and stories that go beyond business and the obvious — all laced with a dash of British humour. Quite a potent and appealing combination.

FT.com’s management section is something I enjoy going back to pretty often and the FT management blog had become a daily read. What makes the FT stand out is pretty much what made the management blog worth visiting too. It was especially useful as an aggregator of management news, with links to interesting management-related stories from around the Web.

So it was pretty disappointing to read that the management blog is downing its shutters. It’s not very clear why the FT pulled the plug on the management blog. While the last post talks about “doing more with less” it also hints about a resurrection — something to look forward to. For now though, there’s one treat less in my daily buffet.

Innovations that will reshape business

Trend spotting can be tricky. Just think about all those predictions a few years ago that people, especially the Baby Boomers, would retire early and then enjoy the fruits of their labour for many years to come. And then along came the recession or slowdown or financial meltdown or whatever it was and suddenly, early retirement was no longer an option for many. In fact, for many Boomers retirement itself now seems a distant possibility.

So the new, post-recession mantra is ‘ postpone retirement and work longer’. Almost simultaneously, and perhaps inevitably, the idea of the ‘multi-generational’, ‘age diverse’ workplace, with each generation benefiting from the wisdom of the other(s) took on a life of its own.

Or consider all the talk from a few years ago about financial innovation, globalised financial systems and the supremacy of credit being the way to go. And then consider where all that innovation took the world.

So it’s pretty interesting to see that the Financial Times has got into the trend spotting act with this story on 10 innovations that will reshape business.

One instance of an innovation that could transform business over the next decade, the FT says, is the revolutionary discovery that “Greed isn’t as good as we thought”. Truly visionary!

While it will be great to see businesses renounce, or at least temper, the Gordon Gekko ‘greed is good’ philosophy, will this really happen. I wonder. While values such as passion and purpose drive entrepreneurship and business, the desire for profit is, arguably, what fuels corporates. So while the single-minded pursuit of profit may be diluted with values such as responsibility and a sense of purpose, corporate greed won’t simply disappear.

The FT piece also talks about how people will have to ‘work longer, work older’, with more people in the 50s and 60s choosing to turn entrepreneurs. This innovation will in all probability throw up demographic and social impacts that will need some serious thought from communities and governments the world over.

One possible impact of the ‘work longer, work older’ movement could be in the workplace, especially given another innovation that the FT article talks about: ‘Generation Xers come into their own’. How businesses handle a multi-generation workplace, with a mix of Gen Xs, Gen Ys and Baby Boomers will determine the contours of corporate life. Especially interesting will be corporate efforts to find a balance between the leadership aspirations of the Generation Xs and the Boomers who are hanging on to the reins of power.

What really makes me go hmm… is the assertion that trial and error could become a legitimate business technique! Equally odd is the declaration that governments, companies and individuals should “roll up for some risky business”. ‘Innovative’ financial products structured around risk, it seems, aren’t going away any time soon, their perceived role in the global financial meltdown notwithstanding. But then as the FT piece points out, according to Robert Schiller, professor of economics at Yale University, the credit crisis merely shows that “much more work needs to be done to democratise finance. The crisis occurred because the principles of financial risk management were not being applied to the widest possible population.” I do wonder where this innovation is going to take business?

In all fairness though, the FT piece also talks about a couple of innovations that are truly innovative. One is the, move towards smarter energy use and management. The other focuses on the changes that are spreading through the world of shopping; for instance, the move towards creating pick-up locations for goods ordered online. An option that is likely to be a hit with shoppers who are time-starved.

Now some of the innovations the FT piece talks about, are ideas that have been floating around for a while. So they really aren’t new. Yet, it will be interesting to see just how much they reshape business over the next few years.

Business lessons from The Dead

Practitioners of the art of management have often found inspiration in the most unlikely places.

Sport and the military have, quite unsurprisingly, been major sources of inspiration for management best practices. For instance, some time last year IMD hosted Usain Bolt the Jamaican sprinter who won a gold at the Beijing Olympics. During the discussion, Bolt offered his b-school audience thoughts on success, motivation and standards.

Equally interesting is that India's film industry has provided food for thought to managers and business thinkers. Almost a decade ago, the Hindi film Lagaan created a buzz, not just for its entertainment value but also for the management lessons it offered. In fact, Totus Consulting — a company based in Chennai, India — did some qualitative research on the management lessons the film had to offer.

And now the news that there are business lessons to be learnt from the band the Grateful Dead. According to a piece in The Atlantic magazine, the Grateful Dead Archive is scheduled to open soon at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

While the archive is expected to be a treasure trove for academics of all hues, the biggest beneficiaries may perhaps be business scholars and management theorists, the article states. This is because management thinkers are finding that The Dead were business visionaries who focused on things like creating customer value, promoting social networking and strategic business planning long before the corporate world warmed-up to these practices.

The Dead, for instance, focused very intensely on its most loyal fans or ‘customers’. “It established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the house, and capped the price of tickets, which the band distributed through its own mail-order house,” the piece in The Atlantic points out.

Similarly, The Dead also had a Board of Directors, with the CEO’s position rotating, and set up a profitable merchandising division. The band even allowed fans to tape shows for free, based on the “assessment that tape sharing would widen their audience, a ban would be unenforceable and anyone inclined to tape a show would probably spend money elsewhere, such as on merchandise or tickets,” the article adds. A forerunner of the ‘give it all away free’ Internet business model, perhaps?

It appears, in fact, that John Perry Barlow, The Dead’s lyricist, had it all figured out over a decade-and-a-half ago. In a piece in Wired in 1994, he suggested that in the information economy “the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away."

So do sport, music, art and literature have lessons for management? Perhaps; just as management may have lessons for sport, music, literature and art!

PS: I also suspect that business thinkers and managers will soon look to the Hindi film Three Idiots for nuggets on the art and science of management!

SATTE thoughts

Speaking at the responsible tourism workshops at SATTE 2010 was, to use a cliché, like preaching to the converted. For most, if not all, the people who attended believe that ‘responsibility’ is the future of tourism and travel. Yet, the deliberations of all three panels and the discussions that followed re-emphasised the conviction that responsible tourism or responsible travel is the way to go.

The workshops also drove home the point that responsibility can be profitable; that businesses can be responsible and also make money. This assertion was the thread that ran through the segment on ‘responsibility and profitability’. What I do wish, though, is that this segment had featured someone from cgh Earth, which went the responsible way many moons ago — perhaps even before ‘responsible’ had entered the business and tourism lexicon, especially in India. For each time I hear the cgh story, I learn something new about how responsible businesses can also be successful businesses.

At the end of the day though, responsible tourism is about each one of us taking responsibility for our actions. We simply cannot outsource responsibility. Not a new idea, but nevertheless one worth thinking about, internalising and practising.