egyii blog

Who’s missing in Davos this week? Sir Fred Goodwin, ex-CEO of RBS; John Thain, ex-CEO of Merrill Lynch; William Cayne, ex-CEO of ex-Bear Stearns; even Sam DiPiazza, CEO of PwC (who is in India looking into the fraud of B. Ramalinga Raju, CEO of Satyam). These and many other business titans represent the ‘old world’ of business, placed in the past tense by the economic crisis.

If we are to move into a ‘new world’ of business, we have to be able to see clearly. The old world of business focused on action and results which could be observed and measured. So long as people throughout the organisation took action that produced growth figures, it didn’t matter what was actually going on in their minds. As we now know, the kind of thinking that led to these actions and growth figures was an illusion. William Cayne was on the golf course while Bear Stearns burned. John Thain spent $1.2 million on re-decorating his office. And B. Ramalingam Raju was so envious of K.P.Singh staging India’s biggest IPO, the $2.5bn listing of DLF, the country’s largest property group, that instead of being happy with his outsourcing business, he immediately immersed himself in the property and infrastructure business, which led to disastrous financial results.

In order to see clearly in the new world of business, we need to go to the source of our emotions, behaviour and results: what is going on in our minds. Habitual thinking patterns, whether envy, grandiosity, acceptance or humility, lead directly to actions and decisions that create results. It is time for companies to put their people’s potential at the heart of business competitiveness, and in doing so show them how to get control of both their conscious and unconscious thinking.

In the old world of business, even suggesting that we focus on ‘the mind’ and ‘thoughts’ as means to produce business results would have met with derision and labels such as ‘airy fairy’, ‘psychobable’ and ‘effeminate’. There was no place for this in a culture reinforced by labels such as ‘macho’, ‘hard results’, and ‘tangible’.

Isn’t it time we grew up? Let’s start with a new set of leaders who understand the power of the mind and know how to harness it for the benefit of all stakeholders and society in general. Let’s then cascade their understandings and examples throughout our corporations so that in the new world of business people actually know what they are doing. Certainly, the hard business results couldn’t be any worse.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore