Book Reviewer: Kishore Menon
BOOK : NECESSARY ROVOLUTION
SUB TITLE : How individuals and organisations are working together to create a sustainable world
AUTHORS : Peter Senge, Bryan Smith, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur, Sara Schley
REMARK : Must read, If you want to see the big picture and interests in “Systems Thinking”
Peter Senge, Senior lecture at MIT Sloan School of management and founder of Society for Organisational Learning (SoL ), author of The Fifth Discipline, honoured as one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years by Harvard Business Review.
and this is the outcome.
Nike has reduced its “carbon foot print“ by more than 75 percent. This was not enforced upon them by any regulatory authorities. Looking for the truly innovative opportunities for the future, company declared to achieve zero waste, zero toxicity, and 100 percent recyclability across its entire product range by 2020.
Why ?
Industrial age bubble – “ Take – Make – Waste “, way of thinking which dominated the world for the last 200 years is coming to an end.
Climate change, natural resource crunch, rampant consumerism, widening economic divide are some of the social and environmental challenge which lies ahead of us, which also gives us the opportunity to change, for good. Transformative collaboration happening between businesses, governments, non- profit organisations are starting to bring about real, sustainable change.
We need to stop pretending that the problem belongs to someone else. In the interconnected world there is no good or bad guys, we are all responsible for our core sustainable issues food, water, energy, waste etc and we all have be part of the solution.
This is the necessary revolution, which needs a shift in thinking.
Industrial age has been an era earmarked by harvesting of natural and social capital to produce physical and financial capital and the time has come when we have to reverse that process. If you look at the complete value chain, it takes 200 litres of water resources to produce 1 litre of Coke, which is way beyond the reduction they were looking to bring down from 3 litres to 2.5 litres, utilised within the factory. Enterprises no more can limit itself to think outside the box, but need to look outside and beyond the building.
Within the industrial bubble we had to choose between better standard of living or healthy ecosystem and cannot have both. In a life beyond the bubble, it’s illogical to assume that our answers from the past are automatically the answers for the future. Innovation Leaders recognising this fact are implementing revolutionary and not just incremental changes in the way we live and work.
To create a sustainable world, inspiration should be drawn not from the machines but from nature and the creation of a different future is only possible by learning to see the larger systems of which they we are part of and fostering collaboration across every imaginable boundary. Market based forces are much more powerful than legal or governmental action in spurring innovation and genuine commitment. So it’s about how one help people simultaneously to be effective in dealing with the reality they face and yet have an orientation towards where they want to go. In a regenerative economy we need to learn to see the larger systems in which we live and work, hence systems thinking.
With living examples cited from major corporations like GE, Toyota, Alcoa, DuPont, Coca-Cola, Costco, Nike, BP and many more, the book stresses upon the power of understanding the mental models and generative conversation.
This book carries simple and logical pictorial depiction of an alternative industrial system. Here they talk about a regenerative circular economy wherein separate circular flow of technical and biological nutrients mimics the living-systems principle of “waste = food“, which has two critical benefits : reduction in waste flows and their damage to natural systems and reduction in the amount of natural resources that must be extracted.
Tomorrow is not far, when we will have buildings that produce more energy and clean water than they can use and function more like trees and forests. The book has specific tools and a way of thinking to help us build competence to respond to the greater challenges of our times. If one gets to see though the content with regard to management models of those successful collaborations, one can see that the predominant pattern that would emerge is that of relational in nature rather than command and control model.
Since my BTR deals with subjects like “ Systems Thinking ” and sustainability this book gave me the big picture framework with regard both the subjects of interest and how some major corporations are transforming themselves to meet these challenges.
The book also helped me with lot of insights, which was thought provoking enough to enable me to find new dimensions in my search for concepts and widening the possibilities within the scope of the project and BTR.
Innovation can never be predicted in advance and can seem impossibly daunting, they are often catalyzed by small number of people who can both see large patterns and focus on small steps that build momentum. Along with organisational intelligence, if you can tap into emotional and intellectual intelligence of individuals in an organisation, unleashing their latent collective imagination and energy within and among them, one can consider the battle as, won.
Do you have it in you ?
1 comments:
Great to learn something about Peter Senge's new book via Kishore's blogpost. His (Senge's) 'system thinking' principle is well explained in the last paragraph of the review, but what is organizational intelligence? Apparently the book does not suppose that the organizations of nowadays will drastically change in structure? Then how will mental models of CEO's and employees change? Just some questions that come up after reading this. Because it is a great and necessary idea: let us all act responsibly!
I like to relate it to the book 'Cradle to Cradle' by McDonough & Braungart (2002), where all products and scraps will be recycled and which will develop whole new methods of production. The idea of 'system thinking' adds to this by making both the companies and the consumers aware of a necessary shift and a broader vision. Kishore illustrates this well by stating that the latent collective imagination to do so has to be unleashed (so: make use of imagineering!).
PS: last weekend I bought a new surfshort which is made of a fabric of the rePET repolymerization process (so a short made of recycled P.E.T. bottles). Apparently, the industry is making progress.
Post a Comment