Brics create their own development bank

The five ’emerging’ BRICS economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa account for a quarter of the world economy (24.5%). Their voting power at the IMF is only 10.3 percent. They have decided to stop waiting for the US Congress to ratify reforms to that voting structure. At their sixth summit recently they announced …

Holacracy

Another in the series of emerging ways of organising is ‘holacracy’. The idea is to treat an organisation as a series of ‘holons’: autonomous self-reliant business units. We are familiar with thinking of a corporation as composed of different business units — defined by geography, customers, or products/services — but holacracy takes the idea one step further and …

Three reasons why change management fails

If we are going to adapt our businesses in a rapid and controlled way, then we need large-scale organisational change. Based on some of the latest thinking on organisational change, this article identifies three key reasons why change management fails. The reasons are: Change consultants are insufficiently equipped on a personal level. Most change models are incomplete. Capacity is widely overlooked, on …

The Community Maturity Model

As businesses build presence on social media, and as they learn to cooperate with other organisations to achieve their goals, a ‘community’ approach can sometimes help to achieve goals more effectively than transactional approaches. But how does a business, that is used to operating transactionally, shift to a ‘community’ mindset? The Community Round Table exists to help businesses …

Greyston brownies

Greyston is a bakery with a different view on the world. They don’t hire people to bake brownies, they bake brownies so that they can hire people. Founded in 1982, Greyston is the USA’s “leading social enterprise“, and explicitly aims to support underprivileged people in New York state by providing them with the employment, skills and resources needed to lift …

Holacracy: changing the future of management

Yesterday we posted about the four-day-week startup: an organisation that is growing fast, yet there are no managers and all employees work only a four day week. (Technology manages the workflow, anybody can propose a new project.) Feedback from some readers has pointed us towards holacracy, “a real-world-tested social technology for purposeful organization”, which “radically …

IPCC and renewable energy — the view from Texas

So, the IPCC has concluded that averting climate change catastrophe is ’eminently affordable’. Of course it is — it always was. Quibbles about the ‘cost’ of averting climate change have always been spurious, partly because the cost of not taking action will always be greater (ie death), and partly because any ‘cost’ will always show …

Welcome to the four day week startup

When the going gets tough it can often seem that the future must be worse than the past. But here is a story about one new company that is already turning over several million dollars a year, growing at 120% a year, and achieving all this by working a four day week. Yes, a four …