Saying goodbye to the greed of Gordon Gekko
Fictional Wall Street character, Gordon Gekko, famously said that "Greed is good", and for a while the business world seemed to agree. Connie Comber believes the time has now come for a more gentle business environment that is a better fit with our post-GFC sensibilities.
Business is changing. Multiple ripples of the global financial crisis (GFC) later, business is changing. Inevitably, therefore, the way you manage a business has to change.
It’s, perhaps, not so clear where these changes are heading, which can make operating a business pretty difficult.
Some clarity is emerging – whether you’re reading The Guardian, Harvard Business Review, or any number of business blogs, there is an increasing focus on sustainable business. It is true that there is a vast spectrum of definitions of ‘sustainability’ but the meaning of the concept boils-down, in essence, to a set of shared values.
Doing business has always required a set of shared values – ‘dog-eat-dog’, ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘anything goes as long as you win’ were all agreed value positions that operated a win-lose business system. It’s the value set that was personified in The Godfather and Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko character.
By the time we’ve experienced the GFC and its subsequent after-shock waves, there is some review of that credo. As it turns out new thinking is also turning out to be good business.
Details are still forming but there is increasing acknowledgement that providing shared or mutual reward/return throughout the value-chain is a more enduring and beneficial way to do business. The shared values of sharing value, if you will.
Revenue-sharing models and collaborative cost-reducing efforts are shifting the ‘old school’ mechanisms between customer and supplier. As one example, an article in The Guardian’s Sustainable Business Blog (26/10/11) provides profound examples of these changes in the major car manufacturers in Asia – Toyota, Hyundai Motor Company (HMC) and Samsung. PepsiCo, Microsoft, Birkenstock, and Zappos are other examples of the many companies adopting different value propositions for their stakeholders.
This shift in the business mind-set is coming pretty fast. One key issue is that we aren’t all up-to-speed with the skills needed to do business differently and with more sustainable business practices. Most of us weren’t trained in collaboration techniques, shared-value mechanisms, mutual-growth strategies and the like.
Our default button still tends to be ‘get-in-first-and-win’ (or we’ll lose out), or due to the fear of losing out, we become fiercely competitive, and top-dog/underdog hierarchies continue to underpin most of our organisations.
Closing the skills gap is a lot easier than we might think – fundamentally it’s all Good Values, applied to business imperatives. It’s not naive or fantasy-land, after-all. It’s turning out to be very good business.
As an added bonus – there is scientific proof in psychological research that sharing improves people’s happiness and well-being, (eg 7 Ways Sharing Can Make You Happy.
Turning good personal values into good business value is an example of creative adaptation that can be wholesome and renewing for businesses – and the people in them. It will require some new skills training and mentoring support, but that is also emerging. Maybe saying farewell to Gordon Gekko is all good news.
Connie Comber is the founder and Managing Director of Re-Imagine Business, specialising in sustainable, socially-aware, profit strategies. She has consulted to small and medium-sized businesses for over 15 years – in addition to owning and operating several of her own businesses. Connie’s track record encompasses both the public and not-for-profit sectors, as well as senior work in the corporate sector (Coca-Cola Amatil, Woolworths, Berri).
