Creating & Managing the Socially responsible Business
This three day event became a really impressive gathering of 230 plus participants in the Gottlieb Düttweiler-Migros Institüt above the Lake of Zurich under the logo of SVNE, an ideogram of "an important discussion within an - assembly hall". The ideogram is part of Nsibibi, the ancient script of the Ejoghan people who lived in SE Nigeria and W Cameroon. It was extremely important because SVNE is an attempt to motivate influential and widely based people in the business and non-business world to respond with urgency to defuse, if possible, the time-bombs that we have made and are still making that could destroy our present civilisation.
The first address graphically illustrated this picture as Eckart Wintzen, founder of a large international software systems company, called his leading presentation: "Masterplan for a sustainable economy in 35 years time". Coloured graphs projected on a huge screen spared us nothing in their stark illustration of how our myopic economic system is wrecking us and our planet, driving us at exponential - speed into unsolvable social and environmental nightmares, creating economic distress and spreading debilitating spiritual malaise.
Frankly I was surprised that the founder of what is now called BSO-Origin, a 4,000 staff company in 14 different countries, dared to be so outspoken - but I soon found that other equally large international companies foresaw similar scenarios and that what we urgently need is not more economic growth but a new economic reality.
Our present economic system, for instance, compels us to import luxury foodstuffs from countries where people are dying of starvation, at the same time as our farmers -are being paid to keep land out of cultivation and many farmers are bankrupted. Worse, the same system compels us to manufacture and export armaments, making the world an ever more dangerous place.
Clearly this is the economics of the mad house, a fact highlighted in three very stimulating and moving plenary talks by Paul Gilding, an Australian global enviro - consultant, and Pierre Saué (Director General of Amnesty International): both had standing ovations and again I was most agreeably surprised at the understanding and response from an essentially middle of the road audience, an intelligent and enlightened cross section of European, US and some third world countries, representing industrialists, consultants and "not-for-profit" organizations.
As we know, the Body Shop lives the message and Anita "Rocket" (as she per misadventure became dubbed at Zurich) did not let us down. Her slides showed her first gas driven lorry in Europe emblazoned with "If you think you are too small to be effective, you've never been in bed with a mosquito" and "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." She felt, finally, the main role of business was to become an "incubator of the human spirit".
The amazing rise of the Swiss Migros Co-operatives starting in 1925 to the present 71,000 employees, all on plough back, was beautifully explained by Christian Lutz. Even now this huge retail activity does not sell alcohol or tobacco and has an excellent name for greenness, price and quality. Its founder, Gottlieb Düttweiler had to fight hard to survive many attempts to drive them out of business, even starting a political party and newspapers to encourage the passing of more sensible legislation for their enlightened purposes.
Overall, the conference message that came through was that business is the only organization that can move quickly enough to save the planet - yet business does not yet have the good of society as its objective - but it is changing fast, yet must do so even faster. Any Board that only looks at profit measuring is doomed to failure - even short term. Business also has responsibility to create social cohesion - some speakers felt social breakdown through lack of social cohesion was more imminent and dangerous than environmental collapse.
There must have been at least 50 diverse workshops, circles, offerings, exhibits of art and the deeply challenging (not for entertainment!) violin playing of Miha Pogacnik. The many private talks and meetings with other participants gave possibly the greatest value. As for me, business school students from Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Vienna all approached me after my workshop on the Scott Bader Commonweath and the inter-cultural and management trainer of the "GD" Institut retained a copy of our video on our SBCW values workshops (Forward).
Further meetings are planned and many Europeans will attend the October 14-16 Conference in Boston of the American SVN. If the gatherings are to fulfil their purpose, then there must be urgent work done to re-base our money system and much more focus on the best ways of managing the breakdowns that have been forecast!