OUR CHANGING WORLD
Where Are We Going
Open Your Eyes, Mind and Heart to Enrich Your Life
Success measured by money and status is still glamorous, but the glitter is fading. Nature’s fury forces our eyes to open, decisively manifested through droughts, hurricanes, and floods. These disastrous consequences of this materialistic ideology change our perceptions and trigger the most basic and potent instinct in the human character — survival.
It is high time we wake up and use all our resources to reverse the trend of devastation we have caused. As humanity, we must take concerted action to change our consumption behaviour to be more environmentally friendly.
A massive educational effort is needed to unite society into a combined force for change. The educational system is too clumsy to achieve this within the required time. The best-equipped group of people to accomplish this job quickly are marketers. They focus on quarterly improvement in sales.
The problem is that marketers would have to change direction and become conscious about the environment. Currently, their objective is to convince potential customers to buy things whose principal value is to bolster their egos, with the environment as collateral damage.
A Redburn and PwC study shows that the value of global marketing is about US$ 1.7 trillion per year. If we can spend this amount of money on things that pollute our habitat, we should be able to find the same amount of money to enhance our survival.
The irony in all this is that we work like crazy for the companies that produce and then advertise glamour goods. Once we buy them, they imply, we will be happy and admired by others. The same kinds of messages get blasted at the others. We will become a mutual admiration society.
The solution is to ignore these blandishments, start thinking and use our common sense. We still have a chance to dig ourselves out of the lifestyle hole we have dug; even find true happiness. Miracles do happen if we work at them.
Common sense thinking can help us weed out the illusions planted in our minds by the $1.7 trillion per year smoke and mirrors. The key to a successful life strategy includes a much broader definition of success than only material wealth.
Change of Perception Is as Good as Holiday
Thankfully, there are signs that people are starting to open their eyes and look at the world and their living environment without the fashionable rose-tinted glasses. In an ironic sequence of events, a pandemic that killed millions turned out to be a trumpet blaring that the emperor has no clothes.
The Covid pandemic has exposed the incompetence and heartlessness of the global leadership. It showed us the shallowness and callousness of both our political and business executives. It revealed that ineptitude and greed are often at the root of the mishandling of the disease and its social consequences.
The pandemic is not the cause of the current state of society, but it has highlighted alarming ruptures in its fabric.
One of the cracks that have appeared is the disruptive technological advancement that has brought about a tectonic wave of workplace change. It threatens an unprecedented scale of unemployment that is already disrupting the lives of millions of people. If we don’t take swift action, we will face a crisis in which hundreds of millions of people’s livelihoods will be in jeopardy. We need to understand that all of us, rich and poor, will experience the consequences of this rage.
According to Mckinsey, a global management consulting company, robots will replace 400 million workers by 2030. Entire industries will disappear. Many jobs will no longer exist. On top of this, millions of young people are entering the job market every year. As machines become more intelligent, an increasing percentage of the workforce will be without work.
To come out a winner from this predicament, we must create a two-pronged strategy to deal with the social and technological issues currently creating upheaval in society. Continuation of the exploitative, top-down, hierarchical and centralised models will entrench us further into the inequality quagmire.
As things stand now, we will not be able to avoid massive unemployment and underemployment. These could spark a dangerous situation where hungry and impoverished people start rioting and plundering, demanding a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs.
To avoid this situation, we have to create a financial and reskilling safety net. Part of the solution to this problem would be the introduction of the much talked about Universal Basic Income (UBI). It would give people some time to reorganise and reskill themselves.
The predicted massive unemployment is such a chilling scenario that we need to mobilise all available resources to manage it.
One massive resource available to us is the unused spare capacity of people. Statistics show that most employees are not engaged in their work and only spend their allocated time at their desks to get paid. They are not motivated and use the minimum of their abilities — just enough to keep their job. The appalling failure of leadership to manage employees effectively results in this non-commitment.
This massive waste of resources allows us to liberate some of this spare potential and motivate people to direct this energy into changing their environment. As they gain experience, they can help others adjust and find purpose in their work and life. A concerted effort focused on the betterment of society would release immense energies currently locked up in indifference.
The liberation of this potential by good leadership is worth billions, if not trillions, of dollars. There are more hidden or misused resources that can be activated and channelled into the development of positive change. We have to find and direct them. It has to be a collaborative effort.
The philosophy of massive capital accumulation, boastful acquisition of goods, and competition with the Joneses is no longer sustainable. Moral values are shifting from materialistic to intellectual, and prestige based on materialism will turn to scorn. This shift could prove to be a saving grace for humanity.
ERP Systems are the Key to Collaboration Organization
While technology is causing unemployment and underemployment problems, technology can also help us to solve these problems. It enables us to create a different type of organisation to facilitate more equitable distribution of wealth. It can stimulate the creation of a collaboration company.
Many technological and social changes accentuate decentralisation, communication and collaboration as new trends, forming the pillars of the economy. Combining these concepts will help companies flatten management structures and elevate workers with functional skills to prominence.
People are moving away from established 9–5 type jobs and starting businesses to achieve independence, by choice or force. Many are beginning to recognise that collaboration with others, whose skills complement theirs, is a road to success. Collaboration companies are emerging.
Technology, primarily ERP software systems, facilitate this collaboration. Together, a network of skilled individuals can undertake projects that were previously the exclusive domain of corporations. This exclusivity made corporations into very arrogant and inefficient money wasters.
Collaboration companies can work much cheaper while still making a lot of money by eliminating the inefficiencies of large corporations. However, they must also realise that they must establish trust that they can execute the project.
Essential Management Competency — Understanding the Job
The company’s performance depends on its process flows and structures. These two factors compel people to coordinate their efforts. Without systems, a business would drift aimlessly, and this is why in a collaborative environment, digitalisation is imperative. An ERP system streamlines, simplifies and documents business processes and individual performances.
To successfully perform their job in this new environment, managers must thoroughly analyse the organisation’s work processes and understand the consequences of any changes in the process. The work breakdown structure is going to become one of the essential management tools.
In many companies, the management muddles through out-of-date work processes, which they are nervous about changing. They are worried that an integrated ERP system might expose their ignorance and inability to manage new technologies. Previously, they could hide these shortcomings through arrogance and political means, but once they implement an efficient management system, they don’t need to hide anything anymore. They only need to learn.
The Dominance of Collaboration Company
A new type of organisational culture will favour results-driven output over time input, giving workers a higher degree of autonomy in decision making. The successful companies of the future will be those where leaders are more mentors than managers. The company will reward employees relative to their output, which an integrated system records.
Modular ERP systems will become the backbone of organisations and will be as pliable as Lego. System managers will put various modules together to suit the process flow of a particular project. To this end, developers will break down the software systems to micro modular levels to configure intricate projects.
A sophisticated level of control and coordination will form the base on which we can build the Collaboration Company. The company will be owned, managed and operated by its workforce. Once a particular project is complete, the company will dissolve and reconstituted for a new project.
Not necessarily the same people that performed the previous project will be included. Skills not required on the new project will have options to join other collaboration teams where their skills are needed.
This kind of organisation will be so flexible that it will almost instantly adapt to changes in the business environment, as entrepreneurs are very adaptable people by nature. The Collaboration Company members will share the profit proportionate to the estimated value of their skills required on the project.
Efficiency wise this kind of organisation will be incomparably more productive than the traditionally structured corporation. Workers will be motivated to find better ways of doing things, maximise the use of technology, collaborate in decision making, and collectivise their intelligence to make their lives easier, more meaningful and constructive.
This kind of collaboration can increase output to previously unimaginable levels, saving time for all participants on the project. These participants will consequently earn a lot more money working on the project than they would have otherwise.
This kind of organisation has no size limit. The organisation gets assembled as required to complete a project within a given time. No waste. This efficiency is why traditional corporations will not be able to compete with the effectiveness of the Collaboration Company and will have to transform to similar models or fade away.
A Collaboration Company is the organisation of the future that will enable us to become more dynamic and effective in dealing with fateful issues facing society. Its vigorous nature will expedite the development of new methods and technologies essential for reversing environmental deterioration, stabilising society, and making our world sustainable once again.
Ante
September 2021
