Congratulations to Mark Ingram and Simon McKeon for assembling such an impressive group of presenters for the inaugural Business for Millennium Development Summit. The summit opened with the world premier of ‘8′, a feature length collection of eight short films by directors including Wim Wenders and Jane Campion, one on each of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

James Wolfensohn, Jeffrey Sachs, Bruce Jenks (UNDP), Adrian Hodges (Int. Business Leaders Forum), plus local leaders including Steven Smith, John Brumby and many others were among the stellar cast.

The overwhelming positive for me was the reality of the summit itself. Although views on the mix and responsibility of business vary, all agree that business has a vital role to play if we are going to achieve what Nobel Prize winner Mohammad Yunus has described as the most ambitious project humanity has ever set out to accomplish collectively. It was fortifying to look around the room at the suit brigade and know that all these people had chosen to attend a conference with the MGDs as the focus.

Less positive was knowing how far we’ve got to go. For the most part, business appears reluctant to face the fundamental issues around motivation: what is the purpose of business? Unfortunately, some of the case studies admitted to being accidental heroes, entering the so called emerging markets at the base of the economic pyramid for purely profit motives. The subsequent social and economic wins for the communities were not part of the original incentive. Or even in the case of some very impressive community engagement policy, this was framed as a necessary foundation for successful business.

I hope before too long forums such as this will showcase leadership that is prepared to go another step and call for business leaders to recapture the role of business for the common social good. Profitable, yes. Captive to quarterly growth for the sake of financial stakeholder return? … someone has to lead the way out of this.

The programme was naively ambitious. It amazes me that people persist in running conferences as a series of monologues by presenters who feel compelled to ‘answer questions’ that no one in the audience is asking. Yes, there are other models … which leads me to digress.

Inspired by some sensational tastes from the iconic Vegie Bar on Saturday, I set out to cook samosas for the first time yesterday. Luckily the strip shopping centre out our back gate includes an Indian groceries and supplies store. It is one of those places where, despite being a small supermarket, when you walk in the attendants ask what you want and walk you around the aisles to serve you. The two gentlemen were as excited about my venture into samosa-land as I was and were forthcoming with multiple tips on method and ingredients that, as good as The Cook and the Chef are, elevated the bar considerably.

The point being, when you are doing something outside your core competency, ask someone who knows - really knows. There are many things that people consider ‘general’ skills that can be done well by anyone with some nous. Cooking samosas and facilitating summits among them. However, we can learn a lot from those who specialise, helping us move from good to great.

It reminds me again of how important it is to know what we do best and to build our businesses around that core competency. If we want to move from good to great, we need help from those who specialise in the other stuff.

So there goes another weekend and here comes another week … people all over the city have pressed play and their weekly routines are underway again. Routines and habits give us security and efficiency. Here I am sitting in one of my favourite cafes Don Vincenzo, the familiarity allows my mind to focus on what I’m here for rather than the distraction of novelty.

But routine and habit have a dark side. They can rob us of so much that life offers us by narrowing our experience. We are told that our brains are like mounds of dirt … when water drips on top it creates tracks to run down, the more water runs through the tracks the more ingrained they become - and the more difficult it is to change directions. We end up doing things the same way, we end up thinking about things the same way, our lives become a long stretch of the same.

A few months ago I was listening to a radio interview about Alzheimer’s. The conversation gravitated to prevention, and one of the key elements was the exercising of our brains. Naturally a part of this is regular thinking activity, but the other dimension was about using parts of our brain that we aren’t accustomed to. Since hearing that interview I have been holding my toothbrush in my left hand while I clean my teeth, every time.

Not that I am worried about Alzheimer’s at this stage of life, but I am interested in living life to the full. Learning to develop strength beyond what comes naturally is part of this for me.

I am looking forward to attending a Summit later this week hosted by B4MD, Business for Millennium Development. Following blog action day last week I am curious to participate in a forum where business takes seriously the challenges associated with the reduction of extreme poverty. I expect I will be able to blog some reflections next week.

Meanwhile, try bucking your own system this week.

It is my pleasure to include these musings from my colleague, now guest blogger, Derek.

To steal a line from Phil Collins, Think about it, if you’re reading this blog, it’s just another day in Paradise. You’ve got access to the internet, will probably have 3 good meals, have clothes on your back (and more in the cupboard), slept in a bed, live in a house. I could go on. 

In the UK there are apparently 2.5 million pensioners living beneath the official poverty line. Roughly 5% of the population and that’s just pensioners. In Australia apparently approximately 10% of the population are considered to be living in Poverty.  Apparently, when Phil Collins wrote the song he was not inspired by the plight of the homeless, it did stir connotations of an experience he had in Washington DC where he saw people living in boxes only a stone’s throw away from the affluent parts of town. That was 20 years ago. 100 years ago, when the pension was first introduced in the UK, the workhouse was still a feature of British life. Poverty has been a part of what we would ‘think’ was “1st world” life for too long to remember. Poverty so often is thought of as the plight of those living in the developing world; those examples are too numerous to list. It is an epidemic problem the world over that cannot be ignored.

Even given the damage done in recent months in the economies of the world, the global wealth is sufficient to solve this problem, yet for so long the courage and conviction to address the issues has not existed.  In his 2005 work, The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs wrote that “Extreme poverty can be ended, not in the time of our grandchildren, but our time. [...] with the right policies and key interventions, extreme poverty - defined as living on less than $1 a day - can be eradicated within 20 years.”   20 years … That’s nothing.

So what’s stopping us? Clearly unless our Governments take this seriously and decide it is a priority to become involved in a meaningful way, nothing will happen. Clearly until each of us individually takes this seriously and decides that it is a priority to become involved in a meaningful way, our Governments will not react.

I’m not pretending that it’s not a complex problem but it is within our grasp to “Make Poverty History“;  What a legacy that would be! I know we can’t do it all, but we can each do something.

The challenge is to work out what influence we can have and how best to capitalise on our good fortune; this is what I struggle with most. I’m probably quite typical: My family support children and communities through sponsorship type arrangements;  My business allocates a percentage of profits to charitable causes. We give away clothes and toys and ‘things’ accumulated that we don’t need. It’s easy for it to feel like it’s not significant and that there’s more that could be done. The focus this week on poverty has prompted me to consider how to keep the issue front of mind for my local MP.

 I’d be interested to know what other people are doing .

It was 1984 when ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’ moved poverty into pop culture. It took a long time but in the early part of this decade, there seemed to be a growing consensus among thinking people that global poverty was the moral issue of our time. Some high profile things were happening:

In September 2000, the world’s leaders signed on to the United Nations Millennium Declaration, committing to 8 major goals including halving extreme poverty by 2015.

Prior to that, the Jubilee 2000 campaign had significantly raised awareness of the economic injustice associated with development efforts.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation started investing so much money in health & education in the developing world it redefined the space and provoked lots of debate about the nature of monopolies, not just in the IT world.

The Make Poverty History and Micah Challenge campaigns got real traction, helped by the endorsement of pop culture icons like Bono.

Economists were also part of the call to action. By the time Jeffrey Sachs wrote The End of Poverty,  and CK Prahalad wrote Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the public conversation had moved beyond charity. Yes, not-for-profits were increasing the rigour and professionalism of their operations. But business began to explore commercially sustainable ways to develop the opportunities among poorer communities via mass, low cost products such as alternative energy solutions. Mohammad Yunus won a Nobel Prize for his Grameen Bank work, the mother of mass micro-financing. And voices like Sachs’ were calling for tri-sector (Government, Business and NGO) approaches injecting hope that we could reach the targets set by the Millennium Develop Goals.

But then came the Climate Crisis. The attention shifted from the moral imperative associated with poverty, to the survival instinct related to Climate Change. Understandably. However, what needs to be reinforced is the relationship between climate change and poverty.

The implications for the North/West are all over our magazines and newspapers. But it is the poor who will have the most difficultly in adapting. Water shortages through Central Asia, extreme climate and geological events, rising sea levels, economic adjustments in developed countries to accommodate the low carbon imperative … and many other factors will all have a dramatic effect on the world’s poor.

It reminds me of a conversation I was part of in the nineties. Many of my friends were choosing lifestyles that enabled them to identify with people living in poor. It is true that one sees the world differently from ‘underneath’. However, part of this conversation was about understanding that poverty is not actually about material wealth, rather it is about the ability to participate in what is on offer. This might be about the capacity to get public transport to the CentreLink, or it might be about accessing medical assistance for mental illness etc. So, it is not really possible for those of us who are ‘powerful’ in the sense that we can access what our society offers, to choose voluntary poverty. At any point, if we chose to, we could step out.

I think the relationship between Climate Change and Poverty holds some parallels. Yes, it will be tough for those of us in developed countries to make the dramatic lifestyle changes required to lower our carbon footprint. But we do so from a position of power. We will survive.

Unfortunately, this is not the case for the poorest people. Poverty must not be allowed to slip off the agenda in light of the growing need to act on Climate Change.

Gurnek Bains et al’s excellent book Meaning Inc. is worth a read if you are interested in trends in business. Based on over 20,000 interviews with business leaders around the world, it builds a case for a particular style of business from the individual up. By this I mean that rather than looking at successful companies and drawing generalised conclusions about ‘what works’, the authors starting point is people’s views on what is not working and what is. I resonate with the approach, and there are many similarities with Ergo’s own Generative Business framework. (The Generative Assessment Survey is our diagnostic.)

One of the ideas that I have both advocated for, and also have been guilty of perpetuating the antithesis of, is what the authors call ‘spikes’. Put simply (in my language); high achieving individuals tend to be unbalanced. Bains et al met with as many exceptional performers as they could. They observed that a large percentage of them were ‘odd’, even eccentric, rather than balanced and reasonable. In Jungian terms, I would describe this as the shadow side of people’s strengths. It is a corollary of extreme strength, that there are corresponding downsides.

The classic HR error is to focus effort on developing people in the area of weakness. The idea of ‘spikes’ is to amplify organisational effectiveness by stoking up the fire under people’s strengths … release them to be exceptionally good at their natural competencies.

One of the drivers for this HR response is the way colleagues report frustration at working with high achievers. They are too introverted, random, unpredictable, obsessive, intolerant, etc  etc.

Now this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t invest some effort at mitigating the collateral damage that can result from the dysfunctionality associated with the ‘shadow side’. It is also not the point that bad behaviour should be excused. But the point is that the most leverage will come from accentuating natural strengths rather than elevating competency in an area of natural weakness.

Now note that we are particularly talking about high achievers here. It is a fair enough question to ask why we should give grace to the so called stars, and be less tolerant of natural weaknesses in the bulk of us. It seems to me that we could take Bains’ view further and apply a similar approach everyone. After all, surely the outcome we are looking for is for everyone to contribute from their strengths.

Line managers are best placed to work with their teams to mitigate against the implications of shadow sides. (When Barry Hall gets himself rubbed out for biffing opponents it does help the team cause.) Perhaps those of us working in people development need to spend more time urging people to follow their natural inclinations, rather than assessing weakness and burning HR budgets creating balance, which can often result in mediocrity - rather than performance spikes.