The purpose of business ... gets clearer (*)
This September once again, the oldest town in The Netherlands, Nijmegen, takes central stage as an ever-increasing number of business leaders at all levels, theorists, practitioners, experts, students, men and women come in from 65 countries around the world for three intense days dedicated to exploring the true purpose of business and most importantly how to apply this to every day business practices. This is the EBBF annual conference, held from the 21st to 24th September 2006.
Having engaged leading persons on the seemingly contradictory marriage of ethics, spirituality and business, the Forum has carved a defining role for itself in the area. This is easily demonstrated each year when it comes together for its annual conference, drawing from experiences of practitioners and extracting from practice to business models, therefore keeping the upper hand on pre-empting ethical trends in business and professional life over the coming years.
The theme this year is The Purpose of Business: From Vision to Action. Participants include world-class speakers such as the Chief Economist of the World Economic Forum, Augusto Lopez Claros; Director of Global Competitiveness at the International Labour Organization, Michael Henriques; Director of ANZ bank and winner of the 2004 Spirit at Work award for drastically improving the bank's performance by bringing spiritual process into everyday work, Sonia Stojanovic; Lawrence Miller, author of the forthcoming book, Competing in the New Capitalism: How Individuals, Teams and Companies Succeed by Creating the Currency of Competition in the New Economy. On popular request from enthusiasts looking forward to attending, several of the trainers and speakers from the previous years will also be returning to hold sessions.
The Forum's annual conference has been described by several participants as a process, rather than an event. This is thanks partly to it's open-floor and interactive model of conducting the conference, where all ranges of age, profession, experience, sex, religion - of participants engage with each other on discussions, exchanging and comparing, drawing from real-life situations and bringing out questions which they've hardly had many opportunities of directing before.
Ethics in business is moving beyond PR to being a strategic element of survival in the new economy. Consultant, Lawrence Miller has identified among proactive businesses, "the growing recognition of the importance of social and spiritual capital. Social capital is trust, both internally and externally. Brand equity is based on trust in product identity and corporate identity. This trust is just as valuable as money in the bank. Internal social capital defines the 'spontaneous sociability' that is the fuel of all problem solving and creativity." At the conference, he will be expanding further on this. Just as many other trainers will be doing; and many experts will be exchanging ideas; with the additional energy of a growing group of Young Professionals, students, who will be bringing forth their own questions.
To register for this year's conference or find details of the program, and its speakers - visit the website.
To engage Forum members and conference participants, several tools are now in place to facilitate discussions as issues around the topics to be covered: the EBBF e-magazine, and the blog are just examples of where resources can be found online on the website.
* (taken from the last edition of INSPIRE)
