From Uni-Minded to Pluri-Minded
Beppe Robiati, EBBF co-founder, board member and "in his spare time" head of a large industrial group in Italy was recently sharing one of his visions for the enteprise of the future. By the way you will be able to hear all of the EBBF board members visions for the enterprise of the future this May at a weekend retreat.
UNI-MINDED
Read here Beppe Robiati's article
access restricted to EBBF members
The two diagrams show the increasing shift of successfull companies from a uniminded system, where the head of the organisation controls information flows towards a pluriminded system where all members of an organisation have access to information and are allowed to input and grow the pool of information.
PLURI-MINDED
This emerging second pluriminded status allows a direct flow of information, but it also allows a personal search for the truth. To their detriment many organisations and departments within organisations filter, hold onto or distort information. An illumined organisation and society would allow all its members to receive the amount of information they require directly from its source.
The other driver of this shift is how much individuals are increasingly demanding a higher level of understanding of how their work influences other parts of the organisation of how they are making a difference and only with a pluriminded model can this be achieved.
Control oriented leaders and organisations are often not aware of the direct link between growth in motivation and growth in awareness that information can generate in all components of the organisation.
Nandan M. Nilekani, CEO of Infosys Technologies, India, recently commented at the World Economic Forum in Davos how "not only attracting but also developing and retaining the right people is his number one challenge."
Including training as part of the information flow he added "The focus is on training people to be adaptable, flexible and able to quickly change with the times because it's impossible to predict what the business will need in the future."
"People say that if you train people then they become more marketable and many will leave. But we find that the more we train and invest in people the more likely they are to stay."
Here the CEO of Infosys brakes another myth that has hampered so much of the development of organisations, believing that giving more useful information or increasing the skills of your employees may make them more likely to leave the organisation.
It is not an increase of talent that will move individuals to another a company: top talent from any organisation is only likely to leave once they find that their aspirations are not met, that their relevance in the organisation is not respected, that what they feel is truly important to them, their deeper values, are not in line with the organisation's.
The temptation may then be for an organisation to manipulate information and its flows to show itself the way its stakeholders want to see it. It is by maintaining the information flowing and untampered that the real shape, direction and beliefs of an organisation will become evident, allowing a transparency and lack of confused messages that will strongly motivate those who are in line with that way of operating.
Spending more time adapting the company's way of operating than "adapting" its information is what will achieve the virtuous circle of talent retention creating meaningful and long term success.
