FUTURE TALENT November - January 2019/2020 | Page 59

TALKING HEADS
T
A new renaissance for business
T
oday, we stand astride a
fault line in terms of
where we wish to go as
a global, interconnected
society. The role of business itself is
being questioned.
If we take a very long view, we
can observe that capitalism and
its role in society is challenged
and reinvented every 100-500
years. Feudalism, between the
ninth and 15th centuries, reached
its apex during The Renaissance
and was replaced by mercantile
capitalism. Mercantilism made
way for industrial capitalism in the
mid-19th century, which evolved
into shareholder capitalism in the
20th. Capitalism, specifically how
business is organised, has not been
a stagnant system.
Looking deeper at one of these
stages of history, The Renaissance
was a flowering of art, culture,
education and commerce. It was
undoubtedly one of the most
profoundly important periods
of societal development in
human history. Business and arts
intermingled in a synergy that
benefited each estate.
While wealthy merchants
sponsored artists, that creativity
catalysed a new curiosity of
anatomy, astronomy, perspective,
m e t a p h o r, n a r r a t i v e a n d
natural science among many
fields, which, in turn, energised
intellectual discipline, fostering
new opportunities for scientists,
businesses and universities. In other
words, the arts not only benefited
from the economic prosperity
of the time, artistic endeavour
contributed to it.
In humankind’s quest to perfect
the process by which we create
wealth, the ménage à trois between
science, business and art has
since become a cosier domestic
arrangement between science and
commerce. The industrial revolution
perfected the philosophy of
Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific
management, in which the way we
organise business is intended to
drive efficiency in and variance out.
Henry Ford, that scion of
au tomobile manu facturing,
famously quipped, “why is it every
time I hire a pair of hands a brain
comes attached?” Over a short
period, the universe of business
lost its constellation of artistic
exploration. We dehumanised
organisations, yet today we lament
that we lack humanity.
The German sociologist
Max Weber remarked, “the fate
Adam Kingl
“Over a short
amount of
time, the
universe of
business
lost its
constellation
of artistic
exploration”
of our times is characterised
by
rationalisation
and
intellectualisation and, above all, by
the disenchantment of the world”.
As a result, we are particularly
unprepared for a world in which
the delta of change is increasing
by the day at least partially because
we’ve been trained as leaders for
almost 150 years to push out those
very human qualities that would
better enable our organisations to
navigate these turbulent waters:
inspiration, innovation, adaptability,
empowerment, curiosity. By the
way, while business worked hard
to drive out these qualities, the arts
have continued to explore how to
drive them in.
And yet, the reason I am
optimistic today is that capitalism
does have a good track record of
reinventing itself. We happen to live
during one of those inflection points
of history. Scientific management
has had its day in the sun, making
many executives and investors
very wealthy. But we now require
a new Renaissance, a flowering
of interchange between the arts
and business whereby we recreate
work around human fulfilment.
I hear from executives from
around the world who feel an
unprecedented pressure to
reinvent how they lead, learn,
operate, structure, incentivise,
hire, promote and communicate.
Business must reflect the needs
of its employees, customers and
society in better ways than those
we have experienced. If capitalism
requires reimagining, the new
solutions will come less from the
‘science’ of management and more
from the ‘art’.
Adam Kingl is regional managing
director, Europe, for Duke Corporate
Education.
November – January 2019 // 59