Episodes
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Speakers:
Jules Goddard, CEDEP Faculty, Fellow of London Business School, Member of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and author of recently published books on both philosophy and business experimentation.
Kate Chauviré, Director, Academic Planning and Coordination, CEDEP
Von Frisch’s famous discovery about bee behaviour can teach us valuable lessons about exploration in business. Most bees use a ‘waggle dance’ to direct their fellow bees to the best pollen sites. But a small minority operate more like mavericks. They ignore the signals of their fellow bees and reject conventional sources of pollen. Instead, they take the risk of exploring further afield, often with no luck, but just occasionally, discover a new treasure trove of pollen.
Mavericks in business are the eccentrics challenging the status quo. Rather than being risk-averse, mavericks provoke, stir up debate and explore. And in today’s uncertain world, we need more bravery, curiosity and experimentation.
Part of the skill of business is to get the balance right between exploitation and exploration. When firms underperform, it is often because they play too safe. They exploit their cost base by cutting back on expenses wherever they can and neglect the braver option of exploration.
The big question is: do you have enough mavericks to make a difference? If you need more, what do you have to do to recruit them or, better still, bring out and liberate more of the maverick within those you already employ?
By encouraging the intrapreneurial talents of mavericks, companies would become more entrepreneurial, restoring the balance between exploitation and exploration.
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Speakers:
Jules Goddard, CEDEP Faculty, Fellow of London Business School, Member of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and author of recently published books on both philosophy and business experimentation.
Kate Chauviré, Director, Academic Planning and Coordination, CEDEP
There is still so much to discover about human nature, the psychology of choice, and the more practical issues of employee engagement and productivity. We are fallible creatures, and we operate with assumptions, many of which are flawed, if not false.
John Wanamaker famously said: “Half of my advertising budget is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” In business, we could equally say: “Half of the assumptions underpinning our strategic plan are falsehoods, but sadly we don’t know which half.”
Experimentation in business is the royal road – the scientific approach – to discovery. Yet, most firms would prefer to save on the cost and delay of experimentation than learn where they are going wrong. Most firms, particularly as they become large, lose touch with the world and operate in an echo chamber of clichés and conventional wisdom. It takes courage to be open to what the world has to teach us.
Experimentation is the artificial manufacturing of extraordinary experiences without having to travel very far. Pragmatism is helpful here - the belief that we act our way into more accurate ways of thinking rather than think our way into more effective ways of acting. Planning tends to start with objectives to be reached and routes to be plotted, whereas experimentation typically begins with questions to be answered and tests to be conducted.
We need to rethink how we do business – be more adventurous, try new approaches, open up to being lucky and bumping into a discovery, make a breakthrough and find a winning strategy. This is the precious art of experimentation.
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Missing episodes?
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Speakers:
Jules Goddard, CEDEP Faculty, Fellow of London Business School, Member of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and author of recently published books on both philosophy and business experimentation.
Kate Chauviré, Director, Academic Planning and Coordination, CEDEP
Very few people would say that competition in the open marketplace is a bad thing. On the contrary, it is the foundation of the world’s wealth. No other system has been invented that comes anywhere near it.
But strangely, we do not believe in friendly rivalry when it comes to the internal culture of an organisation. Here we prefer cooperation, not competition. We place our faith in planning, not experimentation. We give job holders monopoly rights over their area of expertise. Each person, each team, and each department operates more like a closed shop. There are penalties for rivalry.
We accept the notion of internal socialism where the word of a small and powerful cadre (or politburo) is law, planning is top-down, targets are endless, opinion is unanimous, and a great show of solidarity is the norm.
Why do we not trust the collective intelligence of the whole organisation more than the expert knowledge of a minority? We need to rethink organisational design that does not rely on a great leader for its success.
A well-designed organisation or business should freely and quickly adapt to changing opportunities and threats by drawing upon collective wisdom— one where a change in CEO, CFO or CMO has little impact. Change should be natural, continuous, and market-inspired and is more likely to occur if the organisation is designed as a horizontal value chain of internal suppliers and customers who face outward.
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Speakers:
Jules Goddard, CEDEP Faculty, Fellow of London Business School, Member of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and author of recently published books on both philosophy and business experimentation.
Kate Chauviré, Director, Academic Planning and Coordination, CEDEP
When we are young, most of us create more value for the world by belonging to an organisation and learning to be more effective. The organisation adds value to our talent and capability. But at a certain age, most of us grow out of the need for this supportive and protective environment. The organisation starts to hold us back, and we leave to start up our own businesses.
The age at which this becomes apparent will vary. Some of us discover our entrepreneurial talent as teenagers and never want or need employment. Others of us never discover it, and we will always need employment security to provide an income. But the vast majority get to this moment of realisation in their 40s.But what if corporate leaders celebrated rather than mourned the departure of their best talent and took a stake in these new businesses? What about establishing a venture fund and tempting those entrepreneurs to compete for it?
We need to rethink the very idea of employment. Organisations should become universities of enterprise, learning hubs and venture platforms – and thereby lead an entrepreneurial revolution in society.
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Speakers:
Jules Goddard, CEDEP Faculty, Fellow of London Business School, Member of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and author of recently published books on both philosophy and business experimentation.
Kate Chauviré, Director, Academic Planning and Coordination, CEDEP
Economics has led us to believe that buyers use price to measure cost, not quality and evaluate competing products according to their functionality and utility – the lower the price, the better. We have traditionally assumed that competition is about efficiency, that winners are the cost leaders in their industry, and that the benefits of a larger market share and higher sales revenues lie mainly in economies of scale.
But what if the art of strategy is to stay one step ahead of the need to be efficient? Red Bull became the most successful soft drink competitor to Coca-Cola in its history by delivering a smaller can, a higher price and, arguably, a horrible taste. And how did it do this?
Red Bull worked to a very different set of principles. It employed psychology and invented a new category it could own. It chose not to compare itself with Coca-Cola or make claims of superiority. Instead, it was happy to be a unique brand with its own aura, tone of voice and imagery. It tapped into an aspect of human psychology that economics does not recognise – the idea that a product can have a personality and that consumers' choices in the marketplace are essentially emotional and cannot be mapped on to a rational scale of utility.
We need to understand that the market is much closer to being a game of discovery than an economic exercise. Philosophers have a name for this argument: the category mistake, whereby we place business in the wrong category, manage it as a rational activity with a correct answer and treat buyers and sellers as maximisers of utility.
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Speakers:
Jules Goddard, CEDEP Faculty, Fellow of London
Business School, Member of the Council of the Royal Institute of Philosophy and
author of recently published books on both philosophy and business
experimentation.Kate Chauviré, Director,
Academic Planning and Coordination, CEDEPOne of the most important insights of philosophical evolutionary theory is that life
continuously throws up challenges and we must adapt. We are at our best and
most human when solving problems. Rather than following rules, obeying
instructions and sticking to what has worked in the past, modern workplaces
draw upon our capabilities most effectively when we are meeting critical challenges
creatively.We rarely challenge organisational hierarchy and bureaucracy. But in times of crisis, the
rule book is thrown away. We ignore standard processes. Those who have the
skills to solve the problem come together spontaneously and informally. The
culture becomes one of constructive conversation amongst equals rather than a
formal meeting of bosses and subordinates. In other words, adhocracy replaces
autocracy with hugely beneficial consequences. The problem is solved.
Getting the balance right between spontaneity and structure or between informality and control is difficult. And many companies are too wrapped up in their conventions to see
things differently and try out alternative ways of working.
The workweek and
the workplace are human inventions. They are not part of nature. We do not have
to work from Monday to Friday in office settings in structured organisations
and have salaried jobs or paid employment. These are our inventions, and we
have chosen to work like this.
The Covid-19
pandemic has taught us that there are alternatives to the conventional
workplace, and it is time to reinvent corporate culture and the way we work.
