What a Day

This morning I got up at 5 to head down to Canoga Park to take the first half of a two day class from Bill Bellows at Rocketdyne on Enterprise Thinking.  An hour of the class was a vidoetaped lecture by my hero Peter Senge.  And fifteen minutes ago I got home from a lecture by Mohammad Yunus.   

What were the common themes of the day?

• We are not born into this world to be money making machines;
• We are born into this world with the capacity to learn;
• We are born with unlimited potential, but society has not allowed millions to unwrap this gift.  They die unexplored and unknown;
• The post industrial machine, the system of profit maximization, is a theory that real people are trying to imitate, when it is theory that should be imitating life;
• Poverty is not caused by the poor, poor performance is not caused by the person who measures it, grades are not caused by your performance... all of this is caused by systems of institutions, policies and concepts that are artificially imposed;
• A learning organization changes the system, but conventional systems are slow or reluctant to change.
• And from Toyota Way: Lean is about developing principles that are right for your organization and diligently practicing them to achieve high performance that continues to add value to customers and society.  This of course, means being competitive and profitable.

I have spent quite a bit of time thinking today about measurements.  We are in the midst of developing performance metrics for next year.  First, I have learned that there is no need to pull goals out of thin air, that we actually have the data to help us create our goals, with a statistical understanding of how we are performing today being possible.  But are we measuring the right thing?  If we want to provide excellent bicycle parking, does it make sense only to measure the number of hitching posts we put out?  

As long as we are driven to measure success as the maximization of profit, it will be difficult for our mainstream to support social business, where we measure success toward the dividends that are returned toward our goal.  I loved the idea Yunus promoted which is this:  the business can set its goal, for example, health, or the end of malnutrition.  The business can choose to return its dividends back toward meeting that goal.  Then the bottom line is not profit, but rather we can measure our success by the number of people we reach.  He advocated businesses that sell health insurance and bank accounts to the poor, as a viable business prospect that could help us peel off the systems that keep people in poverty.

Yunus was very cooly received by our Santa Barbara crowd.  I was disappointed.  I had heard warming receptions for any number of local bands.  Is it just too much for us to wrap our minds around?