A few months ago, I received an unusual invitation.
It began with, “Permit me to introduce myself. I’m Professor of Strategic Management at the London Business School, the Director of the Management Lab, and an author (Competing for the Future, The Future of Management, etc.).”
The “I” was Gary Hamel, recognized by the Wall Street Journal as the number one management guru of 2008.
“I am writing to invite you to participate in an exclusive conference that will bring together a small group of world renowned thought leaders, and progressive business leaders, to develop a blueprint for how the “technology of management” will need to evolve in this new century.” I’m hoping you can join our unique gathering, at The Ritz Carlton Hotel in Half Moon Bay, on May 28-30.
“The conference is being hosted by the Management Lab, a non-profit organization. The founding partners of the MLab include McKinsey & Co., the London Business School, and the Union Bank of Switzerland.
“This invitation-only event, which is limited to 35 participants, will bring together an exclusive group of world-renowned thinkers and business leaders who will share their thoughts on how the ‘work of management’ will need to be reinvented in the years ahead. The premise behind the conference can be simply stated: Management — the tools and techniques that are used to organize human effort for productive ends — is one of humankind’s most important ‘social technologies.’ But now, as organizations large and small face a daunting array of new challenges, management, as practiced for the last hundred years, needs to be dramatically reinvented.”
OK, I was more than a little surprised to be on the list. I had met Hamel once before when we both spoke at a McKinsey conference, but I wasn’t convinced that I had made much of a lasting impression. The list of other attendees was formidable. They included: Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, the world-renowned industrial design firm; Alex Ehrlich, a managing director of the UBS Investment Bank (surprised he could break away); Kevin Kelly, who helped launch Wired Magazine; Terri Kelly, the president and CEO of W.L. Gore & Associates (the makers of Gore-Tex); John Mackey, chairman and CEO of Whole Foods Market, Inc.; Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, who brought along with him Marissa Mayer, vice president, search products, and Hal R. Varian, Google’s chief economist; Vineet Nayar, the CEO of HCL Technologies, a company that employees 55,000 people worldwide; C.K. Prahalad, author of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits; Thomas A. Stewart, the editor and managing director of the Harvard Business Review; James Surowiecki, writer for The New Yorker and author of The Wisdom of Crowds: Why The Many Are Smarter Than The Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations; Shoshana Zuboff, author of one of my favorite books: The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism; and my good friend Peter M. Senge.
I was more than a little nervous when, on the first day, I was asked to tell the group a little bit about Seventh Generation and why it was so unique and innovative from a management perspective. Now, compared to Whole Foods ($6 billion in sales) and W.L.Gore ($2.5 billion), we are tiny. The strange thing is how our comparatively small company is viewed as a pioneer within this business landscape.
I focused my conversation on the essence and purpose of the company, by highlighting some of our global imperatives. I think it’s fair to say that no one in the room had ever heard of a company whose purpose included:
- Creating a world of equity and justice, health and well-being
- A world of more conscious workers, citizens, and consumers
- A world that is rich in value as contrasted to a world that is rich in artifacts
- A belief that businesses should engage in the personal development of everyone who works for them
- Approaching everything we do from a systems perspective
- With a commitment to ensure that globally, natural resources are used and renewed at a rate that is always below their rate of depletion
- And a commitment to develop products that are not just sustainable but restorative; products that are not “less bad,” but are actually “good”
Not only did all these smart folks concur that this in fact appeared to be a quite revolutionary business model, but it also might just be exactly what the world most needs.