Look inside the C-Suite. There’s a Chief Officer of Finance, Operations, Information. And above it all is Execution.
These things are very important, but they are not the highest things.
Finance, Operations, Information, Execution. These are the concerns of administrators. They are all qualities of mere objectivity, of techniques, of technology. They are the qualities of the successful industrialist.
The titles say it all: these are people oriented by What and How. They lack insight into Why. Taken as a collective mentality, they tend toward autism, toward living in a world of utility, resources, objects. If they cannot measure it, it doesn’t exist to them. They’re Six Sigma, to the sixth degree. Repeatability with the least variance.
The C-mind is too impatient to listen to anything they can’t grasp in the space of an Elevator Pitch, or an Executive Summary, or the back of a napkin. And no new insight can be conveyed in that space. So it has been years since they’ve known a new insight. They’re still stuck in the Industrial Age worldview. It’s been over 150 years since this worldview was revolutionary.
Strip out the Annual Report fluff, and their highest purpose is one thing only: profit for its own sake.
Is it any wonder that when they say “vision” — all they can produce are images of the future or plans to get there? In other words, Whats and Hows? They don’t even know what vision is.
And that in itself is okay. There is nothing wrong with people who think this way. Business cannot function without this kind of mind.
But it is increasingly clear that business cannot continue to merely function. It needs to take moral responsibility for its own fate. But with the C-Suite mind at the top, function is all business will ever do. It will operate like a big mindless machine.
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The best minds of business obsessively watch its own EEG — stock market fluctuations. They jump and jitter and panic or celebrate with each movement. Business confuses the movement of EEG with its mind. No wonder the economy just does whatever it does. No wonder the stock market seems to follow its own irrational logic of fluctuation, oscillation, mania and depression. No human mind is behind it. It’s pure subhuman reflex.
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We need to keep the C-Suite intact, with all the people who inhabit it. But above the C-Suite we need to build an A-Suite of minds directed by Why — by minds who understands the importance of profits, but who understand the purpose profits serve. We need minds who recognize that both part and the whole to which it belongs must be maintained and cultivated.
We need minds who understand both subjectivity and objectivity leading minds who know only objectivity, who cannot on their own constrain their own mastery, who stunt, degrade and enslave the world in all innocence. They know not what they do, but this is not a matter of reward or punishment. They know not what they do — that means they don’t know what they’re doing — and that means they need to be reassigned to a more suitable position in ranks of our culture, and that is certainly not where they’ve been: first place.
And who goes in the A-suite? The last people you’d ever imagine.
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The Industrial Revolution is anything but revolutionary now. The whole industrial worldview has grown so stale and boring and depressing that it’s ripe for revolution.
But this revolution will be nothing like a Marxist revolution. Marx was himself caught up in the industrial worldview and was only an antithesis to the thesis, not the synthesis he imagined. That is why communism failed. Like all antitheses it is even crappier than what it opposes. The cure is worse than the disease.
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It’s stupid to blow up a bridge when you are in a position to capture it.