Back From Moscow

I got back from Moscow two days ago and flicking through my passport noticed that my first visit was on the 2nd February 2006. The three years working on this programme with senior Russian executives have been a highlight in my working life.

The reasons for this are many. These director-level executives are highly experienced and, by anyone’s understanding, enormously succesful people.

What can my UK colleagues and myself possibly offer them? The truth is that I learn more from my Moscow colleagues than they learn from me. We learn together, really.

Recognising Urgency

“China and India are phenomenal innovators. We won’t just go down, we’ll go down big time if we don’t watch out. We have to think of the clever new ideas and be ahead of the game while we have the affluence and economic growth to invest in way-out concepts. That includes the way we work.”

This quote from Professor Cary Cooper in the Institute of Directors’ publication, Director, in 2005 communicates an urgency in recognising a changing economic order in the world. It is far from clear that the US and Europe still have the luxury of “affluence and economic growth”.

In an article in today’s FT entitled Why I Fear The West’s Luck Has Run Out, Luke Johnson says,

“So why should industrious Asians earn a tiny fraction of what citizens in the west earn? Especially when they have so much of the cash and productive resources, while we have deficits, high costs and poor demographics … for too long it has been more profitable in the west to finance consumption rather than production. That cannot continue.”

Perhaps the west is waking up from this collective madness and hopefully beginning to restore our focus on production, urgently recognising that expertise, knowledge and skills are core to economic value-creation.

Shifting Mental Models

It is not just China and India we have to worry about. One of the most refereshing things I have enjoyed about my Russian colleagues is that these experienced and successful people are willing to listen, think very deeply, challenge themselves and others, and act decisively.

They are phenomenal innovators, willing and able to step outside of their experience to consider different perspectives and possibilities. They are developing sophisticated critical and integrative thinking skills – integrative thinking is, according to Roger Martin “the ability to see a problem as a whole, resolve tensions among opposing ideas and generate innovative outcomes.”

Pettigrew and Fenton found this some time ago. This ability to navigate ‘dualities’ – apparent paradoxes or tensions – is common in innovating organisations.

By the way, the executives I am working with are self-selecting. The fact that they are on the programme demonstrates their willingness to change. Of course, not all Russian executives are willing to step outside their comfort zones – desire to carry on as usual in the face of crisis is I suppose a human trait.

Global Recession – Opportunity or Crisis?

So where am I going with this? Will the global economic crisis jolt some business leaders in the west into shifting their mental models, like my Moscow colleagues? I hope so. But already there are signs of the sort of risk-averse behaviour seen in previous recessions, where managements become more controlling and revert to old habits.

The opportunity to innovate is there for any business leader prepared to listen and act. We know what works. We know how to do it. There are no excuses.