In our ordinary experiences with other people, we know that approaching each other in a machinelike way gets us into trouble.
— Peter Senge
A well-managed business will have a high return on invested capital. But that's a consequence. It's not a way to manage a business.
One industrial age belief is that GDP or GNP is a measure of progress. I don't care if you're the President of China or the U.S., if your country doesn't grow, you're in trouble. But we all know that beyond a certain level of material need, further material acquisition doesn't make people happier.
The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.
Governments, especially democratic ones, are short-term and nationalistic.
The Industrial Age is not sustainable. It's not sustainable in ecological terms, and it's not sustainable in human terms.
Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset. As people have been noting for years, the majority of strategic initiatives that are driven from the top are marginally effective - at best.
The most universal challenge that we face is the transition from seeing our human institutions as machines to seeing them as embodiments of nature.
You go to any MBA program, and you will be taught the theory of the firm, that the purpose of the firm is the maximization of return on invested capital. I always thought this was a kind of lunacy.
Business has a way of talking about how to create value, which is in some way isn't bad... We just need to start thinking about if the value we want to create is consistent with all social and environmental well being.
I'm really interested in how you create a whole new economy of recycling. It's literally the 'underground economy.' All this stuff that on the surface creates growth and profit, ends up with waste, junk, and CO2. So how do you make it economic to bring new players into the ball game?
If you are realistic about how our present society works, the economic clout - and a lot of the political clout, frankly - is in the business sector. And it's the locus of innovation.
The company-as-a-machine model fits how people think about and operate conventional companies. And, of course, it fits how people think about changing conventional companies: You have a broken company, and you need to change it, to fix it.
Most leadership strategies are doomed to failure from the outset.
How do you know what people value? Well, you watch what they buy. How do we know what products to create? Well, it's based on what they value.
There's a lot of American kids think their food comes from the grocery store and the concept of seasonality has no meaning to them whatsoever.
Nobody likes to throw stuff away. It's just antithetical to our sense of being a person. But we're all habituated to that way of living today.
Innovation requires resources to invest, and you can see many companies pulling back and going into an intense protective mode in a major extended period of financial distress.
In the Machine Age, the company itself became a machine - a machine for making money.
