From CSR to Sustainable Business – Transformational leadership in action
- Dr. Richard Straub Director of Corporate Services and EU Affairs The European Foundation for Management Development
President Peter Drucker Society Europe
www.EFMD.org
Dr Richard Straub gave the following speech at the EABIS Decennial Meeting, February 1, 2012. (The Academy of Business in Society
www.EABIS.org)
requirements of political correctness that you need to observe as a corporate executive. I consider myself as a jester of sorts – for those who want to listen, I am ready to be a sounding board, providing feed-back that they would not get from those who have a relationship of dependency with them. I am convinced we need to question permanently the way we are looking at issues and avoid thinking that we hold the one and only key to truth.
S
Critical and independent thinking includes the capacity to question the lenses through which we see the world. If critical thinking is one of the key characteristics of the much vaunted transformational leader, it should apply to us as well. Intolerance is born from beliefs that are no longer critically questioned and everybody else is expected to blindly follow. Critical thinkers who may have a well-founded divergent position are
70 Management Today | May 2012
ince I left my permanent IBM job some 6 years ago, I enjoy no more being constraint by the
then treated as heretics and renegades. I have seen a lot of this happening in some strands of the ecological movement.
Managing the economic performance of an enterprise is essential but I would argue it needs repositioning these days. Based on the agency theory and the ensuing shareholder value philosophy, corporate executives are increasingly operating in a market of expectations as Roger Martin calls it in his recent book Fixing the Game. This has removed executive management from the focus on business reality and hence from the customer. The senior executives live in a world of numbers that are supposed to represent the real world. But do they really? Drucker has defined the purpose of the business to create a customer. Based on this he saw marketing and innovation as the core functions of a business. However, with focus on the expectations of financial markets we can see innovation suffering as corporate management has the overriding priority to
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