Organizational Change, Revolutionary Sustainability: Peter Senge

Image Credit: Business Week. Dr. Peter Senge


Dr. Peter Senge, of MIT, is widely regarding in organization and business studies as one of the field's finest thinkers. I view Senge as one of the most original business minds. He and his collaborators sat down with Business Week to discuss his book on sustainability, The Necessary Revolution. As usual, Peter provides a lucid and vast array of connected ideas that lead to new approaches. I particularly appreciate Senge as he understands corporate culture and priorities, and speaks to business from inside the community, but with unique ideas that generally are not found in some (most?) companies. He is very adept at holding a mirror up, and showing the deep side of excellence and innovation in the top companies that are extremely successful. An excerpt from the interview:

In The Necessary Revolution, you profile people, working independently or within companies or organizations, who are trying to bring about a more sustainable world. As you learned their stories, what patterns emerged?

The first is obvious: People have to be passionate. These are innovators in a fundamental sense, and innovators innovate because there is something that they are passionate about. Second, they all in different ways were able to step back and see a bigger picture. This is a huge challenge for people in companies, because so many companies are dominated by short-term perspective and because lots of people in key positions simply aren't very good or don't care very much about the bigger picture. Watch how the decisions are made. Are they thinking of the value of the company 10 years after they retire, or are they thinking about the value of their stock options this year?

The other two things we focused on are the ability to connect with lots of people and collaborate across boundaries—you could call it high levels of relational intelligence. The final element that we saw again and again is a shift [in strategy] away from "we've got to stop doing x, y, or z" and all the negativism that tends to pervade these issues.

Can you give some specific examples?

Nike is a great example of these last two qualities. The company's [eco-friendly Considered system] came into being because of two women who were consummate networkers and who realized that "we're never going to change this culture by convincing people that toxins are bad and that we should be less bad. What's going to make people really passionate is the idea that we can do something that no one has done before and that it will be a great thing for athletes." So they started talking to designers and getting them excited about different kinds of shoes. They created the Organic Exchange for cotton because there wasn't enough on the market. They wanted to design running singlets that were compostable. Within five years they had a network of their best designers really passionate about these design challenges. These are all tough, tough problems; the only way to solve them is to get people excited.(MORE at top...)