This Focused Performance Weblog started life as a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective, but is in the process of evolving towards primary content on interactive and mobile marketing. Think of it as about Focusing marketing messages for enhanced Performance. If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Friday, January 09, 2009
Charles Handy on Slowing Down -- On last night's Marketplace radio show, business philosopher Charles Handy got into the economic situation, and ended the interview with a very appealing scenario for the future...
Ryssdal: So now what then? I mean, if Adam Smith -- who wrote "The Wealth of Nations" that we all know about -- if he's right, and we got it wrong 250 years later, now what do we do?
Handy: Well, I think governments are faced with a difficult problem. They are trying to get people to spend. But it does seem a rather un-Adam Smith idea to get people to go out shopping in order to get the economy going again. More "useless things," in other words. But in order to get that happening, they have reduced the base rate from the Federal Reserve or the Bank of England, in order to get people finding it easier to borrow. But actually there are more savers than borrowers in society. And so, of course, now the savers are not going to save because there's no incentive to it. So, I'm not sure that the solution is going to be easy to get by, and I think it'll take about three years for things to bottom out. But there may be some good news in all of that. I mean we may get back to a saner kind of world -- what Adam Smith called "cultivation" or "civilization" -- where we don't all sort of spend our life trying to make money, to buy things we don't really need to impress the neighbors, and so on. Where we actually do work -- not 60 hours a week, but 40 hours a week. Where we actually do take holidays. Where we actually get to know our kids again. Where it actually becomes smart to have a tiny car, to walk and bicycle and these sorts of things. And we may find we enjoy it actually just as much as the hectic pace that we've seen in recent years. I've often said that capitalism, particularly in America, is a very exhausting business. It tires people out.
Along the same lines, David Armano also talks about slowing down.
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