WHEN I opened Facebook recently, a survey popped up. Did I agree the social media platform was ‘good for the world’?
The survey raises another question: whether such lofty objectives are useful ways for companies to motivate staff.
I subscribe to the idea that you do not need to set world-changing goals to change the world. A few years ago, I heard Vint Cerf, chief internet evangelist at Google, say that as he and others pioneered the early internet in the 1970s, they ‘were driven by a desire to solve a particular problem’ rather than by a poetic mission statement about connecting the globe.
Recently, though, together with an eclectic group that included a former Mexican president, the chairman of Centrica, the UK power and gas company, and the artistic director of London’s Southbank Centre, I spent some time imagining what utopia might be like. It felt good.
Organisers of The Performance Theatre, an annual gathering of leaders, banned us from getting bogged down in the ‘how’ part of the solutions. But the workshops they staged — inviting us to consider what the world would look like in 30 years if, say, gender equality were achieved, organised crime extinguished, or abundant, cheap energy made available — helped shed light on the route to those goals.
Committing time to such indulgent fantasies does not sit well with everybody, of course.
As one speaker pointed out, if you pursue the game of saying “Yes, and ...” rather than “No, because . . .” to a series of propositions, you arrive quite often and quite quickly in a world of ‘unicorns and daisy meadows’.
One participant complained to me afterwards that we had squandered a chance to discuss pressing global issues such as the rise of Isis, or Brexit, for which the UK voted five days after the Performance Theatre meeting.
Yet while it sounds corny, practising positive responses to imaginary plans makes it easier to overcome objections the next time you discuss a large project.
How do these fluffy motivational techniques survive in the hothouse of big, profit-oriented organisations?
Patagonia, the Californian manufacturer of outdoor clothing, has a high-sounding objective not to ‘cause unnecessary harm’ to the planet with its products. As Rick Ridgeway, its vice-president of public engagement, told me recently, the company is aware it is ‘never going to get there’. The mission nevertheless fuels various initiatives that advance the group gradually towards the goal. (It is good PR, too, but that is another story.)
Pascal Soriot, chief executive of AstraZeneca, set a goal in 2013 of developing 10 entirely new medicines by 2020, and ‘[improving] the lives of 200m patients’. The effect of such ambitious thinking is entirely practical. “People take this [set of goals] and think ‘so — what does this mean for me as a scientist?’” says Mr Soriot.
I am sceptical about the ability of every start-up to change the world. Sometimes it is good enough — and lucrative enough — to develop a new way to organise email or to satisfy a need for faster video streaming. The vision “has to be something that makes sense to the individual”, says Didier Elzinga, chief executive of Culture Amp, which develops employee engagement applications. As well as believing in the mission, he says, people also want to feel they are contributing to the advance towards it.
Some global problems do require a world-sized goal. The internet would not exist if the immediate problems of computer interconnection solved by Mr Cerf and others had not also worked at scale.
Similarly, Facebook’s mission is to ‘give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected’. But cubicle-bound engineers or accountants need a bridge to connect them to those ‘daisy meadows’.
Facebook used to have the mantra to ‘move fast and break things’ as an encouragement to experimentation en route to its goal. Announcing a prosaic new version in 2014 — ‘move fast with stable infra[structure]’ — Mark Zuckerberg linked it to a commitment to ‘fix all major bugs within 48 hours’.
My bet is that many Facebook developers are as excited by the prospect of squashing a new bug as they are about building something that is good for the world. But they will never get close to the second objective if they do not meet the first.
Twitter: @andrewtghill
Published in Dawn, Business & Finance weekly, July 11th, 2016
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