Transformational Structures & Processes

This was a big week for me, in many ways. One of the highlights of the week was a meeting between the Working for Good Collaborative team and members of the board and management of the SOMO Business Cluster (a Sonoma County-based business incubator) as part of an ongoing process of exploration of collaboration. And in the context of the meeting, one of the highlight moments was one that has been building for a couple of weeks, with my friend and Working for Good Collaborator Velco Farina.

Velco is trained as an industrial engineer and MBA. He has worked as a consultant with McKinsey, Sapient, and Bain and most recently served as Director of Business Redesign at American Express where, this year, he won the Chairman’s Award for Innovation, for the work he did revitalizing the AMEX business in India. Velco and I have been talking much over the past several months and have met a few times, during which I have been introducing him to the ideas behind Conscious Business and many of the aspects of entrepreneurship that are beyond analytical tools. A few weeks ago I introduced Velco to Brian Robertson and Tom Tomison of HolacracyOne and their Holacracy model for governing and running organizations, which is based on an organic model, with distributed responsibility/authority/accountability and power, deeply embedded purpose and feedback mechanisms, grounded in consistent practices, that create transparent, resilient, and adaptive organizations.

As Velco expected, toward the end of our meeting with the SOMO group, one of their management team challenged us with a question something to the effect of “so, what is your business model and how can you prove that what you will do will generate sufficient ROI?” Now Velco is as good as a creator of business models and projections as you will find, with elaborate arrays of spreadsheets with clear assumptions and parameters. And he’s fast. Velco’s response touched me deeply and made a powerful point. Velco noted that we can produce any kind of projections anyone would want to see, but projections don’t really mean that much. The real question is (somewhat in Velco’s words with some of my own added here), can we create organizations that can quickly respond to changes in the environment and the marketplace that can operate transparently and build trust with their stakeholders, and catalyze a shared sense of purpose?

Certainly, we need to create businesses that serve a necessary purpose – that provide products and services that people want and need and, ideally, that serve society in some bigger way. But to do so successfully is not as much about how good our plan or financial projections look, but more about how are we going to organize ourselves, relate to each other, our stakeholders, and environment. If we aspire to building great companies, then we need to be relevant and deeply connected. We need to inspire and engage others to take on our mission as something noble and truly worthwhile. These are not things we can project on a spreadsheet.

As I made sure to stress to Velco subsequently, all of us in the Working for Good Collaborative feel so fortunate to have him as a teammate and to have his brilliant mind and razor sharp analytical skills in support of what we and others we work with are doing. And we all share a delight to know that these tools now have a larger context to function in. Rather than defining the context – as MBAs, consultants, et al are inclined to do – Velco is putting his tools to use to create companies that are Working for Good.