281: Who is really in charge?
Dear friends
I am revisiting Laozi’s Book of Dao, through a recent translation by one of my favourite authors, Ken Liu (a Christmas gift from my parents who have graciously fed my book habit for over fifty years). This extract frames today’s letter.
“Nothingness, the origin of heaven and earth; presence the mother of all creation.
Empty the mind of desire, so you can take in Dao’s marvels.
Fill the mind with will, so you can discern Dao’s frontier.”
What we attend to shapes what we believe we can create.
/strategy
John Kay, in his wide-ranging book The Corporation in the 21st Century: Why (almost) everything we are told about business is wrong, tells the story of the changing ownership structures of British railways.
“In 1921 the British government forced the amalgamation of all railways into four companies of which the Great Western Railway was one; nationalisation followed in 1948, and a complex restructuring, described as privatisation, was effected in 1995. At the time of writing, GWR is operated under an 800-page franchise agreement between the British government and FirstGroup, which is principally a bus company. The trains are owned by specialist rolling stock leasing companies Angel Trains and Porterbrook. The track is owned and maintained by Network Rail, a state-owned company formed after the failure of Railtrack, a company that had been listed on the London Stock Exchange. If the GWR franchise is not renewed– and it won’t be, since the government has announced yet another reorganisation of the structure of Britain’s railways – then the agreement provides for most of the few rail assets that First-Group does own to be transferred to a new operator. Who are Angel Trains and Porterbrook? The two largest shareholders of Angel Trains are Allianz, the German insurance company, and AIMCo, each with 30 per cent of the stock of the company. AIMCo was established in 2008 by the government of the Canadian province of Alberta. It manages funds on behalf of various provincial pension funds and invests the reserves of that oil-rich province. Fifty-five per cent of the stock of Porterbrook is held by AMP, an Australian financial services business (formerly Australian Mutual Provident) now mainly engaged in the management of ‘super funds’ (Australian for individual and collective pension funds.”
He tells the story in service of a provocation: what does it mean to speak of capitalism and capitalists when ownership is so diffuse?
British Rail is by no means the only company that looks like this and so Kay’s provocation leads to an even more existential question, “Who is really in charge?”
Which in turn left me with a cautiously optimistic hypothesis, “If, in so many instances, ownership is diffuse, well then surely it is possible to intentionally shape the stories of what companies could and should do?”
It means, possibly, that as executives and leaders in large corporations we may have more space to influence than we might think we do.
Kay concludes his provocation, “Twenty-first-century business needs little capital, mostly does not own the capital it uses and is not controlled by the people who provide that capital”.
Well then…
//self
Anne Murphy Paul’ s The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain is one of my favourite books. As you’d expect, it explores all the ways we can improve the quality of our thinking by not thinking.
For example, if I know a client has a particularly emotionally tough decision to make, I might suggest that we discuss whilst walking in nature. Walking enables a different type of thinking. Being in nature feeds a different type of thinking. Using those non-brain ‘technologies’ enables better thinking. We do these intuitively: when you say to a colleague, “Let’s grab a coffee”, you’re recognising that a change in context refreshes our thinking. When you say, “Let’s have lunch”, you’re recognising some relationships and conversations unfold best over time.
Paul explains that cognitive scientists describe stories as ‘psychologically privileged’; we remember as much as 50% more of information conveyed to us in stories than from expository passages.
Stories are neurological simulators.
She notes, “when we listen to a story, our brains experience the action as if it were happening to us. Brain-scanning studies show that when we hear about characters emoting, the emotional areas of our brains become active; when we hear about characters moving vigorously, the motor regions of our brains are roused. We even tend to remember what characters in a story are said to remember and forget what the characters forget.”
In telling, reading and listening to stories we experience them, and those experiences enable us to generate new possibilities. We can change our worlds by changing the stories we tell.
Most of us grew up with an old story of someone in charge. Kay points us to an intriguing possibility: no one is.
/// soul
In The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede… Attention has consequences.”
Best wishes
Karl
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