The past weekend I escaped my current routine and ended up in Hotonne, France in a gathering in the name of world peace. The house where the gathering took place was so secluded from the rest of the world, that it gave space for self-reflection. Is life all about profit? The question had its place in a presentation by Alexander Schieffer, a professor at the university of Saint Gallen and some of his students. Their ideas lie in the belief that there needs to be a change in the current system, to reflect a new era of an “integral development.” The system we live in relies on a self-destructive cycle, while the proposed one relies on each of it’s parts working together to a achieve better results: “Combining four mutually reinforcing perspectives: enterprise & economics; nature & community; culture & spirituality (society); as well as science systems & technology.”
The nature of information, including the rise of platforms, online markets and the Internet itself, increases fairness, linked to the societal perspective from the model. The hot platform of today, Uber, shows this accurately by pricing and regulating the transportation service appropriately, taking into account country characteristics, time spent and distance. Never again will I ride a regular taxi in Panama City to be charged 3 times the market price. It must be clear that increased fairness is similar to, but not the same as increased customer bargain power.
Uber is just one example, but fairness is in many cases not the goal of the company, but an additional effect. How about consciously wanting the information strategies to include ways in which the other perspectives are leveraged? How about these include leveraging nature, instead of just reducing the damage caused to it, and leveraging society instead of leveraging a few individuals? What if we think about nature and society the same way current theories think about profit and companies’ sustainability and competitive advantage? I believe that the potential of information strategy to leverage the three perspectives: business, nature and society is enormous. Why then, just focus on business, if by doing so we come closer to our end?
To conclude, I will quote the same extract a wise economist and artist, Wolfgang Somary, shared with us this weekend. An excerpt from The Odyssey, of when Odysseus was stuck in a storm, holding to a rotten plank and was given a veil and instructions to save himself, he said: “I will not obey her yet, since the land, she said I would escape to, was far away when I saw it. This I shall do, and this seems best, to wait here as long as the timbers hold, and endure in misery, then if the seas beat the raft to pieces, swim, for want of a better plan”. Should we get started with a new system, or keep holding on to the, temporary plank?
