Why is it that we let ourselves continue to refer to the thorniest business problems - of employee motivation, of vision setting, of integration of values and business priorities, of moral and ethical accountabilities - as the soft stuff?
When we actually know down deep, that the alleged soft stuff is actually the stuff that will undermine our full business delivery if ignored, left unattended or relegated to some dusty rule book.
It’s high time that business professionals stopped buying the rhetoric, faced reality and integrated the full range of business challenges into their accountability thinking.
You can concentrate on the alleged hard stuff of business all you want, but in the end the soft stuff will derail your carefully laid out business plans every time.
As in: culture will eat your strategy for lunch and then smile while you keep plugging away at the metrics, dogmatically restructure yourself into obsolence or reengineer your process for the umpteenth time to no effect.
As in: we can regulate the global Wall Street all we want but in the end if those who lead and work there don't systemically build in a culture of ethical responsibility to their ultimate customers, nothing much will change. And we will continue to invest in ways that have more to do with 18th century dog fight gamblling than an actual investment in companies that matter to us and the future. And so we will all experience and be co-responsible for financial crashes that take us all down together.
As in: we can keep talking about equality and meritocracy in the workplace in company brochures or try to legislate anti-discriminatory practices, but until we realize that open-heartedness and open-mindedness are a prerequisite of leadership, nothing will actually change.
It is time to wake up and face the 'scary' soft stuff, with grace, with determination and with real skills. Yes. It is important to project confidence, know your excel, wield a powerpoint with ease and know the nuts and bolts of your particular preferred area of a business enterprise. But it is also vitally important to you, to your business and to your communities, that as business professionals we also consider such matters as the full value of business in society, the power of work to be one's calling, the chance that you may actually affect another real person's life by what you are able to do at work.
So how about we collectively step up to our fullness, face ALL the stuff as the whole system it is a part of and be the leaders we have been waiting for? It will be daunting, it will be more complex, it will ask the best of each of us. But hey, what else have you got to do with the one and only you that you are lucky enough to be this time around? Be someone else? Live less than the 100%ness of yourself? Go around acting foggy headed? Be perpetually rationalizing away your power? Really?
