The antidote is to build future-proof businesses that see doing good as good for business. This isn’t just a cute tagline – it is a core pillar of the DNA of a future-proof business.
Our team at TomorrowToday helps organisations to understand what a future-proof DNA looks like, and to identify the drivers of disruptive change taking us into that future. Contact us to discover more about our work.
TRANSCRIPT
We understand that politicians might be assassinated, and they’re normally surrounded by a lot of security to make sure that that doesn’t happen. But these days, maybe CEOs of big companies are equally at risk.
My name is Graeme Codrington. Welcome to ThrowForward Thursday, where every week we jump into the future and see what’s going on there and whether there’s something we can learn from it today.
Today, though, we don’t have to really jump into the future at all our team has been thinking about this possibility of CEOs of companies being targeted by assassins, and then on December the fourth, 2024, it happened in Manhattan in the United States, the CEO of United Healthcare, gun down in the streets.
There’s obviously a lot of speculation, and I’m not a news agency, so we’re not sure exactly what happened or why, but it does seem as if this was somebody disgruntled by the benefits that they were getting, or I suppose not getting from United Healthcare.
United Healthcare has been in the news a lot over the last few years for a number of different reasons. One is that they have one of the lowest approval rates of any medical insurance companies in the United States. A third of all claims are rejected. They also have a lawsuit against them, indicating that the AI model that they use in order to do most of the work of approving or rejecting claims is fundamentally flawed. And we’re going to have to do another episode on AI again. The number of people who are just badly abusing Generative AI and using it for things that it shouldn’t be used for at all is just insane.
And then another lawsuit against the United Healthcare executives is that a number of their executives, including the CEO and chairman, chief financial and people officers, all sold significant share options a few days before a massive investigation was announced of the firm. Information they would have had but wasn’t available to the public and had a knock-on impact on what they were able to provide for their clients.
So it’s possibly understandable why somebody would have been angry at the firm but then to obviously go out and target and assassinate the CEO is taking that just a step up. ‘Are CEOs safe?’ I suppose is a conversation in boardrooms and executive suites this morning.
At our team at TomorrowToday, we have a disruption radar. We keep our eye open for big, significant forces that are changing the shape of the world. And one of the things we’re keeping our eye on at the moment is angry people. Angry people all over the world are changing the rules. Politically this last year, 70 countries, around about 70 countries had elections, and in almost all of them, angry people demanded change from their governments.
In just the last few days, before I recorded this video, we’ve seen angry people in South Korea pushing back against a President who attempted to impose martial law. We’ve seen angry people in France dissolving their government and causing political chaos. So obviously, there are lots and lots of examples of angry people politically and in wars and war zones all around the world.
But what happens if those angry people are just angry at the lack of products and services that they are getting from anything from the airline they’re flying on to the health insurance products they thought they had purchased? And what happens if that anger gets so big, so bold, so angry, that it turns into disastrous, violent action? It’s possible, and it might even become something that we consider to be normal in the future.
So how should businesses respond? One of the things we do with TomorrowToday is help companies to build a framework for future sustainability and success. Not just sustainability from an ESG green perspective, but sustainability in terms of being able to be successful in a time of deep disruptive structural change.
One of the principles that forms part of our model is the idea of business for good. The idea that doing good or being good is good for business, and that goes against some of what a lot of businesses might think from a capitalistic perspective, where your focus is more on squeezing shareholder value, squeezing staff members’ productivity out of your staff.
But what happens if a way to future-proof your business is not to look at maximising the monthly or quarterly profit or turnover, but rather to maximise how much good you can bring to your industry, the good you can do for your employees and the lives that they live, the good that you can do for your market and your clients and your potential clients. Seizing the opportunity of an angry planet filled with angry people who are experiencing big squeezing and lots of inequality and shifts in the geopolitical environment towards multipolarity and changes in the world around us.
If you can take advantage of all of the big disruptive forces that are coming our way in the near future, and through that opportunity could build a business that stands out from the rest of the competition that people want to work for, that clients want to buy products and services from, well, then you will have done a good thing. And maybe working out what doing good means in your industry might be a key to unlocking that.
Let me give you a historical example to help you think through this. Back in 1913, Ford made record profits, $10 million in 1913 money, at the beginning of the following year, just before they didn’t know World War One was coming at the time. What did Ford do? He doubled the pay of his $25,000 lowest-paid employees. Ford was not a very nice man, but he didn’t do this because he was nice or not. He did it so that he could retain the talent he had, attract more talent, and get more out of his staff.
Then a few years later, what did he do? He went from a 60-hour working week, 6 days a week, 10-hour shifts, to a 40-hour work week, 5 days a week, 8-hour shifts. And you might think that, what? 30% reduction in working hours. Again, he didn’t do it because he was nice. He did it because he had done the research in time and motion studies to see that when you give your staff a little bit more time off and a little bit more opportunity to recover. The reward that you get is higher quality, higher engagement, faster working. And he actually got more out of his factories by asking for fewer hours from his people.
Am I suggesting that your company should do this, double its wages, and reduce work? Should we go to a four-day work week and double salaries at the same time? No, that’s not the suggestion. But it’s certainly something to think about and maybe a way in which you could do good. Just an example, and you might find other cleverer ways to do it. But I’m pretty sure that if we don’t, our CEOs are not safe. Angry people are not going to get less angry just because it turns to January or February or March. Angry people are going to get more angry in the next few years, and they’ve got to take their anger out on something or someone.
Don’t mean to be ominous or dark, and certainly, this is not something I would wish or a prediction, but it could happen, and we need to be thinking about what we can do to build businesses that are future-proof and contribute positively to the future.
That’s what it means at TomorrowToday and our team when we say that we need to learn how to think like a futurist. It’s not predicting the future, but it’s looking at the possibilities and options, deciding what we can do today to ensure that we take advantage of the opportunities and don’t get caught up in the horrific possibilities of the future.
If we can help you to think this through, if we can help you to look at some of the principles of what it means to be future-proof and ready for the future, please make sure you contact our team. Get in touch with me, we’d be happy to show you what we can see about the future and what it might mean for you today. I’ll see you again next week in the future.
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For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognised brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.