On his book Enduring Success: What We Can Learn from the History of Outstanding Corporations
Cover Interview of February 06, 2011
A close-up
A section in Chapter 3 on how companies learn over time and across space is titled “Learning Stories.”
Naturally, corporations love to tell heroic stories. They help to motivate people and inspire others to follow their example. Which makes sense. But great companies are also prepared to learn from their own mishaps rather than sweeping them under the carpet.
In the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell, for example, a powerful story related to Henry Deterding, the company’s former CEO. Henry was a brilliant businessman who engineered the merger between the British Shell Transport and Trading and Royal Dutch in 1907. His success put him in a position of unchallenged power. Unfortunately, after the nationalization of Shell by communist Russia, he felt that only Adolf Hitler could stop the enemies of capitalism. Fortunately, he retired before he could create any compromising links between Shell and Nazi Germany.
It is interesting how Shell dealt with this near disaster in subsequent years. We would expect them to quickly forget about the embarrassment. They did not. On the contrary, they were determined to learn from it.
When in 1964 McKinsey, an influential consulting company, recommended that Shell reorganizes and installs a strong CEO, the company remembered the story of Henry Deterding. They decided that, in a politically-sensitive industry like theirs, it would be better for a number of individuals to share responsibilities. So, instead, Shell installed a committee of managing directors. The outside world never liked its structure but Shell had learnt from its past.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
A close-up
A section in Chapter 3 on how companies learn over time and across space is titled “Learning Stories.”
Naturally, corporations love to tell heroic stories. They help to motivate people and inspire others to follow their example. Which makes sense. But great companies are also prepared to learn from their own mishaps rather than sweeping them under the carpet.
In the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell, for example, a powerful story related to Henry Deterding, the company’s former CEO. Henry was a brilliant businessman who engineered the merger between the British Shell Transport and Trading and Royal Dutch in 1907. His success put him in a position of unchallenged power. Unfortunately, after the nationalization of Shell by communist Russia, he felt that only Adolf Hitler could stop the enemies of capitalism. Fortunately, he retired before he could create any compromising links between Shell and Nazi Germany.
It is interesting how Shell dealt with this near disaster in subsequent years. We would expect them to quickly forget about the embarrassment. They did not. On the contrary, they were determined to learn from it.
When in 1964 McKinsey, an influential consulting company, recommended that Shell reorganizes and installs a strong CEO, the company remembered the story of Henry Deterding. They decided that, in a politically-sensitive industry like theirs, it would be better for a number of individuals to share responsibilities. So, instead, Shell installed a committee of managing directors. The outside world never liked its structure but Shell had learnt from its past.