Anyone who has ever worked in a large multinational or government bureaucracy may appreciate this quote from EF Schumacher:
“The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one’s ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed.”
In the 1970s, Schumacher published a book titled ‘Small is Beautiful – A study of economics as if people mattered’. The modern capitalist economy based on fossil fuel exploitation and consumption was clearly unsustainable, Schumacher argued. The ‘big is better’, ‘growth is good’ mantras that have driven economic orthodoxy for decades and, until recently, been the shibboleths at the heart of business planning throughout the world, would have infuriated him.
If he were alive today, perhaps he might ask: Have we been blinded by ‘big-ness’? With global financial systems in ruins and environmental catastrophe on our doorstep – shouldn’t we be asking where grandiosity has taken us? Majestic strategies, sweeping communications plans involving hyperbole and spin, an intolerance for ‘good’ and an exhortation to be ‘great’ and ‘greater’ – obscure the small, original, experimental, human-scale thoughts, ideas and actions that might, one day, seed something truly great. Something that lasts.
Some years ago I was fortunate to sit next to Arie de Geus at a business dinner on a beautiful summer’s night at a restaurant on Balmoral Beach in Sydney. Arie had just published a book called The Living Company, based on extensive research and his own experience as chief scenario planner for Royal Dutch Shell. He documented a number of long-lived companies, one that was over 900 years old, still thriving and constantly morphing into new shapes. I have never forgotten the principles for longevity that Arie discovered:
• fiscal restraint
• engaged with the world around them
• able to tolerate and encourage experiments at the edge
These ‘experiments at the edge’ are a case of ‘smallness’ in action. What is small and experimental one day, unproven and unorthodox, can become your core business tomorrow.
For example, which country has one of the fastest broadband speeds in the world? Answer – Estonia, a former Soviet Union principality, liberated in 1991, population 1.5 million, one of the fastest growing economies in the world, now often dubbed ‘e-stonia’ due to its strategic embrace of new technologies and the infrastructure needed to support them.
Smart decisions in the 1990s to leapfrog over 50 years of Soviet lethargy have meant that small and ravaged does not disaster make. In 2007, the business magazine Fast Company, put Estonia in the top ten ‘fast countries’ for creativity and innovation!
As the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead once said:
“Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
References
deGeus, Arie (1997), The Living Company, Harvard Business Review Press, Boston
Schumacher, E.F. (1973), Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, Abacus, London