Upgrading the brains of global leaders

Google, Apple, Nike and McKinsey are on the growing list of companies to recognise the rewards of mindfulness.

Corporate managers usually excel at producing real-world results. Not always, though.

The corporate genius for achievement shrinks when the challenge is global and massively complex. A merger is one level of complexity. Sustainability is another. As Anna Birney, Head of the System Innovation Lab at Forum for the Future, observes: "The sustainability crisis is a spaghetti junction of cause and effect. It's the quintessential 'system' problem: you can't just pick out one strand and straighten it out. So, to effectively address it, we need system-based solutions. Introducing green products and services won't be enough, no matter how useful they may be."

It's a challenge that demands a new skill set if businesses are going to be part of the solution. Corporate managers will have to be comfortable with complexity, and develop problem-solving skills in the context of the massive interconnectedness of the world's problems.

Could it be that we need to learn to use our brains differently? Is a new 'executive operating system' required? Some think so. As Barrett C. Brown, a leadership consultant, puts it, "How a leader knows is at least as (if not more) important than what that person knows."

For Birney, it means a new understanding of leadership. "Currently, the term 'leader' suggests a person who shows the way on their own", she says. "It's individualistic and typically top-down. We need something different from sustainability leaders. They need to be skilled at intervening in systems. They need to be system innovators."

No corporate product-development team, no matter how talented, can fabricate a new executive 'brain-frame', or upgrade executives to system innovators. Inner work is required for these things. This isn't exactly a corporate core competence.

The very phrase 'inner work' brings to mind a culture that, if only in caricature, stands for everything corporations aren't: think loincloth-clad sadhus mouthing mantras on a mountaintop.

Yet it is precisely this - inner work leading to inner growth - that seems to be the missing link if corporations are to play their part in addressing the sustainability crisis.

They might one day take to heart Einstein's astute (and cited to the point of banality) observation that "You can't solve a problem at the level at which it was created"?

Google, Apple, Nike have underwritten training that supports a new executive brain-frame It's beginning to look like they might. Google, Apple, Nike, McKinsey, Procter Gamble Deutsche Bank, Yahoo and the Brazilian cosmetics company Natura are on the growing list of companies that have underwritten training programs that support the emergence of a new executive brain-frame, which includes, among other benefits, the ability to better address sustainability challenges.

- GreenFutures