The pace of progress in business is painfully slow

When I was 18, in 1981, I wrote an essay as part of my application to Cambridge University. The theme was the importance of switching from fossil fuels for electricity generation and vehicle propulsion to cleaner and renewable energy, taking advantage of the dramatic breakthroughs, especially in harnessing wave power and tidal power, that had taken place in the 1960s and 1970s.

This strategic switch would solve multiple problems simultaneously: lower pollution, ending reliance on finite resources, diversifying sources of energy to reduce economic impact of volatility in commodity prices. I was not aware of climate change at the time. One of the problems with the switch to clean energy was the ‘unsexy’ (I don’t think I used that term) image of electric cars, as they were associated with milk carts and elderly men on a golf course.

Nearly 20 years later, I began a role as news editor on Personnel Today magazine, noting that the vast bulk of value in businesses at the end of the 20th Century was bound up in the skills and ability of the people employed, more than physical assets. Rather excitingly, some academic studies showed you could be highly successful commercially by treating people well. This was perfectly logical, but still contrary to the dominant beliefs in the upper echelons of business.

So for 40 years I have been following the progress of renewable energy, and for a quarter of a century I have monitored the readiness of the business world to implement the findings on the highly empowered workplace that treats employees with respect and dignity.

In the case of renewables and electric cars there has been some significant investment — although mostly from the 2010s onwards.

As regards the exciting future in which businesses understood that their human capital was essentially their working capital, there should also have been significant progress. Right?

Wrong. A quarter of a century later, if anything workplace conditions are deteriorating, work intensification is worsening according to a recent report in the Financial Times, and unimaginative business leaders are using technology as a tool of surveillance, not empowerment. Hundreds of thousands of employees retire as soon as they can afford to, in the case of many professionals this is before they have turned 60. The UK government is desperately trying to lure them back to work with fiscal measures, carefully tiptoeing around the elephant in the room, which is the toxic workplace. Correspondents in their droves have written to The Times and the Financial Times in recent weeks to confirm that this is the underlying cause of quitting the workplace in middle age. When it comes to implementing the evidence base on human capital many employers, probably most, have ignored it and gone backwards to the Fordist era.

So it amuses me when heads of business schools and the like say that the pace of progress in business is fast and accelerating. I wish. The slowness of adaptation to the evidence base on humane management and sustainable energy seems to reflect a belief that the purpose of human beings is to serve the economy; and in turn that the economy is a generator of material wealth that sits mysteriously above the planet and the workers upon which it ultimately depends.

An alternative would be to assert that the purpose of business and technology is to improve life for humans, without destroying the planet and actually — news alert — humans kind of need the planet.

The pace of change in business is superficially fast, in that there is lots of churn and technological invention. But the profession of management is intensely conservative. Collectively, business is a laggard at fixing the problems it creates — indeed doesn’t even see it as business’s responsibility — and is painfully slow at implementing the evidence base on what constitutes an effective and commercially sustainable business or economy. There has been the kind of progress in the past 30–40 years that I thought would take around five. This is the result of a thinking error: treating social and environmental considerations as ‘soft’, rather than as fundamental elements of the economy.

My application to Cambridge University in 1981 was unsuccessful (to be fair the physics entrance paper was beyond me ….). Since then it has been curious to discover that many people who are way more intelligent than me can also be more dim.