A reflection that is not very far my usual discourse since it’s about optimization under resource constaintes. Most of all human resources.
Everybody know that a company’s goal is to make money in order to create value for its shareholders without whom it wouldn’t exist.
As time went by the need for making profit was turned into the need for maximizing it. A vision that made possible the strongest and longest period of growth, more than a decade ago. But it seems that the engine is now jamming with consequences we can all observe in our daily lives.
At a corporate level it implies the will of doing always more and keep with growth rates that are incompatible with the mere logic. A logic that becomes counter productive when it lead to halve strategies and promising linear performances where people end one day or the other by meeting a ceiling. Both leading to cyclic crisis.
Outside of companies, this lead to a period when, for the first time, growth creates poverty, this poverty being a threat for tomorrow’s growth, destroying current markets and making it impossible for new ones to emerge.
In one word, we have the evidence that, in order to continue to grow rich tomorrow, people must may not ask for the impossible today. In other words one don’t run a marathon by linkinng up sprints.
The event co-organized by Danone and HEC which I attended recently gave me the idea or reading again a collection of Antoine Riboud’s speeches and interviews (Antoine Riboud : Un patron dans la cité
You can find the "original" french version of this blog here
