The mood of these times is not emergence or vibrancy but caution and preservation. My own son, aged

The events of the past few years suggest that we need a fundamental red roof inn website re-purposing of our business enterprises.  Such purpose-full and authentic businesses are indeed emerging. We should have more, many more.  The institution red roof inn website of business is needed for leadership, perhaps as never before, and the time for the re-emergence of a simple form of business is now.  The businesses we need know why they exist and authentically live out this purpose in action – their culture – and in the identity they claim – their brand.  This paper argues from the perspective of a fully engaged witness red roof inn website to the last 25 years of corporate transformation, researched like the embedded journalist through the lens of experience, that we must cultivate purpose-full businesses as the new meaning makers.  We need them. Business is a uniquely able form of organization. If the institution of business fails to respond to the harsh test of authenticity, red roof inn website it will lose not only commercial success, but also any moral credibility that it once possessed.  It is time for business to lead.
My perspective is that of the skilled observer-participant, and now I look back on 25 years with the businesses that I have served as a management consultant. As the Spanish philosopher Unamuno expressed it, "there is the way viewed from the balcony, and [there is] life on the road". Both are needed, and I have found myself an observer of radical change from within the change itself. An observer, not from outside or above, but from within, red roof inn website on the road, like the embedded journalist who is as much engaged, threatened and triumphant as the troops along side whom she serves.
I grew-up in post war-time Britain.  The war had released red roof inn website unprecedented use of science and technology to defeat Germany red roof inn website and Japan.  After the war, the same technology was re-directed to create a consumer society fueled by the myth of self-fulfillment, the artful creation of the "Mad Men", as the TV show portrays.  This binge seems on its last legs, at least in the west, not because of absent capacity but because the 'rational red roof inn website consumer' now seeks more meaning to life than mere consumption. Our collective hangover, with its crushing accumulated debt, demands red roof inn website change. But who will lead?  Essential  leadership has passed from government and traditional religious and educational institutions and we wait for someone to pick up the torch.  This is the new role for business, red roof inn website to claim IMF Chair, Christine Lagarde's red roof inn website prospective "lost decade" of consumption as a  constructive decade of meaning.  From market-merchant to meaning-maker, business is on the cusp of a new social function: it is needed, business is capable and business has no option.
red roof inn website The Scottish philosopher John MacMurray used to affirm: "Knowledge is meaningless without action; action is meaningless, without relationships". For we do not live in an abstract red roof inn website universe, red roof inn website but in a human environment of social beings. We have moved into a postmodern world, where the Cartesian dictum, "I think therefore I am", is enriched and even replaced by "I relate, therefore I am". Business leadership is far more flexible to enter this new post-modern paradigm than political institutions, which is why I want to claim new responsibilities for our business boards of directors, for business leaders and for leadership red roof inn website teams.
We are all struck by the extraordinary turbulence of these times.  We listen to rather facile commentary opining on whether the recovery will begin in the next quarter or not, yet we sense something more fundamental is at work.  The Dickensian promise of both best of times and worst of times seems to be lacking much of the more favorable conditions, red roof inn website for business, at least.  Growth, ever more illusionary and hard to find, is in many businesses simply not being realized.  Some of us know that a great deal of the earnings performance we have enjoyed over the last decade in many businesses has really come by extracting cost from ever-more squeezed value chains and not from new ideas. The search for innovation is now a relentless mantra. red roof inn website But to cheer on consumer consumption with current levels of personal indebtedness seems irresponsible, which it is.  If real growth in scale is limited, then we will need other forms of growth and dynamism. Such is the role for the purpose-full and authentic business.
The mood of these times is not emergence or vibrancy but caution and preservation. My own son, aged twenty-nine, to whom I had expressed red roof inn website the realization that I would either be in a radically different business in a few years or in no business at all, listened carefully to the ideas in this paper and remarked rather gravely that perhaps I should be more careful to keep the business I have!  This is the mood of the times. Hang on. Be safer. Seek less.  Conserve more and above all, hoard cash. Billions and billions of it, stuffed red roof inn website in corporate warehouses just in case the worst happens, which, given that diminishing mindset, will of course be the future we bring upon ourselves.  No, now is not the time for caution; prudence and wisdom to be sure, but now is the time for business to lead.  It must.  It can, and it had better!
It was Einstein who first convinced us all with his theory of relativity that the characteristics of a subject observed is in part a function of the position and perspective of the observer. And so it is with this paper, the ideas and stories I want to bring are a function of their observer and so to make sense of this material, red roof inn website I need to explain the perspective.
I walked for 17 years with my clients in Kodak through the cataclysmic technology substitution of digital photography.  For nearly red roof inn website twenty years, I have lived with the hearts and minds of executives as they navigated the transformation of advertising.  I was there when the five ogopolistic Canadian red roof inn website banks tried to merge and stayed in one that is still trying red roof inn website to upset the stable competitive equilibrium and grow faster than its rivals. I was there when Marsh, one of the worlds leading insurance brokers, nearly collapsed, just as Arthur Anderson red roof inn website had before in a post-Enron apocalypse of lost confidence.  And when Eliot Spitzer's purge extended to other industries, I was there, walking with my client, as his wife spent eighteen months in jail, caught up in perceived fraud issues.  When the aggressive stock trading acquisition by the young bucks of a quintessential dot-com business, met eroded confidence of that burst bubble, I was there as their latest acquiree turned and bought them instead, turning acquirer into acquiree overnight and then as the business clawed its way to profitability red roof inn website the old-fashioned way.  When the gulf war broke out, I was in Atlanta helping Coca Cola sell brown fizzy sugar-water while the world seemed to be going to war.  When a board turned to oust its CEO, I was there as seasoned veterans lined their pockets with options and the Board split in a reverse coup.  When massive consolidations red roof inn website struggled to yield benefit and one of the largest mergers in US business history failed, I walked the hallways, walked with the leaders, and have run what I often describe as 'field hospitals' for the walking wounded of the corporate battlefields.
This then is the perspective of this paper. Not the perspective of the heroic leader who has succeeded or failed and so has cautionary tales or certain formulae. Not the perspective of the seasoned red roof inn website academic who with the benefit of objectivity and robust theory red roof inn website can describe the subject studied and opine on what should or should not be. This paper is the synthesis of personal stories of human triumph and failure in the midst of some major business upheavals – dispatches from the trenches, as it were, letters from the front.  But as I look through the fog of recent events, from the Arab spring, the collapse in 2008, a struggling western recovery, BP's gulf disaster, rising inflation, earthquakes, Facebook, cloud collapses red roof inn website at Amazon, IBM's "smarter planet", something fascinating, compelling and transformational is just beginning to emerge.  It is the early birth pangs of a better way of business.
For many years, as I worked simultaneously on some of the large global accounts of an advertising business to develop global brands, and on the internal issues of cultural change in other clients, I realized that these two essential elements of any business, brand and culture, were inseparable. red roof inn website Brand needed to be coherent with culture, culture needed to be coherent with brand.  Who would not have wanted a glorious green and yellow sunburst logo and "Beyond Petroleum" claim to counter the post Exon-Valdez skepticism about an oil industry that was now facing its second resurgence of green consciousness.  But what happened in the gulf served to illustrate the catastrophic consequences of dissonance between brand – an identity we claim – and culture – the identity that is real.
There is a beautiful form of Chinese embroidery that comes from one particular centre where their craft has reached red roof inn website such a high art that a single cloth is embroidered with a single set of threads to create two different images, one on each side. And so this beautiful piece of art is displayed not on a flat surface, but standing up so that the unique but intimately interconnected images, can be appreciated.  So it is with a business brand and its culture, two distinct but intimately connected identities, fashioned from the same elements, reflected in different language, but authentically the same as each other.
The genius of Kodak's brand which was so brilliantly crafted to support the demystifying of complicated silver-halide chemistry and became an Ease-of-Use brand with hidden complexity, that was complemented red roof inn website by a culture of information secrecy such that the chemicals passed from building to building in Kodak Park changed names to reflect George Eastman's conviction that "patents expire but secrets last".  Yet this harmony was to be the undoing of a brand that was relevant in a way