Year-End

It is the 31st of December, time to look back at the past year. By incident I just came across this short article in Harvard Business Review which I found really stimulating food for thought.

2009 has been a year of economic crisis, of "stormy weather". It didn't come as bad (yet?) as many feared one year ago... Sometimes it takes a crisis for people to change, to realize that something is not going as it should be. The "sense of urgency" is often considered as the first thing required to inspire a change, and I believe the real positive evolution of the last year or two is that globally people start to realise that there is a need to change - not only in terms of how we treat our environment, but also in the way how we run our economy. But then, one of the books that moved me this year was the one of Naomi Klein, the Shock Doctrine, in which she shows how and when a "sense of urgency" has been used by politicians as a justification for major changes. The frontier between a positive use of crisis and the creation of the "sense of urgency" and a negative one seems to be a fine line.

But to come back on the HBR article - what strikes me is that in all these cases of change, the debate is quite rational and doesn't really dive into the world of feelings, emotions, of pride and self esteem. I believe that the HBR article is not only applicable to people in companies - who really need to rediscover that they are working with people and not only with machines - and that people have feelings - but that the same is applicable on a global level. Our society can only change if we don't forget the 'humanity dimension' and if people learn how to really care about (and not only care for) others.