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| ISBN-13: | 9781633882423 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Prometheus Books |
| Publication date: | 09/13/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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The Quantum Leader
A Revolution in Business Thinking and Practice
By Danah Zohar
Prometheus Books
Copyright © 2016 Danah ZoharAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63388-242-3
CHAPTER 1
ENTERING THE QUANTUM AGE
In late 2014, China Daily published a profile of Haier's CEO Zhang Ruimin titled "A Chinese Business Model For the Internet Age." The profile highlighted Haier's radical management approach, company culture, and corporate structure. It stressed Haier's flatted, entrepreneurial platform structure, its borderless management methodology, its culture of constant self-questioning and co-creation, and its consumer-driven design and manufacturing practice. In November of that same year, in a letter inviting me to meet Zhang, a member of Haier's Strategy Department wrote,
What Haier has embarked on early this year is an effort to transform itself into an efficient platform for "makers." It is an overarching strategy adopted by its CEO Mr. Zhang Ruimin. We have been following your Quantum Management thinking and believe it is the one that can guide our path in the implementation of the strategy.
Haier is China's global domestic appliances and "white goods" manufacturer, a semiprivately owned company that has seized 14 percent of the global market. It is one of many Chinese companies embarking on a new quantum management revolution, taking Chinese business thinking into the Quantum Age. There are others in the West's Silicon Valley, companies experimenting with radically new structural and leadership practices, companies taking their lead from thinking in the "new" sciences born in the twentieth century and now really shaping the world in the twenty-first.
It is not new for management thinking and practice to take its lead from science. For the past three hundred years, science has been the dominant influence behind nearly all human thinking and activity. Through applied science, first the Industrial Revolution and then subsequent revolutions in medicine, public health, the nature of war, transportation, and now the still unfolding computer revolution, technology has transformed beyond all recognition the way we live and relate on this planet. In terms of technology alone, there has been more change in the past fifty years than all previous change since the Stone Age.
But the scientific thinking of the past three hundred years, the research, the discoveries, the theories about how life and the universe have evolved, of what they are made, of how they function, has also transformed beyond all recognition our thinking about ourselves. They have changed our assumptions about how we function, of who and what we are, of our place in the general scheme of things and thus the meaning of our lives. The scientific thinking of the seventeenth-century physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton has pervaded every corner of the human mind, and thus all the creations and products of our minds.
Newtonian science gave rise to a general Newtonian worldview. Still today, Newton's model of a machinelike, clockwork universe in which all things are determined by three simple iron laws, and thus all things are certain and predictable, underpins the Newtonian psychology we assume about our own behavior and relationships; it underpins the Newtonian medicine still practiced in our hospitals, and the Newtonian management taught by our best business schools. Newton's ideas about atoms underpins our Western taste for individualism, our fear of the collective, and even our preference for Western-style democracy. Though you are most likely wholly unaware of it, if you live in or are influenced by the Western world, you live with a Newtonian mind-set and believe in a Newtonian you.
But a radically new way of thinking runs through the scientific work that first began with the discovery of quantum physics at the start of the twentieth century, and we have yet to catch up with it. New concepts, new categories, a wholly new vision of physical and biological reality mark a sharp break with nearly everything that science held dear or certain in earlier centuries. The transition to this new thinking has been so profound and so abrupt that it constitutes a Second Scientific Revolution. This new scientific revolution, I believe, promises a revolution of comparable magnitude in our understanding of ourselves, a new way of living in society and a new way of doing business. At the deepest level, it would be a spiritual revolution. Just as Newtonian science gave rise to an all-embracing Newtonian worldview, quantum science lays the foundation for a new Quantum Age.
The old science was framed by Absolutes — absolute space and absolute time, absolute certainty. The new science stresses the relative and the indeterminate, the uncertainty that lies at the heart of all reality. The old science told us that mind and conscious observers play no role in the making or running of the way things are in the physical universe. Material reality is just "out there" and I a passive witness, someone who just finds myself in a world of forces beyond my control. The new science says we live in a "participative universe" where conscious observers/agents make reality happen, where we are responsible for not just our own actions but for the world itself. Where the old science stressed continuity and continuous, linear change, the new science is full of quantum leaps, complexity, catastrophes, and sudden surges into chaos.
The old science portrayed a physical universe ofseparate parts (atoms) bound to each other by rigid laws of cause and effect, a universe of things connected by force or influence. Quantum science gives us the vision of an entangled universe where everything is subtly connected to everything else, indeed where everything is a part of everything else. Influences are felt in the absence of force or signal; correlations develop spontaneously ("synchronicity"); patterns emerge from some order within. Where the Newtonian scientist reduced everything to its component parts and a few simple forces acting on them, the quantum or complexity scientist focuses on the new properties or patterns that emerge when parts relate to form wholes. A universe where nothing new or surprising ever happens is replaced by a self-organizing universe of constant creation. The quantum scientist learns that things cannot be described in isolation from their environment or context, and that wholes are greater than the sum of their parts. In the new science, organized simplicity gives way to self-organized complexity. We are in charge, and nothing is simple.
Most people have heard of quantum physics, but they imagine it hasn't anything to do with them. It's something about how atoms, and even smaller particles inside atoms, behave. It's obscure, mathematical, and some people say rather weird. Most people are not alone. The founding fathers of quantum physics did not understand it either, and some felt they never would. Einstein called it "Alice in Wonderland physics" and compared it to "the system of delusions of an intelligent paranoiac, concocted of incoherent elements of thought." He had helped to invent quantum physics, but he never came to like it.
Yes, quantum physics is very different. That's what makes it interesting. It has the capacity to change everything. It is all around us. It's inside us, inside our bodies and our minds, and inside nearly every technological gadget on which we've come to depend. We actually live today in a quantum world, and once we fully grasp that, nothing will ever be the same again.
Look up into the evening sky on any early autumn afternoon and marvel at the mysterious flocking activity of hundreds of birds. It is quantum signaling between electrons in the birds' eyes that enables their coordinated flight. Large-scale quantum phenomena play a key role in plant photosynthesis, the functioning of cells in the human body, the synchronized firing of neurons in the brain, and perhaps even in the mystery of human consciousness. All the technology that defines the twenty-first century is quantum technology. Superfluids, superconductors, laser eye surgery and all laser technology, PET scans, silicon chips and thus all our laptop computers, smartphones, tablets, even Nintendo, X-Box, and Wii are quantum technology. The whole digital communications revolution is a quantum revolution. The Age of the Internet is the Quantum Age.
"Few modern physicists think that Newtonian physics has equal status with quantum physics, even in the 'real world' of everyday life," says Vlatko Vedral, Oxford University's professor of quantum information. "It is but a useful approximation of a world that is quantum on all scales." A world that is quantum on all scales! And yet, most of us are still trapped in an outdated Newtonian worldview that dominates our best thinking about ourselves, our societies, and our organizations. It's time to catch up!
THE QUANTUM WORLDVIEW
The new quantum worldview means many things — an emphasis on wholes rather than parts, an emphasis on relationship rather than separation, both/and and many ways rather than either/or and just one best way, an emphasis on questions rather than answers, on potentiality rather than just the here and now, humility in the face of one's own thinking, integration rather than fragmentation, complexity rather than simplicity. We shall be looking at all these in depth in the chapters that follow. But the quantum worldview also promises to restore meaning and a sense of purpose to our lives and leadership. Finding a deeper meaning for these troubles many leaders.
A business leader who survived the 2011 Japanese tsunami said afterward, "Every day now I think about the meaning of my life and what I am here to do." A senior executive from Sweden wrote to me, "I'm still young, I have a beautiful family, plenty of money, and I'm at the top of my profession, but I'm not happy. I'm making money, but I'm not serving any of the things that I care about." Lord Andrew Stone, former managing director of Marks & Spencer PLC, told me, "I often wake at four in the morning, asking myself what it's all about, what it all means. I feel if I can't find answers to these questions, I might as well chop myself"
The search for meaning is the primary motivation in all our lives. It is this search that defines our humanity, that possibly makes us unique among earth's creatures. And it is when this deep need for meaning goes unmet that our lives come to feel shallow or empty. We "lose the plot." To function as full (and fulfilled) human beings, we need meaningful answers to questions like: What is my life all about? What does my job mean? What is the meaning of this company I have founded or worked for? Why am I in this relationship? What does it mean that I will die someday? Why commit myself to one thing or another, to one person or another — or to anything?
When we can't find the answers, we find ourselves in a state of crisis, a crisis of meaning. We may experience this in different ways, as feeling lost, being rudderless, listless, depressed, or bored. For a business leader, the lack or loss of meaning can result in occasional cynicism and a short-term pursuit of profit at any cost.
We are by definition a questioning species, but of all the questions that we ask, four stand out as the essential questions that frame any meaningful worldview. In various forms, they occur in all the world's great spiritual traditions, and they set the agenda for finding deep meaning and a sense of existential security in our lives. These questions are: Where do I come from? Who am I ? Why am I here ? and What should I do? In my own way, I've been asking these questions since I was five years old, and simply asking them anew as the years go by has been my essential spiritual practice. I would like to share with you the "answers" I have found in my own evolving quantum worldview, in hope they can offer a quantum perspective on the spiritual foundations of leadership itself. As Christopher Giercke, CEO of Altai Himalaya, an Asian company that provides fashion goods exclusively to Hermès, says, "A leader has to see himself in a cosmic context, to get a perspective on where we fit in, just how small we are and thus how important it is that we cooperate with and serve one another."
WHERE DO I COME FROM?
If I were to ask you how old you are, you would almost certainly tell me your chronological age, measured by your date of birth — twenty-five, forty-five, sixty-five, etc. If I then said to you, "But remember that you are a child of your culture," you might say that in that case you are perhaps one hundred years old, or three hundred years old, or even, taking the longer view of the Western or Eastern traditions, two thousand or five thousand years old. If I said, "But, oh, you are a child of life on earth," you then would say that you are one and a half billion years old. But in fact, each of us is thirteen and a half billion years old.
Each of us was here at that moment of the big bang, when the massive expansion of a singularity gave rise to all that was to come. We were here when, a split second later, the big bang gave rise to the quantum vacuum, space, time, and the Higgs field. We were here when that first fluctuation of the Vacuum, the "wrinkle in time," gave rise to mass and energy and gravity, and when these then gave rise to a fiery plasma and cosmic radiation. We were here with the creation of particles and forces, stars and planets, and none of these is truly inanimate, none wholly without some primitive form of agency, volition, and sense of direction, even a sense of purpose. As quantum physicist David Bohm says, "Even the electron is informed with a certain level of mind."
We carry the whole history, purpose, and intent of the universe in our bodies and in our minds. Our bodies are made of stardust; our minds obey the same quantum laws and forces that bind the universe together. And I believe that each of us is destined to retell this story of our origins in whatever the language and culture of our times. This could be why all the world's great creation myths, from the ancient Babylonian to the contemporary quantum, tell much the same story, each in its own way.
We also carry within us the whole history of the evolution of life on this planet. In the simplest layer of our bodily organization we find structures like those of single-celled animals such as the amoeba. They have no nervous system, all their sensory coordination and motor reflexes existing within one cell. Our own white blood cells, as they scavenge for rubbish and eat up bacteria, behave in the blood stream much like amoeba in ponds.
Simple many-celled animals like jellyfish still have no central nervous system, but they do have a network of nerve fibers that allow communication between cells so that the animal can react in a coordinated way. In our own bodies, the nerve cells in the gut form a similar network that coordinates peristalsis, the muscular contractions that push food along. More evolved animals develop increasingly complex nervous systems, and eventually primitive brains. The most primitive part of our own brain, the brain stem, is inherited from reptiles, and is often called "the reptilian brain."
With the evolution of mammals a forebrain developed — first the primitive forebrain of lower mammals ruled primarily by instinct and emotion (and containing our emotional center, the limbic system), then the cerebral hemispheres, with all their sophisticated computing ability, the "little gray cells" that most of us identify with the human mind. Just as we carry the whole history of cosmic evolution within our consciousness, so we think and function with the whole history of life's evolution on earth.
Then there is the whole history of our great and ancient cultures, with their myths and superstitions, their moral laws and values, their art, music, and stories. How many of us are still afraid to step on a crack, to travel without a talisman, or to feel uneasy about Friday the thirteenth? How many educated people think, in times of defeat, of Sisyphus, who pushed a boulder to the top of a hill only to have it roll back down again, or of Icarus, who flew too close to the fire of the sun?
The logic and reason taught by the Greek philosophers and the rational intelligence measured by our IQ tests are only the tip of our mental iceberg. Many of these beliefs from the evolution of our culture are contradictory or mutually exclusive, but we think, and make our decisions and commitments, drawing from them all. Hence the mess we make of things! Jungian psychology, with its eye on the many layers of the unconscious, has always stressed that we are only about one percent civilized.
From our genetic history we inherit physical features, talents, diseases, and behavioral traits once belonging to distant ancestors. In the East, and increasingly in the West, many people believe that we inherit, and/or accumulate, a karmic history, a destiny and a set of life challenges that passes from one generation to the next, from one act or decision of ours to the next. And then there's the influence of our parents, from whom we inherit values and habits, aspirations and our starting point in life, problems and challenges, neuroses, and sometimes even psychosis.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Quantum Leader by Danah Zohar. Copyright © 2016 Danah Zohar. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments, 9,Introduction: Why Business Needs a Revolution, 11,
PART I: A QUANTUM APPROACH TO BUSINESS THINKING, 21,
Chapter 1: Entering the Quantum Age, 23,
Chapter 2: Three Levels of Real Transformation, 37,
Chapter 3: Three Kinds of Thinking: How the Brain Rewires Itself, 53,
Chapter 4: Eight Principles of Quantum Thinking Applied to Leadership, 71,
Chapter 5: Leading at the Edge, 107,
PART II: THREE MODELS OF ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE AND LEADERSHIP, 127,
Chapter 6: The Western Model: The Newtonian Self and the Newtonian Organization, 131,
Chapter 7: The Eastern Model: The Networked Self and the Networked Organization, 139,
Chapter 8: The Quantum Model: Bridging East and West, 149,
Chapter 9: Quantum Case Study: Haier Group, China, 169,
PART III: QSD: QUANTUM SYSTEMS/STRATEGY DYNAMICS IN PRACTICE, 179,
Chapter 10: Quantum Systems Dynamics, 181,
Chapter 11: The Motivations That Drive Us, 187,
Chapter 12: The 12 Transformational Principles of Spiritual Intelligence, 215,
Chapter 13: The Dialogue Group: A Way to Transform Company Culture, 237,
Chapter 14: Meditation and Reflective Practice, 247,
Conclusion: The Quantum Leader as Servant Leader, 257,
Notes, 271,
Bibliography, 283,
Index, 285,