Re-Enterprise

Re-Enterprise. Book over-view.


Business enterprises move at break-neck speed to becoming organisations. Sometimes this is deliberate, often times it just happens. Sometimes with benefits, but almost always damaging the very spirit with which the enterprise was created. Sometimes it is best for enterprises to just ‘be’, and always good for organisations to get back the ‘spirit’ and become enterprises once again! Re-Enterprise.


Limited Companies, start modelling and becoming like other organisations. What starts of as a free spirit, deliberately moves to becoming limited. Willingly tied down to strict rules, boundaries, structures, systems with ‘firm’ excuses for becoming rigid, and for not doing things. 


What about management and leadership?

Businesses are run by management, and businesses talk leadership. And business creates employment, which serves as livelihood, which raises people from poverty, which makes the world a better place. So business Management and leadership are good things. BUT hasn’t industry always had a more of a management thing about it? In the larger context of society, ‘leadership’ seems to be strongly related to most other domains- politics, military, and society at large, like student leader, religious leader.

Ok. Here is the point. Within industry at least, Management, has stolen the lead on Leadership. Think education ... it is Management School, right? And business Management! And management books and even Management Gurus! 


So it is time for business to focus more on leadership.


Today, Leadership is best understood as the exclusive and expert practice of a skill or accomplishment of a task, often driven by individual excellence. At first glance, leadership is attributed to bravery, courage, strength. First off the block. Defeating others.

This individualism idolises the epic hero, the bold leader. A “great guy” approach. Time and context in the west necessitated this ‘art of the possible’.

There is a place for this heroic display, but is there more to it? 

In a bi-polar view of the world... developed and developing, emerged and emerging, east and west, there is more to leadership.

The Eastern, greater Asian traditions, diverse and dissimilar as they are, highlight something that is best viewed as the ‘art of the necessary’. This focused on the normative, “need” side of action, as against the transformational visions from the west. The Eastern paradigm saw a different grounding. Leadership followed the norms and values of society. Social habits, traditions, norms were reflective of power and success. Group needs were more important and group wisdom more influential than individual vision.



When we look eastwards, at the future and emerging markets, the pressures, pleasures, challenges, problems, opportunities ... they are all on a different scale. Black Swans, VUCA. Almost a new planet. We can forget ‘best-practice’. Our burning platform is ‘next-practice’


Population was once a problem. So was employment. Remember the days of VRS (so-called Voluntary Retirement Schemes). These very numbers have come to be viewed positively. Demographic-dividend. Thank you McKinsey!

Population, became hands and talent that could build the new-world. Now, retention and attrition are industry issues. This very population simultaneously also became consumers... more products to sell, services to provide, opportunities for everyone ... not just within India

and China ... but for the world at large!

The problem is now the opportunity.


So the need for fresh insight, new thinking, relevant models. Basically Re-Enterprise the business enterprise, holistically.

Re-Enterprising the business outside-in, is about consciously removing the external inhibitors imposed on the individual, enabling free flow of people-energies.

Re-enterprising the business Inside-out, is about authenticity and value. Its about letting people blossom and about supporting individuals and teams to overcome their internal inhibitions (irrelevant, outdated, and imaginary).

This calls for a new wave of Holistic leadership to Re-Enterprise.