Creative Talks

Events Work Style Creative Talks

By MASSIMO TEMPORELLI

Recovering From the Crisis

Getting out of the crisis, improving organizational performance and increasing your success by linking science and business: in the last three talks we looked at degrowth, internal communication and corporate organization.

THE MYTH OF DEGROWTH

"Anyone who believes that exponential growth can continue indefinitely in a finite world is a fool or an economist." These provocative words by Kenneth Boulding opened the third Creative Talk. From the beginning, Creative Talks aim to transfer the models of modern science, ecology and complexity, to the world of work, to see if they can work in companies and their increasingly complex management. Biology teaches us that in nature (except for some rare cases) organisms grow continuously. Human beings grow in height and weight, only until the age of development, and then their body stops growing. The same thing happens to other animals and most plants. Nature, in short, can handle the stunting of “natural” growth. Serge Latouche in his Farewell to Growth says "in this situation, it is urgent to rediscover the wisdom of the snail. In fact the snail not only teaches us the virtue of slowness, but there is a lesson even more essential. The snail constructs the delicate architecture of its shell by adding ever increasing spirals one after the other, but then it abruptly stops and winds back in the reverse direction. In fact, just one additional larger spiral would make the shell sixteen times bigger. Instead of being beneficial, it would overload the snail.” Growth must therefore have a limit. Finding the limit, for a company (organization) as well as in nature (organism), means finding a life balance. But balance is not enough; even during a growth phase, firm rules should be imposed, such as the speed of growth and the structure you want to grow. Some experiments have been proposed to allow participants to think about this topic. Between soap bubbles and expanding gas, the group discussed growth, the degrowth and states of balance. At the end of the day convergence was evident in the company as in biology, the healthy growth of an organism or organization should include all parts, cell by cell, tissue to tissue, organ by organ. This is perhaps the most important lesson we should learn from nature, when we think of the growth of our company.

LEARNING FROM ANTS Internal communication is a very complex issue, for which many companies are looking for a solution. According to employees and managers, it appears that information does not circulate: people

Physics boom. On 4 July, 2012, scientists at CERN succeeded in making some particles collide with tremendous energy. After causing this "incident," the researchers went to count the pieces left after the impact. Astonishingly, the collection seems to have led to the identification of an elementary particle (a boson), provided by the Standard Model and the physicist Peter Higgs in 1964, which would explain much of the stability of the universe, including the existence of matter and dark energy. This finding could be very important as the Higgs boson is responsible for mass transportation between the other elementary particles.

Randstad Award Global Sector Reports: Finance & Banking, IT Consulting, FMCG.

The results of their recent work include comprehensive reports on perceived attractiveness of companies and trends in recruitment channels in Finance, FMCG and IT Consulting. Some findings: • Financial Health Deciding Factor Globally long-term job security is the single most important factor in choosing to work for a specific company, but in regard to Finance, FMCG and IT Consulting, respondents choose financial health as the most important driver. • Attractiveness Per Geography Finance is viewed as more attractive in Italy, Spain and India compared to 2011. Finance is also popular in Singapore. In Japan however, Finance is the least attractive sector of all. Finance is considered reasonably attractive in Belgium, Germany, New Zealand and the UK.