FIFA, VOLKSWAGEN …. MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN on the not-so-subtle rap business and commercial organisations are being given for their need to clean up their act (click: 2015 article on FIFA). Will it be a sustained assault? I don’t know, but certainly ‘acceptable’ practices that were once considered the norm, are showing themselves to be questionable and indefensible when a little unexpected light is shone suddenly their way.  Fits and starts, but a pattern nonetheless.

LIBOR and Bernie Madoff spring to mind in relation to my own industry, financial services, which has not shown itself in its most redeeming light over recent years, either.

Interestingly, it only took a couple of US university researchers – admittedly this was their agenda – to show up what was wrong not only with Volkswagen’s business practices (and its now evident moral deficiency) but in fact also with entire regulatory regimes applied to the auto sector in the US and Europe in relation to environmental law and public health, with their inadequate and unchecked reliance on ‘DIY’ testing and reporting instead of independent enforcement of standards set by government.

In fact, there are reasons government itself is not what it once was. According to another article in the Economist, in his book ‘Ruling the Void’ (anyone looking to buy me this Christmas please take note) Peter Mair observes the parallel disintegration of various Western political systems as these societies, too, become fragmented — with people/voters (a.k.a. consumers; but let’s leave that for another day) living more individualistically today than before, robbing parties of their traditional support bases and therefore their ability and legitimacy to make meaningful reform.

(This is a different take on the usual ‘disenfranchisement’ story of voters being alienated from their political systems in that it’s possibly the political class itself that is the disenfranchised.  Again, for another day).

And let’s not get started on the disintermediation of the media industry (no pun), that traditional sense-check and thrower of light and transparency on questionable practices in society, business and government (when it works of course, phone-tapping aside … ahem, did I mention something about a pattern?) Although it seemed to work in the matter of Volkswagen.  Eventually.

Bottom line: The signs are there that the next fifty (fifteen?) years could look quite remarkably different to the last fifty for societies, governments and business. Different norms and perhaps even different means by which old norms are broken down are being replaced, often suddenly, by the new as our societies and how they operate evolve.

I’m not pessimistic — in fact, maybe change has always come from the unexpected and even as fitfully; I don’t know, I wasn’t there the whole time. Some things will remain constant: accountability and transparency, I can only imagine, will need to be encouraged, albeit ‘administered’ at times by different methods and external actors than those that we’ve grown accustomed to since the (last) industrial revolution.

Ethics, too.

Notwithstanding these constants, managing businesses in future will likely take a different style of management and leadership overall, a different set of skills to meet a different array of challenges and  accountability to possibly a different mix of observers, stakeholders and expectations.

As leaders, if they are to last, we must think about whether our organisations are geared for this. What norms and ways of doing things need to change, and what standards and values ought to preserved? What practices are acceptable by today’s standards but could well be challenged in future — or by tomorrow morning’s headlines?

And are we as leaders and managers ready for this new future?