Impressionist culture shock

Imagine a country where:

-  You can be stopped 12 times by ‘customs’ service during a 5 hours travel. That’s how you can first assess how free trade is taken into consideration.

-  Investment concept is just a terra incognita word. Switching from a day to day P&L culture to an investment and ROI culture can be a tough one sometimes.

-  Drinking nine green teas per day is a minimum requirement. That helps to turn oceans of data available to islands of insight, they say.

Change management under constraint

Changing organizational culture is tough work. You need to transform how people work and they (don’t) work together. A particularly difficult task in a country where work conditions are ‘extremely difficult’.

 

One key problem is the differing views of change held by senior management and the rest of the organization. Senior managers view it as an opportunity to strengthen the business, to align strategy and operations and to advance their careers, while other employees often see change as disruptive and intrusive. It upsets the balance.

Plug into the end of oil age

Sustainable development may ultimately be about the environment, but it is perhaps about economics first and foremost.

Electric vehicles are not new. They were first marketed in the early 1900s and then revived unsuccessfully in the 1990s. However, the situation at that time was very different: oil was cheap and abundant, and the downside costs of environmental impact largely ignored or unknown. Thus the internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV) emerged as the dominant technology, since it was less expensive and not limited by battery capacity or recharging times. A century of infrastructural development based around the ICEV has created ‘lock in’, which has enabled the incumbent suppliers to prevent all disruptive technologies from emerging. No wonder then that nine of the ten largest corporations in the world are either oil companies or automotive manufacturers.

 

Time has changed and now that economies are committed to win the war against global warming, reduce foreign dependency and increase national security, industries are reconsidering the model.