Fast Company’s “Road Show”
An interview with Steve Brant
October 8, 2002
One of the things about morning and midday meetings is that they’re often best coupled with either coffee and breakfast or lunch. Today I continued my working meal trend by meeting Steven Brant, founder and principal of Trimtab Management Systems, for lunch at Shelly’s New York Restaurant on 57th Street.
In addition to his consulting work, Brant is a key member of an internal, pro-bono working group associated with the United Nations Global Compact. Formally launched in 1999 at Davos, the compact is an agreement that signatory organizations and companies can address to incorporate more mindful sustainability and globalization strategies into their corporate activities. The working group Brant is active in has determined the methods businesses will use to incorporate the compact’s nine core principles into their daily operations and future strategies-and is now crafting the programs the compact organizers will use to market and support the resulting initiatives.
After wolfing down a chicken sandwich, I asked Brant a series of questions about the compact, new models of globalization, and the impact of September 11 on business.
Return to Your Roots
Given September 11 and the current state of our economy, we’re in a situation of insecurity, anxiety, and uncertainty. But instead of trying to just live with what’s happening and avoid the next attack, we need to get to the root cause and stop future attacks. U.S. businesses will spend an additional $150 billion solely on security this year. That’s not something we need to spend forever. Sure, short term, we need to put out the fire, but we need to find out what started the fire. While it’s not a standard political practice, it’s a standard business practice to get to the root cause of problems. If we incorporate this approach in our international relations, global businesses could help individual countries create a truly global economic system.
Set New Standards
Right now the motivation of globalization is to make more money and to combat global catastrophes such as global warming. We need more aspirational goals. We can create a positive global culture if we move beyond war as our major way of relating. Some of the principles we use to solve global problems may no longer be accurate. One example is the notion that the role of business is to promote what we already know around the world. There’s a tremendous fear that America want to promote its lifestyle around the world rather than give people in other countries what they really need. We need to export newer principles that are more appropriate than just exporting the methods we’re already using.
We Don’t Need to Compete
One of the major challenges in globalization is competition. Competition is wonderful if you’re competing to determine and deliver a standard. Look at Six Sigma. It’s about managing defects. Quality management is about continuous improvement. If businesses were to compete on those levels instead of just in terms of market share, we’d all be better off. We can accomplish more together than we can separately. Right now globalization is based on fear and a market mentality. The international space station is a wonderful example of an international scientific activism but also of international cooperation. What could the European Union and the United States do as a cooperative venture once we stop competing with each other? We have world fairs, but they’re about individual nations. The Olympics offer a more interesting model because the world record isn’t based on who beat whom but on who improved the most. Then there’s the Special Olympics. Everyone wins because they’re out there doing their best. It’s not a celebration of success at the expense of another.
Fill in the Whole
The large-scale design principles that are being used as companies globalize are missing key elements. I’m an engineer by training. I worked at the Army Corps of Engineers where I designed military facilities. Because of that, I see the interrelation between parts of a system. Design principles need to change as new knowledge is acquired. If you improve the quality of steel, you have to design based on that new strength. Organizations have been trying to make globalization work one part at a time. We look at the rights of children, urban problems, or the environment. If globalization is going to work, those things need to be connected. We need to see what those things can add up to.
Support Sufficiency
We now live in a world where there’s not enough for everybody. War is a learned response to scarcity. We need to move beyond the scarcity model to a system based on sufficiency or abundance. Hunger doesn’t exist because there isn’t enough food but because of global politics. The underlying disease of things like terrorism is the unequal distribution of the world’s wealth. We now have the ability to at least provide the minimum. We could put all of the smart people who are working on things like the missile defense system to work on water distribution and waste management systems. If the world’s a healthy place, we have 6 billion potential customers. There’s a tremendous business case for world peace.
Coordinates: Steven Brant, sbrant@trimtab.com