World Business Forum provided quality thinking time on important issues

 by Mike McGrann, executive director of the S. Dale High Center for Family Business

One of the benefits of attending the World Business Forum was that it provided a time away from the office in which participants were encouraged to think… rather than do. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, encouraged participants to create time for disciplined thought. He referred to this as “creating white space” in your calendar to think. I know that I spend a great deal of time doing stuff and not enough time thinking about where our Center needs to be in the next five years… about how my classes at E-town need to change… about where I, as an individual, need to grow and change. The few times I have done this since returning from the World Business Forum have been incredibly productive. It is a practice I will continue.


I found several other points raised by Collins to be particularly compelling for leaders:

1. Double your ratio of questions to statements.

2. Continually ask yourself: “How is my industry changing, and what are the brutal facts?”

3. Create a to do list and a NOT to do list and rank it … with no ties allowed.

4. End our obsession with titles – great people have responsibilities, not a title.

5. Companies are more like likely to die of indigestion from trying to swallow too many opportunities… than starve from a lack of opportunities… so FOCUS.

6. Set a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) 10-15 years in the future for your organization.

I also found Al Gore’s discussion of the relationship between climate change and capitalism particularly interesting. Some still doubt whether global warming is occurring, and others doubt that man is the cause of changes in the global climate. But it seems to me that these debates are avoiding one of what Collins calls a “brutal fact”… which is that man is pumping tons of carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere. And the other brutal fact is that if you change the inputs to a system, eventually you will change the outputs. How long will this take? Perhaps 5 years, perhaps 50, perhaps 500… but eventually the ecological system of the earth will breakdown if there is no change to our current levels of CO2 output. As Gore pointed out, capitalism’s great challenge and great opportunity is to find ways to address this problem now in a way that creates economic opportunity. Ultimately, policies that inhibit economic opportunity create more poverty and further degrade the planet.

Mike McGrann was one of five business faculty and students attending the 2010 World Business Forum in New York City, representing Elizabethtown College and the S. Dale High Center for Family Business, made possible by The High Companies, headquartered in Lancaster, PA.