A revolutionary mind, a revolutionary approach, and a revolutionary science

I was confused to find out that I am a champion of private property while at the same time I truly support open source and believe it will be the overarching practice in the future. My thoughts led me to a book recommendation I had gotten recently. “The Opposable Mind” by Roger Martin gives clues to a lot of questions about topics spanning contradictory and very opposing motifs in nature. The ability of the mind to hold two opposing ideas at the same time and use them concurrently is one of the most fascinating capabilities humans have developed.

I think Roger Martin, the Dean of Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto, is a revolutionary in his thinking and would truly refer to him as the father of integrative thinking. In his book “The Opposable Mind” he features innovators such as Procter & Gamble chief AG Lafley, choreographer Martha Graham, and Red Hat co-founder Bob Young, who utilize the approach of using the constructive tension from two conflicting ideas to "think [their] way through to a new and superior idea." I have been fascinated by this typically North American approach of integrating various tools to understand, analyze and assess business.  While disintegrating a problem into its parts and solving it might be an optimal way for a lot of people, I believe the holistic approach is the right one for many reasons.

First of all, as a business leader you come up with many options, you face challenges which require decision- making. That is especially relevant for the field of change and transformation management, in which I worked.  So instead of choosing one model, you design a new one spanning previous ones and even maybe contradictory ones at first sight.

Secondly, integrative thinking according to Martin “does typically involve a predictable cascade of four interrelated steps that constitute a heuristic process.” And heuristics is the underlying approach of behavioral economics, a field which might explain a lot of ideas about the not so rational human mind. Through the behavioral finance approach one can explain aspects of the financial crisis which led to the bankruptcy of many giants in the investment banking industry and the downturn in the world economy.  Why would mortgage lenders provide loans to everyone who would know on their doors?  Why would financial institutions bundle and repackage risk-obscuring financial instruments including collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)?The counterintuitive nature of those decisions implies the necessity of cultivating a counterintuitive stance, based on a heuristic and integrated approach. For more than 2 decades, researchers in behavioral finance have sought out the signatures of human irrationality in markets. “Behavioral finance is an intellectual revolution that tries to give a broader perspective from multiple social sciences,” including psychology and sociology, says Shiller, a founder of the field. (Crazy Money, www.sciencemag.org) 

Third, the integrative stance stimulates creativity and the perfection of brand new skills as the central value is placed on learning. Roger Martin and Hilary Austen write in The Art of Intergrative Thinking , “It embodies tolerance for the temporary incompetence that comes with the development of new skills.”

Martin’s ingenuity definitely motivates my respect for him and while I can be a straightforward spokesperson and an ardent critic, I can only say I am truly fascinated by the mind called Roger Martin.

With his expertise in areas of integrative thinking, global competitiveness, business design, and corporate citizenship, Martin makes the perfect example of a (business) leader of the future. That is why I believe an interesting reading on my list would be the one he coauthored with Mihnea C. Moldoveanu, “The Future of the MBA: Designing the Thinker of the Future”.

Private Property

Coming from a former communist country in the heart of Eastern Europe, I cannot dismiss the importance of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 on the modern history of Europe. This revolution marked the transition from a totalitarian regime to a democratic way of government throughout Eastern and Central Europe, brought the consolidation of Eastern and Western Germany and most importantly the fall of the Iron Curtain, which prevented Eastern Europe from developing in step with Western Europe and the US for approximately 50 years. Jeff Goodwin thought that revolutions entail “not only mass mobilization and regime change , but also more or less rapid and fundamental social, economic and/or cultural change, during or soon after the struggle for state power ." The change of 1989 fully exemplified Goodwin’s definition.
The conflation of private and social life was the most daunting feature of socialism. One of the detrimental mistakes the Soviet Union and Communist Europe made was the state’s monopoly over every single aspect of life. Colin Barker in Marxism and the Revolution of 1989 argued that “the classic Stalinist regimes yoked together government, state and enterprise in a single framework”.
The transfer of state ownership into private hands was one of the most crucial changes to take place after the demise of the Soviet Union economic and political model personal incentive and private property are at the crux of entrepreneurship and the establishment of SME (small and medium size) enterprises. Many debates have been led whether state enterprises are more efficient than privately owned ones..Despite the efficiencies of state monopolies in many industries like railroads, airspace etc, the term state or public ownership in the Soviet context is just a façade hiding the true owner that is Politburo, the Communist Party etc. In a situation of state ownership prices are artificially suppressed by the government (as inflation does exist), output decisions are taken by the Soviet elite; monitoring costs are excessively high, too, just to name a few of the pitfalls in the system.
Questions have been raised about the ethics behind the claims over property and its restoration to its pre 1945-1948 owners. Hans-Hermman Hoppe in The Economics and Ethics of Private Property defends his position that a property right in one’s own body must be justified apriori. Furthermore, his work supports the idea of private property as a trigger of a person’s actions. He writes, “Any propositional exchange requires a proposition maker’s exclusive control (property) over some scarce means. Noone can propose possibly anything and no one can possibly become convinced of any proposition if one’s right to make exclusive use of one’s physical body were not already presupposed.” Therefore, without property to rely upon anyone should feel that they have their hands tied and cannot take action to release their ideas.
The property rights in the former Soviet Union block countries have been enforced by the rule of law over time. However, the management of this same property has turned problematic. It has been an imperative to put socio-political reforms in tact with the required economic changes to ensure the necessary environment for private investment to grow and stir economic development. Victor Nee, Daniel Stark, and Mark Seldan in Remaking the Economic Institutions of Socialism consider the fact that “the reform process has created or strengthened a large variety of non-state ownership forms and activities”. They also acknowledge as a great merit of the reformers that they “allowed or initiated such experimentation [in the variety of ownership forms] with courage and open minds”. I agree that this is a benefit and look forward to seeing how the wheel of change would be stirred over the next decade