Edinburgh Epistle- Response and Responsibility
I was at the Edinburgh Refresher event last week which was well attended with around 50 attendees. We had an excellent day with some very relevant material and superb facilities provided by the Edinburgh Business School.
My conclusion from the programme was basically distilled into two questions
1 Have you clearly identified the issue?
2 How are you going to respond?
The speakers explored a wide range of topics from leadership models, trust and governance, not only discussing reactive actions but also how innovation can enable businesses to remain competitive.
We also heard about how businesses should respond and react to the growth of social media and cyber -crime. Not only was it a hard ware issue and using appropriate platforms to get the message across, it was also about responsible use of software and acknowledging that security measures need to be properly enforced.
The recurrent them was about having a ‘Responsibility’ to behave correctly in leadership and communications with the all stakeholders and also having a ‘Response Ability’ to act ethically and with Trust in protecting Brands and personal reputations. We had many examples were inconsistent behaviour of individuals and businesses broke this code by not remaining true to their espoused values and breaking that all important Trust between themselves and Society.
This is very important when information is put out into the cyber-sphere from different sources and all must be on the same message to ensure the firm is protected.
In Scotland, there is a rich philosophical tradition of actions which emphasizes the values of improvement, virtue, and practical benefit for the individual and society as a whole. Indeed, Adam Smith set the tone for the modern economy and the benefits of market forces.
The overriding conclusion, again going back to basic philosophy, is that you can’t control what happens in the external environment, but you can control your reaction to events .
As MBAs we can all draw on our knowledge to ensure that our actions and responses are responsible.
