It has been said that Stafford Beer was 50 years ahead of his time. In this webinar Steve Morlidge will reflect on the relevance of the VSM from the perspective of someone dedicated to helping finance practitioners half a century distant after the first edition of Brain of The Firm was published.
Steve Morlidge has 30 years of practical experience in designing and running performance management systems in Unilever, including three years as the lead of a global change project. He is a former chairman of the European Beyond Budgeting Round Table and now works as a management thinker, writer and speaker, drawing on his years of experience at the leading edge of performance management thought and practice. Steve Morlidge published Future Ready: How to Master Business Forecasting, John Wiley, 2010, ‘The Little Book of Beyond Budgeting’ and ‘The Little Book of Operational Forecasting’ through Matador in 2017 and 2018 respectively. His latest book ‘Present Sense: A practical guide to the science of measuring performance and the art of communicating it, with the brain in mind’ was published in November 2019.
He is on the editorial board of Foresight, a forecasting practitioner’s journal published by the International Institute of Forecasting to which he regularly contributes. He is also a cofounder of CatchBull, a supplier of forecasting performance management software and sits on the non-executive Board of the Beyond Budgeting Institute. Steve Morlidge is a visiting fellow at Cranfield University, Bedfordshire, UK and has a PhD from Hull Business School in Yorkshire, UK focusing on the application of systems concepts to the design of complex organisations. He completed his BA with honours, and he is a qualified management accountant (CIMA).
He can be reached at steve.morlidge@satoripartners.co.uk or steve.morlidge@catchbull.com
How can a global manufacturer with tens of thousands of employees not just survive but thrive in turbulent times? Guided by its CEO philosopher, the Chinese white goods appliance leader went through four decades of strategy, business, and organizational reinvention, rewriting everything we knew about management. Based on years of direct collaboration with Haier, Emanuele will conversate with Krishan to explore RenDanHeYi’s ability to get rid of hierarchical control, top-down people management, centralized budgeting, organizational bureaucracy, distance from the market. They will compare the foundational RenDanHeYi’s concepts with VSM pillars to show how more and more enterprises worldwide may embrace unprecedented levels of self-management, entrepreneurial initiative, customer centricity, diffused value sharing, and ecosystemic thinking.
Many of Beer and his team’s reflections on the effective incorporation of people into the project considered prototypes for measuring audiences in real time. This view of the common good is especially critical in the main political and sociocultural dilemmas that form part of todays debates regarding the future of ongoing Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Why did humankind create such a moral and ecological mess of this world, and why have we done that for only about 10,000 years? This question might be related to the Sapient Paradox, which emerged after decades of archeological and neurophysiological research.
