I had the great pleasure of catching up with Dov Seidman this morning, when he came into the FT’s offices to meet me and my colleague John Plender. Dov is a remarkable guy. He has degrees by the armful: bachelor’s and master’s in philosophy from UCLA, PPE from Oxford – followed by Harvard Law School. All this after wrestling with dyslexia as a child.
He is an entreprenuer with ideals. He founded LRN, his consultancy, 15 years ago, to pursue his belief that businesses needed to adopt an ethical approach. But he managed to write a successful book on the subject, How, in 2007, without banging on endlessly about ethics. LRN now has around 300 employees worldwide, and has an impressive list of corporate clients.
Dov is different – free-thinking and original. He is a Davos regular, and is much quoted by the New York Times’ Tom Friedman (and me). Today we had a vigorous hour-long conversation, during which time he raised any number of interesting and important points. Here are two of them:
1. A lot of business leaders and politicians have been talking about the need to “reset” the economy and the business world. But doesn’t that imply simply going back to a faulty business model, and a flawed view of the world? Maybe the operating system needs to be changed. We need to rethink, not just reset.
2. “Think outside the box” – what an insult! “If you trusted your people you wouldn’t put them in a box in the first place,” Dov says.
After this morning I have about another ten pages of Seidmanisms in my notebook, and I will share more of them with FT readers in due course.
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