Companies require more than just leadership that collects problems to be solved. Financial pragmatism erodes identity and suffocates innovation
The Titusville Herald newspaper 23 December 1912 (page 6)
You will find greater values here. We are told: “Curiosity killed the cat,But satisfaction brought it back.”
It is the same story with groceries.
“Prices will sell Groceries, but it is always finality that brings the buyer back.”
Many businesses are in trouble and have lost touch with their stakeholders, customers, and the market.
For them, quarterly financial reports are a moment of hesitation: the market reaction is frequently explained in retrospect, inferring potential reasons for failures or successes that often go beyond company choices.
Most executives share a financially pragmatic worldview that forces them to view leadership as a collection of “problems” that need to be “solved.” This pragmatism is conservative of the status quo because it lacks a long-term vision of the company’s role in the ecosystem. To motivate solutions that confirm the state of affairs imposed by those in charge, it does not look to the future in a speculative, evolutionary, and innovative key.
It is the vision that has lacked in the automotive industry, which has recently seen Tesla enter and disrupt a mature market that its primary players’ have failed to evolve.
The same vision has been lacking in life science sector, which has seen a company with a small production capacity and a single technology enter and outperform gigantic companies with revenues greater than entire nations.
Since conservation is the primary objective, there hasn’t been a clear understanding of positioning strategies (in research, acquisitions, and divestments), which has caused them to lose their original spirit.
Companies lose focus as they age
Pragmatism is the defect of the Keynesian paradigm, which is now the basis for all economic systems.
Business leaders of all sizes can show off their managerial prowess by merely naming the issues identified by prominent financial analysts. And it is through tweets that high-priced energy, distribution, and procurement concerns, growing raw material costs, and widespread resignation become flywheels, punch lines capable of simplifying any discussion about workplace safety, precariousness, and sustainability.
Within a matter of hours, one leader is replaced by another who is more pragmatic and better able to attract investors, concerned with growth and profit.
If you’re wondering who wouldn’t desire growth and profits, look no further than the growing apathy and fluidity that undermines brand loyalty, lowers barriers to entry, and trivializes brand products.
And it is here that we highlight the paradox of a managerial action that begins as obsessively pragmatic and evolves into something considered non-concrete and mellifluous by consumers, patients, and stakeholders. And without this ability to look into the future, there is no investment.
The role of visionary leaders
Visionary leadership is that special awareness that arises from the proper combination of science and art, providing a representation and interpretation of reality.
Visionary leaders provide direction and common sense
Visionary leaders do not state growth in every quarter but identify the causes of development under the innovative drive and attempt to remove inertial forces by examining positional sacrifices (resources and personnel) that maximize the minimum payback in a sustainable (fair to the ecosystem) manner.
They do not promise two-digit growth without specifying how; they ask why innovation no longer exists in companies that have made research and the ability to change their success a priority for decades.
The homologation of managerial pragmatism represents the main impediment to diversity because it trivializes, exploits, and bends it to survival logic, causing internal and external breaches within companies.
It alienates employees and customers because it does not provide them with a horizon of true inclusiveness.
Pragmatism is the constant pursuit of a downward compromise
It constantly reminds those who create, sell, serve, or assist that they are doomed to beg for recognition, as is already the case in everyday life.
Managerial pragmatism is hollow and dull, and it encourages employees and customers to shop around.
Why are customers and employees opposed to the idea of technological liberation that considers passive forms of income for one’s well-being as a means of subsistence, albeit a more precarious one?
It is because managerial pragmatism has permeated every aspect of business and society.
Every job change and every product change equalizes the employee and the consumer, resulting in intimate complicity in all social spheres, accepting that the holistic understanding of the game foresees that the theoretical part, the content, is ultimately ineffective in ensuring subsistence.
This purge of content as a function of utility results in the consumption of solutions and a delegation to technology in which new advances do not represent the possibility of finally and again putting tools at the service of knowledge but rather as a proxy in blank to a neutral standardization, devoid of diversity and not necessarily value-bearing.
Final thought
The leaders of the 1920s were able to rally squares around false solutions to an economic depression that had brought the lower middle classes to their knees.
The situation is not much different a century later.
The oversimplification with which we respond to our times’ challenges creates a distance that cracks in business models, lowers the barriers of decades-old industries, and opens the way for new ways of resource aggregation, control, and expression.
Pragmatism is a threat if it maintains firm control.
Getting rid of it by re-centering content becomes an opportunity to achieve long-term balance.
