Looking Into the Need to Build a Sustainable GO Society

Speaker A I think one of the things that would be of great benefit is to have is to have that sense of coherence amongst people that are using the ideas to have the ability to share, to swap ideas. Now I think in order to do that we've got to establish a very high level of trust because there will be clients who may not want to share, there'll be consultants who may not want to share. But I think within, certainly within with the community that we work with we work with other firms of consultants and we work in a very open way so we very clear where the boundaries are. So I think there has to be an advantage of bringing together a group of very able and energetic people because we have to find a way. Why say we have to find a way? Maybe we don't. But if we want the work to continue and to grow then to be sustainable in the long term we have to have continuous development so we cannot be overprotected and rigid in otherwise we start having a very strong guardian culture. I think people have to be really clear about what is intellectual property and if they at any time want to use it then it's acknowledged, the source is acknowledged and that's not new within that community there'll be a large number of academics who have always acknowledged other people's work. But I think that we also, I think, need to think about where the next generation will come from because we're very aware within BIOS that the next generation won't have had exposure to some of the founders. So there's got to be an excitement in that in its own right, a benefit in its own right not just to the individuals but to organizations, to the communities in which they're working. And that's why I think we need to find a way of sharing those ideas within the group. Obviously the whole issue around work complexity and capability tends to be core but actually I think we can make a much wider contribution based on the whole understanding of how people and organizations work. I think we can make a great contribution to the whole issue of leadership and future leaders whether that's around their style or their capability or the way they run their organizations. So I think we need to continue to broaden the areas in which we can work and look at the totality of organizational life, but also the communities, because those organizations are not working in isolation. They're actually linked to communities in some ways. And anything that we can do to help that whole corporate social responsibility bit, I think would be great. So it's trying to not just be overly internally focused but to try and keep that external perspective as well and just to be aware of the internationalism of what we do. You think who's coming to the conference? These aren't just western ideas, they actually work right across a range of cultures. It I think that just keeping that broad, international and global perspective would be good.