self-realization, along with that of other companies, produced furiously competitive commercial creativity and growth.[13]
In all of this I saw the generative aspect of power: the universal drive to "get one's job done." Power expresses our purposefulness, wholeness, and agency. Although power is the drive to realize one's self, the effect of power goes beyond one's self. Power is how we make a difference in the world; it is the means by which new social realities are created. Without power, nothing new grows.
At Shell I was head of the strategy group that constructed scenarios-plausible alternative stories-of social-political-environmental contexts in which the company might find itself. In 1991, Pieter le Roux, a professor at the left-wing University of the Western Cape in South Africa, contacted me because he wanted to use the Shell methodology to help a group of South African opposition leaders develop a strategy for effecting the transition away from apartheid. Nelson Mandela had just been released from twenty-seven years in prison, and the negotiations between the opposition and the white minority government had started in earnest. Le Roux's project sounded interesting and worthwhile to me, and my Shell bosses were happy, after years of being vilified for not having divested from South Africa, for the opportunity to rebuild the company's relationships with the opposition. So in September 1991, I traveled to Cape Town to facilitate the first workshop of what became known as the Mont Fleur Scenario Exercise.[14]
What I found exhilarating in meeting these leaders-from political parties, trade unions, community organizations, universities, and companies-was their powerful purposefulness. Every one of them was committed to addressing, from their particular idological and institutional base, South Africa's tough challenges, and they had already realized that they could be successful only if they worked together. White businessman Johann Liebenb
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