Responsibility And Sustainability Inevitable

Jim O’Neill is a currency speculator best-known as the inventor of the brics acronym. As he heads off into retirement, CNBC interviewed him.

By way of retrospective, he naturally repeats much of what I’d enjoyably heard elsewhere. Chief among this was his mantra,

never waste a crisis

He knows this as often the making of people. Not least because you are going to get out of it. There is an end to this one if for no other reason than that there’ll be another one along to replace it. One you’ve not even thought of yet. Be adaptive, and quick to act. Ride the many exciting moments.

One aspect I heard fresh was this.

business must become more ‘sustainable’, &

it is inevitable that there is a move to responsible capitalism

I realise this could be dismissed as lip-service from a remorseless banker off to the beach that never did anything to properly promote such thinking during his career. Yet it remains music to my ears.

I bang on about sustainability a lot. Selling can only truly thrive when based on such principles.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t pressed for firm policy ideas here. But still, it’s great to hear someone in his position suggest we should search out being sustainable.

The single biggest factor underpinning successful sales is pursuing a repeatable sustainable winning process.

Maybe one steer from O’Neill can come from his comment on the current global finance woes; “austerity is not reform”. If you can’t totally cut your way to economic growth, then perhaps you can’t in your sales operations either?