If it ain’t ‘woke,’ does it need fixing

By Joe Arney

Does "woke" make you broke? A new book from Tim Kuhn serves as a reminder that, while we might think of corporations as single-minded entities, they are in fact messy and complex-and that messiness often is where innovation takes place.

"Corporations often deploy purpose to create order, to fight complexity, because we typically think of a good organization as being orderly," said Kuhn, a professor of communication at the University of Colorado Boulder's College of Media, Communication and Information.

"Purpose tends to be seen as this device that produces similarity, produces unity, produces a setting or a culture where everybody is on the same page. And that is a fantasy."

So, when you see companies posting about pride or gun control, it doesn't mean they've suddenly been taken over by "woke" warriors. Rather, it's evidence of different perspectives and new avenues of thought being pursued within a larger organization. Those can produce more humane workplaces and foster innovation-which, together, can be healthy for the bottom line, Kuhn said in the book, What Do Corporations Want?: Communicative Capitalism, Corporate Purpose and a New Theory of the Firm.

Corporate purpose, Kuhn said, has often been framed as either producing profits or following principles. "Some versions of purpose can be a claim for morality, for your business to stand for more than shareholder maximization," he said.

But believing corporations are only a single thing means "we're missing an opportunity to understand their complexity and how they effectively serve a wide variety of purposes," he said. "Saying that corporations just want profits, full stop, is perhaps way too simple, and does an injustice to both businesses and the good people who work in them."

'Dysfunction' as a business driver

For businesses to pursue both purpose and profit-to walk and chew gum at once-is a good thing, because being open to multiple outcomes can help companies develop new lines of business. Chasing the idea that an organization must choose a single form of value often creates the dysfunctions managers think they need to neutralize.

By way of example, Kuhn's book mentions Coinbase, which operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. In 2020, as social tensions heated up from the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement and a charged pre-election climate, CEO Brian Armstrong said there would be no political conversations permitted on workplace channels.

"And, as you can imagine, employees revolted," Kuhn said. "Employees said, 'This company is about shaking up the way the world works. Politics is core to who we are.'"

Coinbase offered severance to employees who left over the policy, and while the business was private at the time, making it hard to evaluate impact, Kuhn said this was an opportunity lost.

"What if you thought of strategy not as an attempt to create unity and a simple trajectory for your firm?" he said. "What if you thought of strategy as developing from the many possibilities for our future-the many voices that made up the organization? What new practices, what appeals to new audiences, might have emerged from that?"

Leaders, Kuhn said, "should be less fearful of conversations that stray from our predetermined purpose or strategy, and instead foster conversations that develop emergent, perhaps unanticipated, practices that could be considered part of our complex organization."

Exit strategies

That sort of adaptability is crucial for corporations charged with innovating amid change and competition. Unfortunately, they don't always get there. As part of his research, Kuhn observed a high-tech incubator in action. While the entrepreneurs housed there had big ideas about disruption, the accelerator's model was laser-focused on exit strategies for the startups, as that's where their money came from.

"That makes sense, in that we often think that's the only way corporations think about value," Kuhn said. "But as I spoke with many of these startups, they were interested in a variety of other forms of value. Many wanted to fight the corporate machine, were really interested in civic values or just wanted to do something technologically cool, whether it paid off or not."

Instead, he said, they were pushed to sell out in ways that didn't always make sense for the long-term viability of their companies, "and it was telling for me that there was a corporation-the accelerator- that was doing the pushing-a form of communicative capitalism that was making these nascent firms into something they didn't want or need to be."

The book is a collection of theoretical deep dives into how communication, purpose and authority intersect, but there are plenty of practical takeaways for leaders looking for an edge in innovation.

"Organizations are these conglomerations of humans, practices, places, things, passions, times, histories and so on," Kuhn said. "If managers think their proclamations will directly produce the outcomes they want, they are probably not long for their positions. Because nothing is that simple."

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