“It’s 80% Dark Matter”

I attended the launch of “Collaboration Strategy: How to Get What You Want from Employees, Suppliers and Business Partners”, the new book by Felix Barber and Michael Goold of the Ashridge Strategy Management Centre. The book contains plenty of good material on structuring terms with the parties who you work with and aligning incentives. Reflecting the past service of both authors with the Boston Consulting Group, it has plenty to say about focusing on those activities in which you enjoy competitive advantage and outsourcing the others.

Publisher’s glass in hand, I was listening to Felix deliver a short lecture providing a synopsis of the themes of the book when someone¹ muttered in my ear:  “they’re talking entirely about markets and financial incentives, but in reality it’s 80% Dark Matter”.  This is a powerful metaphor and an important insight: we need to recognise that there is lot of dark matter out there in the economy and without it nothing works.  Market forces and financial incentives alone do not explain how organisations, partnerships and collaborations operate and why we need them.  Barber and Goold do acknowledge, buried deep in their text, that there may be more going on by commenting that they “don’t wish to downplay the importance of other approaches to motivating employees and other partners”.  But, possibly reflecting lifetimes as consultants and academics, they convey in the book the impression that they don’t recognise the amount of Dark Matter that the system needs.

¹ David Pitt Watson, sometime managing director of BCG rivals Braxton Associates, Labour Party Finance Director, boss of the activist investment fund Hermes Focus and now social entrepreneur and responsible investment guru.