Constructive Capitalism

This is an important post for me. I've been carrying it around in my head for a while, struggling to articulate it. Thankfully someone else has done it for me. The video below is a talk by Umair Haque who has been doing some important writing on the subject of the current economic malaise. Like me, Umair believes that what we are seeing is somewhat more than a 'normal' recession, and more than a financial crisis. It's a crisis of rigidity, of conflict, of stagnation, of nihilism, and a crisis of depletion.

If you're at all in any doubt about that last one, read this feature from New Scientist ("It has taken all of human history for the economy to reach its current size. On current form it will take just two decades to double."), and click on the visual below (if you can't read the annotations on the lines, they relate to things like population, CO2 emissions, water use, species extinctions, average surface temperature, loss of tropical rainforest and woodland. The time scale across the bottom is about 250 years. The unbelievably exponential increase is over the last 50).

 

Image courtesy

Umair's point is that we are faced with a crisis of interaction. Interaction has exploded. Changed the way we form institutions. Whatever happens now things will never be the same again. Like how we define value. And how we define growth. Capitalism itself is changing, and there is a better way to compete, and a better way to interact, based on new principles:

• Strategy is a commodity
• Competition is obsolete
• There is nothing more assymetrical than an ideal
• Tommorrow is today
• Connections not transactions
• People, not product
• Creativity, not productivity
• Outcomes not incomes
• Advantage is in the DNA
• The next revolution is institutional

A new set of rules are forming, and it is all of our opportunity to help shape that. I believe community can make a difference. And the We20 initiative that Johnnie posted about is not a bad place to start. This video is long, at an hour, but I urge you to watch it. If you can't do it now, bookmark it, and come back to it when you can. But do watch it.

Umair Haque @ Daytona Sessions vol. 2 - Constructive Capitalism from Daytona Sessions on Vimeo.

Comments

[Jon Howard]

Sorry, but I'm going in for a bit of blatent cross promotion, as I completely agree with you: http://bit.ly/kIPth

Plus within it, the link to a post on collaborative 'ecologies' vs. competitive economies, and strategies of 'enough' rather than 'more'

[Charles Frith]

Great stuff Neil. I think Umair dodges the silver bullet a bit though on the growth question and I've given it some thought. If we're going to be brutal with our thinking we need to think about managed decline and population decline should we want to pass on a better planet.

Not managed decline forever. A bit like pruning a tree. That's where we're at and I've even given it some thought as to how we do that in a fair way.

As ever though. Just thoughts.

[John Dodds]

I watched this a few days ago and while his arguments are interesting, I recall thinking that too many of his examples were there to fit the argument rather than vice versa and some of his assertions just factually untrue (I'll have to watch it again to retrieve the details).

I'm still not convinced this is as fundamental a crisis as some think in and of itself - that it occurs at a time of some other real problems such as the depletion crisis has I think led to some conflation. But it's a crucial debate - maybe you could get him to speak somewhere.

[Jake Yarbrough (jakeybro)]

Neil,

I don't know when I found Umair and/or who recommended him, but every time I read one of his posts, I find my head shaking up and down in agreement.

@Frith brings up a gut wrenching concept of managed decline. The intestines are stirring, in part, because it is so insightful -- something I wish I had thought of. Where does that pruning begin? I'm sure that is something that can be discussed at length.

In reading the Master Class in Account Planning book that was released last year, I was struck by the JWT Asia planning statement that all insight is the struggle between human desires and cultural desires.

Could Frith's pruning/decline argument be a more appropriate example of this conflict? I think not.

Thanks for getting my brain boiling so early in the day.

[Taylor Davidson]

@Firth: I don't think we have to deal with a "managed decline" at all: we just have to be comfortable with heart-wrenching changes in the direction of business and humanity.

I hate to put words in his mouth, but Umair isn't anti-growth: he is against the type and direction of growth that has created our current economic and cultural values.

Neil has talked about the need to change our definition of growth previously: do you see it as a "decline" or a "shift in direction?

[Charles Frith]

Gentlemen. Forgive me for not responding. I've been lost since cocomment stopped working ffor me.

I've been thinking about the managed decline issue for a while so it's quite entrenched. The sharp end of the stick is managed population decline but let's park that for a mo.

We're choking on growth. It's not bigger numbers we need it's cleaner air and cities built for people not cards.

There are a million way we can create value. Look at TV. A multi squillion (ok whatever the number is) dollar industry globally and yet it is completely dispensable.

All we have to do is choose where we focus and how we reward. We create the value. That's what constructive capitalism is all about.

So anyway, we need population decline. It's a hard truth and particularly as my conclusions are that the toughest controls need to be imposed on the rich. Low carbon peoople like African, Brazilians and Indians shouldn't have to be curbed because of our SUV's and plastic wrapped everthing culture. Let's just hope they leave the Cathedrals intact when they decide to move in. ;)

I'll try and pop back if there's anything that sticks out as obviously flawed with my view (apart from idealism). Doddsy isn't far off though. Umair needs more examples. We need more examples. But really. Strategy is a commodity? Those are the kind of words that reframe my world.

[john]

A great presentation. I think it's quite pertinent that Umair notes this constructive capitalism shift is taking place in many third world institutions. With regard to his comments on nihilism, I think it's quite pertinent that years of school geography lessons have told us we are a developed country.