It's quite delightful to point readers off to a kindred thinker. Jeff Jarvis, fresh from his meeting with the world's elites at Davos, has come to believe that
"Perhaps the most important ‘ding’ moment I had at Davos was that the powerful are, no surprise, one step behind in their understanding of the true significance of the internet: They think it is all about individual action when, in truth, it’s about collective action. And so they don’t yet see that the internet will shift power even more than they realize."
[read it all at http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2007/02/01/davos07-my-big-conclusion/]
You can read my take on this same shift in a few posts at this blog, three of them here:
http://rwrld.blogspot.com/2006/12/social-evolution-and-next-corporation.html
and
http://rwrld.blogspot.com/2007/01/be-rupert-murdoch-for-only-5000.html
and
http://rwrld.blogspot.com/2007/01/employees-becoming-entrepreneurs.html
Vladimir Dzhuvinov has a blog through which he's working out a model that could effectively disperse power. You can find him at:
http://www.thetransactioncompany.com/
Russell Ackoff is perhaps one of the best known thinkers in management to espouse internal markets (just one of his many profound ideas), something that I'm beginning to believe will be an essential part of the dispersion of power from corporate elites to the common man. You can find information about his ideas at:
http://ackoffcenter.blogs.com/
Not all of the corporate transformation talk is actually about transforming the corporation. Pamela Slim has a blog directed towards helping people to escape the cubicle farm - no longer keen to waste her energy helping corporations to transform, she's directly helping the people stuck within them. Even these actions will help to hasten a transformation of the corporation, forcing business to reconsider the role it has defined for its employees. You can find Pam's brilliant "open letter" here:
http://www.escapefromcubiclenation.com/get_a_life_blog/2006/05/open_letter_to_.html
Such ideas are infectious memes. The ideological immune system of the current social system will first miss these ideas, then mock them, and then point out their flaws. But these ideas will eventually transform society. When you change the dominant institution, you invariably change all of society.
Just think about it. What if this chorus (of often harmonizing, sometimes discordant voices) is right? Maybe it's time to ask yourself what exciting things are possible if power were to disperse outwards from the elites within the corporation as they have previously done within the church, the state, and the bank. And what if this pattern of revolutions, the rise of the individual, has been the pattern of progress throughout the history of Western Civilization? And if you think about that, the meme is already in, already past your defenses. What was it Supreme Court Justice and co-inventor of Pragmatism Oliver Wendell Holmes said? “Man’s mind stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimension.”
R World (Ron Davison muses aloud)
Showing posts with label davos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label davos. Show all posts
01 February 2007
16 January 2007
The Future of Prosperity - When More is Less
A fascinating post at http://virtualeconomics.typepad.com/virtualeconomics/ leads with this:
"Jeff Jarvis is blogging from the Davos world leaders conference, finding (amongst other things) that 53% of Western Europeans think that the next generation will be less prosperous than this one. That's compared to 37% in the US, and just 14% in China."
Why the optimism gap? It could be that the West has an intuitive sense that the model we've been using for more than a century may be appropriate for a place like China but is increasingly less so in the West. China's per capita income is about 5% what it is in Western Europe or the US and Canada, making their perspective very different.
A single scoop of ice cream is nice - two can be fine ... but at some point (3? 6?) the enjoyment turns to nausea. More is nice for those who have little but after a while more becomes less desirable. Many Chinese are only now beginning to enjoy the benefits of prosperity - getting bikes, cars, stereos, and fashionable clothes for the first time. But once they have that, what is the next stage of prosperity? What happens when more is no longer better?
For decades we have confused quantity of goods with quality of life. Given that the prosperity of the last couple of centuries was the equivalent of our first scoop or two of ice cream, this confusion has not been particularly important. But now that we're facing our third or fourth scoop, it is important to make the distinction.
Our economies are still largely geared towards more, towards quantity of goods. Walk through a Costco or a landfill to see how voluminous our appetite for "goods" is. Yet these goods to have are not the only kind of goods. In fact, philosophers distinguish between goods to have and goods to do - considering the goods to do a higher good than those we have. Quality of life is related to goods to have - it is hard to imagine aspiring to a quality of life that didn't include at least some modicum of shelter, clothing, and food - much less those delightful bits of technology like laptops, mp3 players, or cell phones. Yet the marginal utility - the additional joy we get - from more goods (to have) does gradually drop. Eventually, goods (to have) simply do less to increase our quality of life.
Those in the West may well see that we're geared for getting more even as getting more has less and less impact on our quality of life. This may be the reason for the optimism gap between the West and China. Until the West has shifted its economies to more directly go after improvements in quality of life, this sense of pessimism in the West may only get worse.
"Jeff Jarvis is blogging from the Davos world leaders conference, finding (amongst other things) that 53% of Western Europeans think that the next generation will be less prosperous than this one. That's compared to 37% in the US, and just 14% in China."
Why the optimism gap? It could be that the West has an intuitive sense that the model we've been using for more than a century may be appropriate for a place like China but is increasingly less so in the West. China's per capita income is about 5% what it is in Western Europe or the US and Canada, making their perspective very different.
A single scoop of ice cream is nice - two can be fine ... but at some point (3? 6?) the enjoyment turns to nausea. More is nice for those who have little but after a while more becomes less desirable. Many Chinese are only now beginning to enjoy the benefits of prosperity - getting bikes, cars, stereos, and fashionable clothes for the first time. But once they have that, what is the next stage of prosperity? What happens when more is no longer better?
For decades we have confused quantity of goods with quality of life. Given that the prosperity of the last couple of centuries was the equivalent of our first scoop or two of ice cream, this confusion has not been particularly important. But now that we're facing our third or fourth scoop, it is important to make the distinction.
Our economies are still largely geared towards more, towards quantity of goods. Walk through a Costco or a landfill to see how voluminous our appetite for "goods" is. Yet these goods to have are not the only kind of goods. In fact, philosophers distinguish between goods to have and goods to do - considering the goods to do a higher good than those we have. Quality of life is related to goods to have - it is hard to imagine aspiring to a quality of life that didn't include at least some modicum of shelter, clothing, and food - much less those delightful bits of technology like laptops, mp3 players, or cell phones. Yet the marginal utility - the additional joy we get - from more goods (to have) does gradually drop. Eventually, goods (to have) simply do less to increase our quality of life.
Those in the West may well see that we're geared for getting more even as getting more has less and less impact on our quality of life. This may be the reason for the optimism gap between the West and China. Until the West has shifted its economies to more directly go after improvements in quality of life, this sense of pessimism in the West may only get worse.
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