Institutions as Tools

A central message of my books The Fourth Economy and New Politics for the Next Economy is a transformation too rarely discussed: the shift from institutions using individuals as tools to individuals using institutions as tools.

Machinery shifted the limit on the value we could create through work from our physical abilities to our cognitive abilities. AI promises another shift—from the limits of our intelligence to the limits of our entrepreneurship.

Increasingly, our success will depend less on what we can do ourselves than on what we can imagine and bring into being: our ability to orchestrate capital, people, technology, and materials into initiatives that excite investors, attract customers, and create products, services, and experiences that enrich lives.

In this economy, realizing one's own potential becomes increasingly entangled with helping others to realize theirs. 

And here is a curious paradox: as individuals become more entrepreneurial, they become more dependent on the quality of their relationships.

Entrepreneurial success requires creating value simultaneously for customers and investors, employees and suppliers. It requires imagining possibilities that others find worth pursuing or at least supporting, building institutions that people want to participate in, and coordinating contributions that no individual could make alone.

Far from celebrating the self-sufficient individual, entrepreneurship reveals just how interdependent we are. The paradox of the Entrepreneurial Economy is that the more capable we become as individuals, the more our success depends on what we can accomplish together.

Ultimately, it is this entanglement—the quality of our relationships and our capacity to create value together—that makes a neighborhood, community, society, or nation rich, vibrant, and successful.