National Debt & Global Warming

Here is a fascinating graph from the folks at swivel.com

Accumulating debt and accumulating carbon dioxide are both driven by the advance of capitalism. What is the quip? Things that can't go on forever tend not to?

The Corporation is Today's Dominant Institution

Fortunately, you can't see air. If you could, it is unlikely that you could see anything else. In a similar way, when a particular institution dominates a community, it is nearly invisible.

In medieval times, that institution was the church; today, the dominant institution is the corporation. Its influence is so pervasive that we can’t even see it.

Think about the typical day of the average person. The alarm goes off at 6:30. The programming is courtesy of a corporation - the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The very thoughts that first enter her head aren’t daily prayers sanctioned by her church but are, instead, news items and commentary approved by employees of a corporation. The radio that conveys this programming is made by the Sony Corporation and was bought from a retail outlet the Best Buy Corporation. This person lifts herself off the bed, a bed made by the Select Comfort Corporation. The alarm goes off at 6:30 because the time it takes to commute in her car (made and sold by the Nissan Corporation) plus the time it takes to get ready (using products like toothpaste, shaving gel, hair gel, and deodorant provided by the Proctor & Gamble Corporation) equals the time that the corporate employer expects her to begin working. She has scarcely gained consciousness and already her day is defined by corporate norms, products, and expectations.

Even the context for the use of the products listed in the above paragraph is a product of corporations. The very notion of “body odor” is a product of corporate advertisers trying to create demand for deodorant early in the 20th century. The idea of time zones was not an idea of governments but of railroads that needed uniform time zones in order to create schedules. It is one thing to notice that we’re bombarded by about 3,000 advertisements a day. It is another to notice that the very expectation of wearing deodorant or chewing mints is created by corporations, much less the expectation that we’ll all synchronize our watches and alarm clocks.

Our clothes and transportation are defined by corporations. Our working hours and the number of years that we need to work are also defined by corporations. More than 90% of Americans are employees and their role as employees is either defined by a corporation or an institution that patterns itself after the corporation. The level of pollution that we accept is defined by the needs of the corporation. Only when health needs of people and the planet are being too obviously ignored is that negotiated or changed. The extent to which children are allowed to be with their parents during the work day is defined by the corporation. Even our diet is defined by corporations and if the health consequences of this are harmful, then corporations are ready to offer prescription drugs that remedy the complications from the diet.

One of the real obstacles to transforming the medieval church was getting enough intellectual distance from it to see it, rather than simply see through the lens it provided. Our situation is little different today. Just take note of how pervasive is the corporation in defining your daily life. Once you do, you can begin to explore ways to define it rather than accept it defining you, taking to heart the warning that Emerson gave: "We have become the tools of our tools."

Why does this matter? It was impossible to change life, to make progress, coming out of medieval times without changing the church - and changing it fundamentally. Today, fundamental progress depends on changing the corporation, today's dominant institution.

W. Edwards Deming on the Future of Capitalism

If you can understand this 5 minute excerpt, you can begin to understand how pervasive are the changes we need to make to the modern corporation.

Making More than Your CEO

99% of CEOs would be outraged if the next government said, “We’ve decided how much money people can make and what they should focus on. Here are our pay grades and here is your list of objectives for all CEOs.” And yet this is exactly what 99% of CEOs do to their employees. Amazing.

We'll know that the corporations are creating healthy environments when a small and growing number of employees regularly make more than the CEO.

Welcome to the Next Transformation

In about 1300, the West began its first great transformation. When it was complete by 1700, the church had been eclipsed as the dominant institution by the nation-state – kings had more power than popes and it was the individual who chose his or her religion. Starting with this great transformation, the West has gone through three great transformations. You are living through the very beginning of the fourth.

In succession, the past transformations have given the individual freedom of religion, the right to vote, and access to credit. In the process, the church, state, and bank have been transformed. And the West has overcome the limits of land, capital, and knowledge workers as well through a succession of economic revolutions we’ve come to know as the Commercial Revolution, Capitalism, and the Information Age.

The next great transformation, the fourth in the series, will transform the modern corporation as the past repetitions have transformed the church, state, and bank. It will result in the individual having unprecedented levels of control over how he works and on what he works. In the process, the West will overcome what has replaced land, capital, and knowledge workers as the new limit to progress, it will overcome the limit of entrepreneurship by turning a growing number of employees into entrepreneurs, changing our notion of a corporation and its employees.

Key to all of this is this notion. We are well aware that progress depends on technological inventions like the wheel, the compass, the steam engine, the car, and computer. We seem less aware of the fact that progress depends, too, on social inventions like the bank, accounting, legal contracts, schools, universities, nation-states, and the modern corporation.

The next great transformation will disrupt everything. It is hard to image a world in which a group who might have been expected to take a role as factory workers in the 19th century or as knowledge workers in the 20th century will, instead, take on the role of entrepreneurs. Imagine having even 10% of the population busily creating and recreating the organizations through which we conduct business, education, and governance.

This blog will tell the story of next great transformation, will predict the next 50 years using a pattern that began 700 years ago. Pull up a chair around my kitchen table and settle in. This is going to be a fascinating series of events to narrate.

Welcome to the next transformation.