Trump's Bold Move to Win the Female Vote

The Trump campaign is having trouble finding reputable Republicans to speak at the convention. Quite a number have indicated that they'll be working or on vacation but certainly too busy for something as inconsequential as the Republican Convention.

So, the campaign let reporters know that they are going to have some celebrities speak on Trump's behalf. A couple of names released were Mike Ditka - former NFL player and coach - and boxer Mike Tyson.

Ditka told reporters that Trump had asked him but he said no. He is a fan but he's also 81 and speaking is not really his thing. Apparently, the Trump campaign hadn't thought to ask Ditka about speaking before telling reporters.

Anyway,that still leaves Tyson to speak on his behalf. Adding a convicted rapist's endorsement to Putin's, David Duke's, and Kim Jong-un's should help Trump's poll numbers with women. 

Renaissance Popes (Helping the Protestant Cause)

Bad popes and CEOs, while possibly not a sign of the apocalypse, are a sign that an institution has gone rogue. When the church is about the glorification of the pope, or the corporation is about enriching the CEO, it is an institution in bad need of reform or reinvention. It is hard to imagine three popes who could do more to dissuade Europeans of respect for medieval authority than the 3 Renaissance popes Alexander, Julius, and Leo.

Think of the fun Fox and MSNBC would have reporting on these popes. A pope with sword on hip, swearing at his soldiers to urge them on in military campaigns? Another pope who, when a cardinal, was rebuked for hosting orgies?

Alexander rather fittingly took his name from the conqueror Alexander the Great rather than some milquetoast saint. Pope Alexander purchased the papacy in 1492. As Columbus was discovering a new world, Alexander was bribing fellow cardinals for their vote, an investment that he and his children would recoup.

Where a modern CEO might think it fun to throw multi-million dollar parties for a child, Alexander’s gifts were more creative. He bought his children lavish wedding parties, private bull fights, political positions and even armies with which to conquer new territory. Alexander had at least 7 known illegitimate children, a natural enough product from a man who seemed so at ease with sex. As pope, he once hosted a party that included a contest matching his guests with prostitutes and then dispensing gifts to the guests who demonstrated the most impressive feats of virility.


The next pope had once tried to depose Alexander, an attempt that led Alexander to try to assassinate this impetuous cardinal. It is hard to imagine someone as reticent and peaceful as Pope John Paul even surviving in this era, much less aspiring to the papacy. The church had too much power to be left to any but alpha males with little compunction.

Julius was bold enough to lead armies and raze St. Peter’s Basilica and commission a new one in its place, a feat that made Michelangelo and his ceiling more famous than this warrior pope.
Erasmus, who did so much to open the door to secular learning, penned a satire after Julius’s death titled “Julius Exclusis.” In this piece, Julie protests that St. Peter would block his entry to heaven.


Peter: Is there no difference between being holy and being called Holy? . . . Let me look a little closer. Hum! Signs of impiety aplenty. . . Priest's cassock, but bloody armor beneath it; eyes savage, mouth insolent, forehead brazen, body scarred with sins all over, breath loaded with wine, health broken with debauchery. Ay, threaten as you will, I will tell you what you are.... You are Julius the Emperor come back from hell....

Julius: Make an end, or I will excommunicate you....


P: Excommunicate me? By what right, I would know?

J: The best of rights. You are only a priest, perhaps not that you cannot consecrate. Open, I say!


P: You must show your merits first....

J: What do you mean by merits?


P: Have you taught true doctrine?

J: Not I. I have been too busy fighting. There are monks to look after doctrine, if that is of any consequence. … I have done more for the Church and Christ than any Pope before me.


P: What did you do?

J: I raised the revenue. I invented new offices and sold them... I recoined the currency and made a great sum that way. Nothing can be done without money. Then I annexed Bologna to the Holy See.... I set all the princes of Europe by the ears. I tore up treaties, and kept great armies in the field. I covered Rome with palaces, and left five millions in the treasury behind me....


P: Why did you take Bologna?

J: Because I wanted the revenue....


P: And how about Ferrara?

J: The duke was an ungrateful wretch. He accused me of simony [the purchase of office], called me a pederast.... I wanted the duchy of Ferrara for a son of my own, who could be depended upon to be true to the Church, and who had just poniarded [plunged a small dagger into] the Cardinal of Pavia.


P: What? Popes with wives and children?

J: Wives? No, not wives, but why not children? [1]


As Europe became more secular, it made a kind of perverse sense that the church and its leader would also become more secular but this still did not set well with Europeans. Luther’s protests about the excesses of Rome found ready ears. In Erasmus’s account, Peter expresses dismay that there is no way to depose such a pope and in this speaks for many Europeans. Although revolutions may seem obvious in retrospect, people do look for a variety of options before the overthrow of the social order. It took a lot to embolden Europeans to give up on popes.

Alexander and Julius convinced many Europeans that the papacy – and by extension the church – was corrupt and unworthy of respect. This provoked two responses that each undermined the grip of the church.


The one response was probably best characterized by intellectuals like Machiavelli and Erasmus, who were less concerned about the excesses of the church than the need to complement religion with secular teachings and human will. Machiavelli actually admired Julius’s boldness. And even though Erasmus criticized Julius, he seemed more aligned with the Catholic Church than the Protestant movement. These men saw progress through a further embrace of the secular, but an embrace that came in the arms of something other than the church.

The other response was best characterized by Martin Luther and John Calvin. They did not approve of Europe’s secular tilt and sought, instead, to create a church uncorrupted by so much power and money.


As it turns out, these two approaches had more in common than an opposition to the status quo and the power of the Catholic Church. A church that kept itself pure by letting others care about secular things like money, the rule of territory proved a perfect complement to the newly emerging nation-state that was secular in its interests and focus. If all the world had to be funneled through the church, the church was either going to be an obstacle to progress or it was going to become secular. But if the church was to focus on religious matters, then we have the birth of a new kind of world.

----------
[1] Will Durant, The Reformation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957) 279-82.

The Transformation The Financial Crisis Can Trigger

“It will have to change in order to stay the same.”
- Daniel Greenstein


In the century between 1690 and 1790, political innovations triggered the financial innovations that gave birth to capitalism. More democratic governments gave birth to modern financial markets.

In this century, financial innovations can trigger business innovations that will give birth to a new entrepreneurial economy. Financial innovations can help to fund a period of entrepreneurship that will transform corporations.

I am going to state this as simply as I can:
The reason for the financial crisis has far less to do with financial markets than with the capacity of corporations and communities for entrepreneurship. Financial markets did their job – they created money, credit and a host of financial products. The problem is that this money went to bidding up the price of what already exists (e.g., stocks and real estate) rather than financing the creation of something new (e.g., new business ventures and the infrastructure for new transportation and energy technologies).

A series of bubbles have burst. First in stocks in 2000. Then in real estate in 2005. Again in stocks this year. Too much money was chasing too few possibilities. There are actually more mutual funds than stocks. Huge sums of money was seeking higher returns, bidding up the price of financial products and trying to enhance returns through leverage.

Too little of it – as a percentage – went into the creation of something new, went into infrastructure like public works or the creation of alternative fuels, or new businesses or new products.

The corporate world did not adapt to these innovations in financial markets – remaining a relatively staid place where little innovation is expected to occur (at least within corporations), particularly innovations that would demand the sums of money generated by the recent spate of innovations in financial markets.

This has a parallel from about 1690. First the Dutch and then the English made innovations in politics that triggered innovations in finance. The Dutch and British were the first to adopt constitutional monarchies and first to invent modern stock and bond markets. It is no coincidence that these two went together.

Constitutional monarchies – the political innovation of the Dutch and English - made kings and queens subordinate to laws and a constitution. Monarchs could no longer just tell their subjects to give them money – to simply tax them. Under this new form of government, Parliament had power to resist. When the king said, “Pay me a million in taxes,” Parliament could say, “Why don’t we loan you the money instead and you can pay us back. We’ll buy bonds that pay interest.”

Figuring out how to finance this prompted the emergence of modern bankers and bond markets. Innovations in politics – the constitutional monarchy and Parliament – triggered innovations in finance – the birth of bond markets and the gradual popularization of investing. This was huge because it laid the foundation for the birth of capitalism.

What is the parallel for today?

Innovations in financial markets have created our predicament today. We’ve leveraged our way onto a precipice and governments are now trying to talk credit markets down off the ledge before they jump.

As easy as it is to dismiss this “excess” in financial markets as proof of greed and madness, these financial innovations have created a huge capacity for credit and expansion. The problem is not that we’ve created more money, more capacity for financing. The problem is that we’ve used that money to bid up the price of existing things – stocks and homes – rather than to create something new. More specifically, we failed to apply this new credit and expansion to the creation of new ventures.

The innovations in finance can turn out to be as wonderful as the innovations in politics were hundreds of years ago. To properly work, though, we’ll need to see innovations in business, a transformation of the corporation.

Right now, corporations are set up to – for the most part – be founded by entrepreneurs and then run by employees. In order to properly use the money financial markets are capable of producing, the corporation will have to become much more entrepreneurial – a place where a growing percentage of employees behave more like entrepreneurs.

Transforming the corporation into an entrepreneurial place is going to turn corporations into net users of cash rather than net producers. Properly done, turning corporate employees within the corporation into entrepreneurs will require lots and lots of cash: perhaps as much as the recent spate of financial innovations has generated.

We are facing a great moment in history. Going back to the Great Depression, however, will suggest only some needed regulations. It will not suggest the innovations that are most likely to take us into an economy as different from this information age as capitalism was from the agricultural economy.

The ability to create money and credit ought not to be considered a bad thing. And if we can again use innovations in one major institution (finance this time instead of politics) to trigger innovations in another (business instead of finance), we can move towards a new economy.

The idea is not to perfect the old world with these innovations. Rather, the idea is to create a new one. This has always been the theme of progress. There is no reason to believe that the way of change has changed for our own time.

Collaboration in a Post-Institutional World

Clay Shirky claims that the problem of coordination and collaboration need not depend on institutions. New technology actually enables groups and individuals to collaborate without an institutional construct in which to operate. He claims that this is revolutionary and says that a revolution doesn’t take you from point A to point B but, rather, takes you from point A to chaos. The printing press took the West away from the organization that came from church rule into chaos that was not resolved until the treaty of Westphalia defining the nation-state as the newly dominant institution about 200 years later. He suspects that the emergence of social networks and peer to peer technology will do something similar to institutions today, particularly to corporations. But this time he thinks it is less likely to take 200 years and will likely play out in about 50.

I’ve talked for quite some time about the popularization of entrepreneurship and what that means for the corporation. I have basically said that the role of entrepreneur will become more widespread during the next 30 to 50 years, sweeping up an increasing percentage of employees into its net, just as knowledge work became so prevalent in the last century.

Shirky seems to challenge even the notion of what it would mean to be an entrepreneur, shedding light on how entrepreneurship might become so common. If collaboration and cooperation no longer requires an institutional overlay, or construct, entrepreneurship becomes an act of catalyzing behaviors and activities rather than focusing on creating the context or container for such activities.

This suggests that community itself may be the container for the actions and behaviors of individuals, with no need for creating institutions. It does suggest that the very notion of, or need for, institution is set to transform along with the definition of entrepreneur.

Here is Shirky's talk:

The Rise of the Individual

Bad governments come in at least two forms: they put up bureaucratic obstacles to those who are pushing beyond the current norms and / or they ignore the plight of those who are failing. Good governments don’t ignore one of these goals at the expense of another. And this is a trick of the hardest kind: creating a system that makes allowance for the individuals for whom the system does not work. This is the paradox of progress.

Systems don’t easily transform for the individual. Too much of what passes for self improvement is actually the act of conforming the individual to the system, to society, to the institution. We have not yet lived in a time when social systems were considered disposable and individuals essential to preserve; to date, our experience has been the reverse. Flipping this order would be transformative. Dopeless hope fiend that I am, I even think it can be done.

“He didn’t think in human dimensions. Humanity was never of any importance to him. It was always the concept of the superman … the nation, always this abstract image of a vast German Reich, powerful and strong. But the individual never mattered to him. Though he always said he wanted to make people happy – he started a variety of welfare and recreational organizations in the Third Reich – personal happiness was never of the slightest importance to him. “
- Traudle Junge, in Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary

Corporate Revolution & the 4th Economy

So, here's the question: can a guy in a t-shirt, sitting in his home office, trigger a revolution? In my on-going life as an experiment, this is me trying a new medium for (what is for me) an old message.



I mis-spoke twice.
One, I said that 90% of the American population was employed. Not so. About 90% of the work force works as employees (as opposed to working as independents or business owners).
Two, I said that the CEO's role will look more like that of venture capitalist and the role of a growing minority of employees will be ... that of venture capitalist. Again, I mis-spoke. That should be, the role of employees will look more like that of an entrepreneur.

Next time, maybe I'll try using notes instead of just talking extemporaneously.

Social Invention & The Fourth Economy

1. Social Invention & Progress

In the earliest grades, children learn that technological inventions fuel progress. Things like the wheel, the iron plow, the automobile, and computer obviously made ours a different world.

Less obviously, social inventions are essential to progress. Tribes, city-states, nation-states, and international organizations have made it possible for larger groups of increasingly specialized people to cooperate to create a new world. Like microwave ovens, churches, governments, banks, and corporations have also made ours a different world from the one in which our ancestors lived.

We're about to enter a new economy, one in which the act of social invention (a broader application of the notion of entrepreneurship) will become as normal as the introduction of new products. At first, this will seem disorientating, but our grandkids will think it is normal. It will be a period of unprecedented prosperity and individual freedom.

2. Waves of Social Invention

Social invention often looks like revolution. When innovators change how people worship, or challenge the king’s authority, innovation will probably be violent. Indeed, the acceptance of change without violent resistance is a fairly novel experience in humanity’s history, and a big reason that the pace of progress is accelerating.

Social invention can occur in a wide variety of domains, from Macarena dance moves to currency arbitrage. Some of this innovation is random and in some of it one can discern a pattern.

Between about 1300 to 1700, a wave of social and technological inventions produced the first economy. As land, or natural resources, was the basis of wealth in this economy, one can simply refer to this as an agricultural economy. Technological inventions like the seed drill and steel plow enabled farmers to produce more and new technology like the compass made it possible for anyone to sell their products more widely, capturing a higher price as trade emerged across even oceans. Meanwhile, social inventions like Martin Luther’s challenge to the papacy and Henry VIII’s making himself the head of the Church of England were key to the eclipse of the nation-state over the church. This maelstrom of innovation produced an agricultural economy, the first market economy in lieu of a traditional economy.

Once natural resources were being traded widely (think of Italy without the tomato, Ireland without the potato, and England without tea and you begin to get a sense of how transformed Europe was by the flow of new products across oceans), the next step in creating value was processing. Wood and wool has less value than lumber and textiles. Processing natural resources into finished products was the work of the industrial revolution. This, too, required a panoply of technological and social inventions. Democracy did for the nation-state what the Reformation did for the church – dispersing power in the dominant institution outwards to a wider group.

In the last century, the most advanced countries have hosted the latest wave of technological and social inventions, culminating in the information economy. Technology like the computer and telephone, coupled with innovations like the modern corporation and university have produced the most advanced economy yet.

3. Social Evolution is Not Done Yet

But this most recent economy will not be the last. The pattern of invention and revolution since about 1300 suggests that we are on the cusp of one more wave of innovation. One more economy, one more society, has yet to emerge. As with every new economy before it, this one will transform our philosophy, our dominant institution, the social order, and the individual. And unlike the emergence of the first economy that took place over a period of hundreds of years, this one will emerge in about half a century.



4. Pattern of Revolutions

The pattern of revolutions has been the same each time a new economy has emerged. The power in the most dominant institution is dispersed outwards from elites. Intellectual, institutional, and social revolutions accompany the new economy.

In the first economy, the power of the elites over the church – the power of popes and cardinals – was dispersed. Martin Luther declared, “We are all priests!” and became a prophet of how the West would eventually treat religion – giving the individual authority to make his or her own choices about how – or whether – to worship.

In the second economy, the power of the elites over the nation-state – the power of kings and queens – was dispersed. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “All men were created equal,” and became a prophet of how democracies would eventually treat politics – giving the individual authority to choose leaders and policy that defined the community.

In the third economy, the power of the elites over the bank – the power of capitalists – was dispersed. The bank itself was dispersed into a number of pieces, some as well known as Central Banks and others as arcane as hedge funds. The average person who, in the beginning of the 20th century had to grovel for a few hundred dollars with which to buy a simple appliance would, by the end of the 20th century, be regularly turning away offers of credit in the form of credit card solicitations.

These changes were not lightly made. Although the most recent looked more like innovation than revolution, each involved myriad changes in technology and social norms. It is easy to forget that credit – or, rather, debt – was generally considered dishonorable a century ago, rather than a simple fact of life.

5. Intellectual Revolution

The most pervasive and least visible change was in how people thought. There is a huge difference between the medieval mind and even the Renaissance, much less the modern, mind. In medieval times, witches and evil spirits were blamed for bad crops, infertility, and dying oxen. The earth was the center of the universe. But Renaissance thinkers embraced facts, heeding the advice of Roger Bacon to use the empirical method.

While a Renaissance thinker like Galileo could say that the earth circled around the sun, he could not explain why it was that we weren’t spun off into space by centrifugal force, like ants spun off of a rock spun around on a string. Galileo could accept facts as he observed them, but didn’t really have a cogent explanation of why the solar system worked as it did.

It took an Enlightenment thinker – the Enlightenment thinker – to explain why. Isaac Newton, in one fell swoop, explained how it is that the earth circled the sun and why we didn’t fly into space while spinning at 1,000 miles an hour. Newton added laws – a theory – to observations and facts. His friend John Locke did a similar thing in the domain of politics, brushing aside Henry VIII’s argument for the divine rights of kings and replacing it with the rule of law to which even monarchs were subject.

Pragmatists like Henry James and Oliver Wendell Holmes were less impressed with the general application of Enlightenment thinkers’ laws. They were not looking for a universal tool with which to eat. Rather, they were content that a fork would work best for some foods and a spoon for others. They were interested in solving specific problems in specific situations and thought of Enlightenment style thinkers as idealistic. (To this day, you’ll note how politicians and managers invariably refer to themselves as pragmatic.) The engineer and modern professional is neither a Renaissance nor Enlightenment thinker. By the end of the 20th century, the dominant way of thinking was pragmatism, a philosophy at one and the same time invisible and obvious, as characterizes any period’s dominant philosophy.


6. Social Revolution

Finally, the social order is transformed with the emergence of each new economy. The medieval church was the dominant institution of that time, but as a social invention, the church is less effective than the nation-state as a means to get the most out of land – the basis of wealth in the first, agricultural economy. The nation-state’s dominance was lost when land was eclipsed by capital as the basis for wealth. The bank, or capitalism more broadly, eclipsed the nation-state as the most dominant institution during the second, industrial economy. Most recently, the multinational corporation has eclipsed the bank in importance as knowledge workers, rather than capital, have become the limit to progress. A community dominated by a church is very different from one dominated by a corporation. This revolution in the social order has seemed to get less notice than institutional revolutions that transformed the church or state, but have been as defining of the new communities.

7. Economic Revolution

These various revolutions – intellectual, institutional, and social – swirl within a larger pattern – the emergence of a new world. One easy way to tie together these changes is to see them as means for creating a new economy. Authoritarian communities like the medieval theocracy that defined the West are incompatible with market economies that take their lead from individual choices. Products of the land – whether they be spices or gold – are going to be worth more when traded and their value is greater when strong governments can remove tariffs and other barriers to trade while respecting property rights in a way that encourages investment. The emergence of the nation-state, the rise of fact-based thinking, and the reformation almost seem obvious when you think that social inventors had to develop solutions that would enhance the value of land – the basis of wealth in the first economy.

The revolutions of the second and third economies can be understood in the same way. The rise of parliaments that voted for bonds that paid interest rather than taxes that simply took money helped to fuel the development of nascent financial markets. Monarchs could not be the ultimate source of power if a community was going to encourage investment and the development of capital. Investors instead needed a rule of law in which they could trust.



8. The Fourth Economy – the Pattern Repeats
"The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know."
– Harry S Truman

As it turns out, our future is in this past. Tomorrow the sun will rise just like it did yesterday. Patterns repeat. And in this case, the patterns of transformation will repeat. A new economy, a new society, is just beginning to emerge. We can predict quite a bit of it based these past changes.

Power within the dominant institution will be diffused. Just as popes and monarchs and JP Morgan lost their grip on their period’s most powerful institution, so will today’s CEOs lose theirs. Within the last decade, information has been radically dispersed outwards; a 12 year old with internet connection has access to more information than the heads of the CIA or KGB did in 1970. Now, as decisions are dispersed along with this information – as power to act is dispersed out to individuals within corporations, the CEO’s power will change.

This is not to say that CEOs will have less power – just less power relative to everyone else. President Bush had more power than President Hussein, it is just that Hussein had more power relative to the average citizen. The role of CEO will be more like that of venture capitalist than traditional boss and while measured in absolute terms the CEO’s power will increase, in relative terms it will be radically less.

The Popularization of Entrepreneurship
In the last economy, progress followed from getting more – and getting more from – knowledge workers. Universities, information technology, and corporate bureaucracies were all social inventions that facilitated the growth of the information economy in which knowledge workers – labor – had become the limit to progress rather than capital. Before 1900, there were knowledge workers but there just weren’t enough of them to define the economy.

In this Fourth Economy, the same will be true of entrepreneurship. Since the dawning of the market economies that have defined the West during the last 700 years, entrepreneurs have been around and have been vital. But they’ve always been the exception, not the norm. An entrepreneur creates something new, defies convention to create a new organization that combines labor, capital, and resources into value. The entrepreneur is a social inventor. And the Fourth Economy will be to the popularization of entrepreneurship what the popularization of knowledge workers or capital was to the information and industrial economies. This will drive and be driven by the transformation of the corporation. Within the corporation, the role of employee will begin to look more like that of entrepreneur.

And the reason that the fourth economy will be the last economy to emerge is that within it, communities will learn to make fluid what has previously been cataclysmic. Social invention and its resultant changes will become the norm rather than an exception, part of the normal pattern of progress rather than revolutionary. Forms of schools, government agencies, businesses and non-profits as yet unimagined will result from this Cambrian-like explosion of social innovation.

Evidence of this is already appearing. A growing number of successful entrepreneurs have taken the path of Bill Gates – applying their wealth and their expertise to creating sustainable solutions, engaging in acts of social invention rather than just donating money to problems. The resultant organizations don’t neatly fit into the category of any pre-existing organizations. They are non-governmental, not really charity in the classic sense, and are certainly not for-profit businesses. They defy simple categorization and in this sense may well be the model for future organizations, pioneers of entrepreneurship writ large.

The Intellectual Revolution
Systems thinking pioneer Russell Ackoff has pointed out that we have, in the West, created separate institutions for different dimensions of being human. We’ve created schools for learning, office spaces for working, and parks for playing. And yet, this fragmentation of the human experience doesn’t really facilitate the experience of being human. Children learn most rapidly when they are working at play, innovations in work often come from learning that follows from playing with ideas or things. These institutions we’ve created fragment our experience into artificial categories and make it hard for us to treat one another as humans or to feel fully human ourselves.

Seeing beyond the confines of our institutions into what new institutions we can create will require that we adopt something other than the reductionist perspective that underlies the philosophies of the first three economies. Since the time that Descartes advocated breaking apart – or reducing – problems into simpler parts, the West has largely been defined by a reductionist approach. Systems thinking offers a complement to this, a philosophy or world view that is beyond that of Renaissance, Enlightenment, or pragmatism.

Entrepreneurship gets its value from synthesis – bringing together the pieces into some whole. Labor gets its wage, capital its return, and resources its price. After all that is paid and combined into a new whole – some product or service – the entrepreneur gets profit. Entrepreneurs are systems thinkers who deal with systems.

The really important problems are emergent – they don’t neatly fit within the confines of one institution or domain. Solutions to problems like terrorism, pollution, climate change, and trade issues are provoking the creation of new institutions, acts of entrepreneurship that bring social invention outside of the traditional confines of nation-states or corporations. These emergent problems are systems problems and can’t be addressed from within the confines of traditional institutions.

Systems thinking – with its emphasis on interaction, interdependencies, and emergent phenomenon – will be to the fourth economy what the Enlightenment was to the second. By beginning to embrace the approaches and perspectives advocated by people like W. Edwards Deming, Russell Ackoff, and Peter Senge, we’ll begin to create this new economy, this new world. It is a way of thinking that will find its expression in new institutions – in acts of entrepreneurship.


9. The Rise of the Individual

During the first economy, the nation-state rose to eclipse the church as the community’s most powerful institution. In the fourth economy, the individual will at last arise to eclipse institutions.

To date, the individual has been measured against a variety of standards, expected to find his or her justification within the institution. The individual is expected to adhere to some standard in the church, judged as good Christian. The individual is expected to adhere to some standard in the country, judged as a good citizen. The individual is expected to adhere to some standard in the corporation, judged as a good employee. In an age when social invention becomes expected, these institutions will instead be judged against the needs of the individual. Does the church make the person feel more peace, more joy, more charitable? If not, perhaps it is the church and not the Christian that needs changing – a change that requires an act of entrepreneurship, or social invention. Does the state make the individual safer and more free? If not, perhaps it is the state that needs changing and not the citizen. Does the corporation allow the individual to choose only to do tasks that add value, to pursue her own potential, and to find and create opportunities that would not exist on her own? If not, perhaps it is the corporation that needs to change rather than the employee.

Social invention has been largely overlooked in the story of progress. It will, however, be central to the fourth economy, when entrepreneurship will be popularized and institutions will be expected to adapt to the reality of the individual’s experience. This will be the most exciting economy – the most exciting world – yet to emerge.