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World Inc. Excerpts
Chapter 2:
On Panic and Resolve in Leaders
The question at the heart of this book, despite all its nuance and complexities, is really quite simple: If competition and the desire to win are such an inherent part of our nature, can we remake ourselves and our firms — yet again — to better consider social need? We all understand quite well the value, the temptations, and the seduction, frankly, of competition on a vast scale. Corporations get to fulfill their self worth by creating something better than their competing companies, and consumers get a superior product. Yet do the best 21st-century capitalists have it in them to understand, appreciate, and then capitalize on the value of social needs?
Projections for the success of a company are, by their very nature and the constant shifting of the marketplace, uncertain. What IS certain is that we will eventually run out of oil and gas as a fuel supply to heat our homes, drive our cars, and sustain our industrial output as we know it. This is fact. The end of this age of oil is an increasing topic of debate and concern in the boardrooms of the largest oil, automotive, consumer product, and agricultural companies. In order to survive and to prosper further, these 300 largest corporations need to develop and further refine the business art of innovation for social needs — they need to find a new and socially responsible way to fill the hole our depleting oil supply is leaving. We call this elaborate social art in business the S-Frontier.
World Inc. is far too complex a theory to be summed-up in a single bulleted list. Nonetheless, the image below compresses three current realities:
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the Swiftness of new global market information
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the Severity of some of the leading social problems before us (such as climate change and the rising price of oil)
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the need for Social response capitalists
This S-Frontier is already here. We call it a "frontier" as it represents the progressing fringe of business thinking, much like the idea of the Western frontier shaped and furthered so much American thinking in the l8th and l9th centuries.
Many corporations and individuals still need to adjust their bearings to this new terrain, and as more and more people begin to understand and play by the changing rules of the game, folks will be able to discern when a company is headed for disaster. And not only will people be able to see disaster looming on the horizon for certain companies, they will even have a hand in calling for the end of those companies who don't meet the new requirements. In short, only the well-positioned firms of today will have wind behind their sails when the change takes. By 2050, it's easy to predict that the top 300 multinationals will undergo tremendous change, and only a minority will remain at all.
