Enterprise 2.0 - Now a necessity in a low/no capital world - The Death of the Dinos
by Rob Paterson
Easy to get capital and easy to get credit is vanishing and enterprises that rely on this will not make it.
A deep undercurrent of this blog has been how difficult it is for a conventional organization to adopt a 2.0 world. The entrenched habits of control, centralization and top down could not be shifted. No amount of appeals, about the power of a 2.0 world, more speed, better infomation, better conection inside and outside the enterprise, landed with the change.
I think we all underestimated the height and the steepness of the slope of the “landscape” that had to be crossed to go into the next “valley” of the 2.0 world.
Systems remain stable for a long time - so long as the key environment to support them exists. For real change to occur, you have to get out of the “valley”, over the mountain and into the next valley. So the dinosaurs ruled for millions of years, while the more adaptive mammals lurked in the shadows waiting the moment when the environment would change and set them free.
So until last week, it was still possible for organizations to chug along with a 1.0 perspective. For its key environmental factor, cheap and easy credit and access to capital was still in place.
Well dear readers - this is no longer the case. The asteroid has hit the worlds financial markets and the dinosaurs will die.Large cumbersome beings that need a lot of capital and credit and who cannot adapt quickly will die.
Credit and assets based on cheap credit are simply evaporating. So is the “photosynthesis” process of capital and credit creation. Investment banking and conventional banking is in the process of losing its own capital base. Even the credit of the US itself will be tested to the limit in the ensuing months.
What we are experiencing is not a normal correction but the equivalent of an asteroid strike.
It will get worse. For another key environmental factor for the 1.0 model was cheap and easily availble energy. As the new reality of Peak Oil becomes clear, then all business models also based on moving goods long distances and from huge central hubs fail. Of course this model is also based on massive usage of financial capital.
So how does this play out and who wins?
Mammals won for 2 reasons. They were small and because they raised their young they could extend their offspring’s ability to adapt by adding cultural learning to their natural instinct.
We cannot know in any detail what the future will now bring.
All we can know is that the nimble and the smart will do better than the clumsy and the unthinking. All we know is that any model based on large amounts of capital will not make it - so forget nuclear as an option for energy.
The new of course exists in proto form today as it did when the dinosaurs roamed. The new will be based on network models. It will use the network effect and it will use social capital to do big things. It will use its distributed intelligence to “see” what to do and to undersatdn the chaos that we will be living in.
The time for a world based on a model that is itself based on nature itself rather than a machine is dawning.
Understanding the “natural economy” , the “natural organization” and social capital will be the key to your survival. Not just in business but in every part of our lives.
For we as citizens of the “machine world” gave up all control to the “System”. We became isolated and helpless. We lived in the Matrix. We did not even know what we had given up.
2.0 is I think really short hand for using technology to help us go home to a world based on a community rather than one based on being cogs in a machine.
Until now many of us were merely playing with the idea of taking the Red Pill. Now its life or death. Life or death for organizations, life or death for us as people.
In closing I don’t think that this will be all bad. Here is a passage that has affected me deeply for decades. When I first read it, I could not imagine the circumstances that would make it come true. Now I can.
There will come a time when humanity will choose to go against nature, to exploit her bounteous gifts, causing a sickness across the planet. People will forget the ecstasies of communion, and life will become drab and colorless.
In these coming dark ages, though, a deep sense of loss will cause the beginnings of a Great Return. They will look at the landscape and the old temples, built to withstand the cataclysms of millennia and understand once again the sacred laws of Existence.
When this day comes, humanity will have come of age. It will consciously acknowledge its role in the creative impulse that comes from the Sun, fertilizes the Earth, and calls forth the flame in the hearts of men and women to worship Life and the miraculous forces behind Creation.
Miller, Hamish & Broadhurst, Paul. The Sun and the Serpent: An Investigation into Earth Energies
