Global capitalism in the last century has been a conquest. “It’s a dog eat dog world,” we say without much thought. Business is war. Sure the battlefields have changed, as Mark Shaefer explains, but it’s still the same fight—”trying to sell more to more people for more money more often.”

But just over a decade into the twenty-first century, are we losing the fight?

A decade with no wage growth, with return on assets of publicly traded American companies approaching zero in the next ten years, and with public sector workers railing in the face of service cuts and tax hikes. Something’s got to change.

In search for meaning

Last April, Joshua-Michéle Ross proposed two things at Stowe Boyd‘s social business edge: that cultural change precedes institutional change, and that current cultural change will shift our metaphor from “business is war” to “business is social” (thanks to the Internet and its social networks of course).

We can already see edge thinkers like Umair Haque fueling this transition. Haque’s meaning organization proposal is less about strategy, marketing, and finance, and more about significance, outcomes thinking, harmony, purpose, peace, love and ambition—descriptors that we might feel more comfortable using to describe our approach to a relationship.

Haque is right in focusing on meaning—as Bruce Sterling explained: networks are the engines of meaning. Cultural trends suggest that networks will rise, old organizational processes will fall, and we will learn to do business better.

This coming shift, as I explored in attempting to find a place for the voice of the organization in social business, means a different way of thinking about our organizations:

If business is social and not war, then organizations will be organized more like villages and less like armies.

Unlike Armies, which have centralized power systems, villages are formed by loosely connected individuals who each maintain a significant amount of autonomy. And unlike armies which set up in highly guarded camps, villages have porous relationship with outsiders, allowing them to come, go, and pass through with ease.

Getting to the village

But the village metaphor, borrowed from Stowe Boyd, may obscure some very real and difficult barriers to change. Villages leverage their social networks by relying on simple, face-to-face exchanges to accomplish work. Simple in concept, but more difficult in execution.

Big, decentralized global companies need easy-to-use, sophisticatedly designed tools to accomplish this same level of organic exchange. Sure, these tools exist (e.g. Socialtext,Telligent, Socialcast, etc.), but implementing them in a meaningful way and subsequently gaining widespread adoption is far from simple.

The problem is in order for an organization to shift from warmongering to harmony, peace and love, they have to change not just the way they think about business (a huge hurdle in itself), but also how employees do work.

We’re asking people to put down their guns crawl out of their bunkers. They will feel vulnerable.

We’re asking people to start defining what they do in relation to other people instead of in relation to their job descriptions. The will feel unsettled.

Because most people don’t like feeling vulnerable or unsettled, it’s natural that they’ll rail against this type of change, no matter what kind of suggested bottom-line benefit statemens we push across their desks.

The struggle

Business as a war is neater package than business as social. Armies maintain control through a centralized power structure. Orders from the top create order in the ranks.

Order in business as social is more fragile. Social order (and innovation, and collaboration, and, and, and…) is created and sustained in and through relationships between people.

If Capitalism’s hope is to reach for what is meaningful—to reach for harmony, purpose, peace, and love—then we must also understand that meaning will need to be defined in relationship between people.

Meaning cannot simply be a strategic imperative. Capitalism’s coming change is not just about defining meaning in our mission, vision and values, or even in the products we produce; it’s about defining meaning in every conversation in every cubicle, conference room, and corner office.

Meaning must be an infection that takes over an organization. Meaning must be present in the everyday, every minute exchange of relationships between bosses and subordinates, between coworkers, and to suppliers and customers.

Because it’s in relationship that organizational change will take place. That’s how we’ll disassemble the war machine. That’s how we’ll get to the village.

It’s not about implementing social tools or even striving for meaning in what we do. It’s about finding a way to make meaning an intergral part of doing our work in relationship to others.

Image credit: The U.S. Army, soldiersmediacenter on Flickr. See original for copyright information.

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keywords: army, business is social, business is war, metaphor, the nature of work, village

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