Let us go back to the basics of human relationships. What are the very first conditions for wealth creation?

Are we talking then about marketing, KPI’s or stakeholder values? No!

We talk about trusting eachother, respecting eachother and building values together.

Since all this is lost the crisis will take one or more generations to solve and certainly not a bucket full of cash.

Between 1950 and 1970 a few countries around the world, including the Netherlands, actually reached the satisfying state of sustainable welfare. But they got gready, mainly pushed by the American model of economic growth. They opened up the borders, made trade easier and more wide spread and got an increasing amount of troubles to cope with. To finance such troubles, which we call welfare deseases, more growth was required, creating a focus on money only and not at all on moral sensitivity. The last decade governments tried to compensate by introducing Social Responsible Entrepreneurship but this was a mere cosmetic recognition to the moral backlog. The same happened in the USA where even moral issues like the environment or social security funding were not prioratised. Money became the goal and only goal for the entire western world. Morality on how long traffic jams should grow to keep the automobile industry alive, or how many electric appliances we could fit in a house, using up more energy than ever before, never even reached the political agenda. Competition was severe and growth drove us in the arms of low wage countries increasing even more the amount of unnecessary stuff we had to purchase. We were getting too fat, too lasy, too gready, too individualistic, too agressive, and too everything.

We now know, looking at the picture, that material growth needs to be parallelled by equal moral development, else we enter into the vulnerable zone. For over 30 years we have neglected this and have all these years to recover in order to get back into the comfort of sustainability. We have shelved innovations our of self or mingled interests and now realize that most of our structures, systems and organizations are built on the wrong foundations. While we start realizing that it also becomes clear that we have a huge challenge ahead in redefining living communities, mobility, transportation, food dsitribution, clean water supplies, infrastructures in order to comply with the moral requirements of our current global situation. When we do that we will find the need to rebuild everything from scratch. And this provides the world with over 500 billion jobs for the next 20 years.

It may sound easy but it is not. World wide politics, multinationals and individuals will have to transform their way of thinking. Soon we will start here in Holland a prject called “City of Tomorrow” in which we will start experimenting with innovative alternatives to transform society into a sustainable place. We will film the monthly debates and make the available to the world through my new foundation, STIR (Sustainable, Transformation, Indexation & Research).

For various decades the large multinationals have been squeezing their capital spunge to satisfy the short term financial interests of their shareholders. The activa have been plundered selling off properties, capitalizing stocks and dealing in business units to scale up a new core business and optimize it through coist reductions. No ideology was applied since that takes time and requires risk taking. Now most large multinationals destruct welfare as they use up more external capital than they actually reproduce. The total balans of true added value that they create, taking social and ecological reponsibilities equally into account, is negative along the line.

The business cultures in those organizations has totally disappeared. No traces are left of the old spirit to perform as personnel has developed a 9 to 5 attide and lack of motivation due to the continuous reorganizations and downsizing. The multinationals have no flesh on the bones anymore and no spirit to fight. They are all doomed to die thanks to the greed of the shareholders and lack of vision and entrepreneurial courage of business leaders with a pure financial background and a self centered bonus culture of their own, speculating with resources rather than constructing sustainable foundations. 80% of the world economy depended on these giant white collar business gamblers and all this is now falling down fast in the largest moral crisis of humanity.

The shake out that is taking place has nothing to do anymore with the wealthiest, largest or most agressive. It has to do with the moral transformation that has to take place in the boardroom first and then affect the entire business culture and innovative output of the multinational. True added value has nothing to do with cost optimization or growth but with vision and content, taking the global social and ecological challenges extremely serious. The best businesses for such transformation are not the multinationals that have their shares at the stock exchanges, but the smaller organisations that are being led by the owner him or herself with a heart for the business and the vision or luck to take the righ decisions at the right time.

Multinationals that want to survive this global crisis need to invest now in transformation and develop an identity around a moral choice. That is the only way, else they will die and disappear, no matter how much money they receive from government.