If we consider that 99% of western businesses are managed purely on material basis (KPI’s, product/price, cost reduction programs, etc.) you are not really to blame when you find out that you do the same. But the credit crisis has shown us that this way of thinking causes us to behave far to insensitively to moral values which causes the general and gradual decline of our overall wellbeing. In the end we do not distinguish ourselves anymore from competition and all players together become responsible for a moral crisis of which the credit crisis is just an example. More are to come.

When we draw a point of balance between moral and rational material decision making than we can visualise this point on the following drawing:

Find the point of balance

The rational path is our traditional way of entrepreneurial thinking: Product/Client/Cost optimalization with pure material goals. Money is the target and we would be willing to take immoral decisions just to make the triangle work. For who? For our pockets.

But in a global era we are too many doing just the same, covered by government who push for growth. What identity do we develop among so many others? How long a technical lifetime does our product innovation have nowadays? How loyal are our clients to us if the receive temptations all the time? How good can our cost optimization be if we run out of low wage countries? How high will inflation be if we have to compete to purchase our natural resources?

Doesn’t this mean that we are forgetting something? While we are at it making money we are destroying our own market potential by increasing the costs of resources, making low wage countries rich and competing our products so cheap we can hardly make them anymore. How TVs can a household have? Or anything else by that matter? Shouldn’t we remind ourselves continously that there are three basic moral rules to make sure we can run a business still at all in the future? Why should we want other to take the responsibility to comply with those rules and not us? Why are the companies that do comply more successful in general than those that don’t?

How moral are you when you run your business? What do you want to achieve? Money? Or recognition for a good job? Just think about it.

A lot of people in politics and business think that this credit crisis is one we sing out in a few month. The capital injections of western governments should stabelize the situation again. The contrary is true. The credit crisis has indeed triggered the problem but did not cause it. The problems lie deeper and are related to morality. This is an issue that has no capitalist response but needs to come from inside.

To illustrate what I mean I kindly ask you to reflect about the last 60 years of western history. There are two clear blocks: The reconstruction phase after world war two and the adult economic phase after that (the last 20 years). Now think what has been created of wealth in the first block of 30 to 40 years? Our infrastructures, social security systems, life insurance, pension scemes, housing infrastructures, etc. all originated in that period of time. It was a true era of growth and material creativity as well as content.

But what has changed over the last 20 years? Really changed? Absolutely nothing. All that has happened is that the existing values have been copied over and over again to get us to have more and more of the same but cheaper every time. The economies however were forced to grow through pushing our overconsumptive nature. We have hardly invested in renovation of our true values: our infrastructures, our ways of living, nothing. That all stayed the same. So economies were blown up as a ballon through speculation and development of greed, nothing else. Meanwhile the true wealth on which our economies have to rely became obsolete and overrated. 

Meanwhile we grew cold to the challenges of the world. We have lost the habbit to evaluate our choices against the morality of what is good and what is bad. Our moral is empty while our mind just sees price tags and material needs. We even compare eachother according external decorations rather than the sensitivity of true inner values. We take a distance from family and friendship values, grow distant from our children or elderly and develop a respectless attitude towards our neighboors and environment just persueing material wealth in which we believe to find security.

Twenty years of demoralisation is a long time. An entire generation of people doesn’t know what true moral is and often grow mentally sick by the overwhelming need of spiritual meaning. The credit crisis has just popped the ballon into our faces showing us the enormous gap between our obsolete structures and the point of balance that would be needed. This crisis will take a long time to resolve because we need to rebuild our true and intimate believes. This crisis is personal, social and within business policy. It affects us all and takes at least 5 years and a lot of suffering to set the basis for renewal.

And renewal is needed, totally. It is as if we come out of world war three and needed to reconstruct everything. The bulldozers literally need to go through our society and we need to rebuild it according the multidimensionality that we now know. Our goal is the optimal point of balance that will permanently become our goal for the next 15 years. We will measure ourselves against this goal, run our business created added values for that balance and vote for social representatives that create a healthy basis for the collective persecution of these goals.

In 15 years we will live in a new world. But first we need to avoid getting ourselves into chaos or terror due to the nature that we need to abondon in time. We can do it, but it needs to come from within, all together.