The biggest entrepreneurial challenge ever
Entrepreneurship got a special status about 300 years ago when industrialization took over from specialized individual craftmanship. We can distinguish four phases since then:
1. Product manufacturing and sales
2. International growth and cost optimization
3. Marketing on sentiments
4. Speculation on shortages
The first three phases brought us consumer wellness and a transfer from global agricultural to industrial and logistic processes around retail. They all built up towards the fourth phase (making money without doing anything other than keeping wealth away from others) which brought us finally the crisis situation today. The fourth phase could not exist without the preceeding three.
For 300 years morality has followed the industrial era through the development of a care taking government (education and health regulation) to counter the greed and self interest of industrial kingdoms. Wars have been faught and political systems developped with left and right wing challenging each other through argumentation. Constitutions were written for human rights and governance while economic systems grew causing concentration of humankind in urban megastructures.
The phase of speculation finally unified greed up to a clear break up of human balans. The ecological and social consequences were so large that a fifth entrepreneurial phase announces itself. It is an entrepreneurial phase that does not just affect business but also governance, education and the individul awareness. behavior and mentality. In fact, the fifth phase is not a linear continuation of the former four, it is the very first post industrial and post economic phase announcing the global transformation.
Entrepreneurial phase 5 is dedicated to save humankind within its natural habitat.
This phase I refer to as sustainocracy, the compulsory focus on the sustainable preservation and continuation of the species.
It is a complicated phase because it ends a periode of perceived global luxury to replaced it with the indvidual and collective need to take responsibility. It puts the world upside down for most people and institutions. The phase is therefor preceded with a large period of overall political, executive and public negation which will cause death and disaster beyond any historic precedence. Those who are to blame will still be alive when all this happens and judgment day will surely confront them publicly in due time.
This entrepreneurial spirit of the fifth phase is however already building up throughout society, as my AiREAS venture (air quality, human health and city design) shows. It is not just individual anymore but also affecting the motivation of the large powerblocks of current humankind. These many people who use their personal motivation also in their institutional jobs to make a difference, have reached the point already of enlightenment and personal commitment to a new future. Sustainocratic processes lead the way, even if they are still small, fragile and extremely localized. Step by step these purpose driven ventures based on phase five of global entrepreneurship will build up enough power to break through the lethal dominance of the speculants of phase 4.
No institution can start a new world unless they are invited and willing to change
Important for everyone is to recognize and understand phase 4 and the transformative phase 5. Then the process will only speed up reducing the potential human suffering of phase 4 to an absolute minimum. Anyone can become a phase 5 entrepreneur. And when you do you’ll become aware that there is a lot of entreprenerial work to be done as simply everything made and organized by human beings needs to be changed. It will keep us passionately occupied for centuries to come.
Capital injections don’t work – end of phase 3
When I traveled to Madrid this week (june 2012) to present AiREAS as a sustainocratic solution for the city problems with air polution the very first reaction of government executives was the traditional and classic public negation. “We have no air polution problem!”. This was interesting because I had just landed in the dense smog of the city and have information that Brussels threatens with sanctions if certain norms are not complied with in 2015. I also know that the local government has been trying to do its best to address the problem but that the issues go beyond the complexity of government regulatory authority and consequence driven measures.
The problem most government officials have is that they are so used to cover up their impotence around truly complex issues, publically claiming that they are in control and things will get better somewhere in the future, that they feel automatic resistence when someone walks in with a new proposition. This we see also in the world of finance. The traditional blind negation of an economic bubble, ignoring it until the bubble blew up in everyone’s face in 2008, was exaactly the same. When negation is not posible anymore because of undeniable proof the next psychological phase is entered: the one of disbelief and urgent correction. Then the negation continues. A quick massive capital injection should solve the problems overnight. 4 years and many billions of money later we all see that the problems continu.
When I got home from Madrid I watched financial analists on TV explain for the first time why the capital injected was only pushing the problems forward but not solving them. This remarkable first announcement of acceptance was a great relief to me. Of course, all huge capital injections had given the rats to cash their risks and leave the ship befor sinking, but still. It indicated to me that the phase of resistance to change and negotition for recovery of lost financial stability was ending.
The next phase (following my own model of cyclic phases of awareness and human development) is the one of fear. The large financial institutions had recovered their long term loans against public debt so that the institutions would not go broke. The citizens only had democratic rights and fear. A few 10K extra debt per person was institutionally acceptable. Of course, the public itself was never asked. It is all a game of big financial interests and liabilities played over the back of unaware masses of people. Institutions now need not fear anymore. Their power play is now over the civilians which hardly get organized to oppose and which can be submitted still under the pressures of financial law of debt.
Then the acceptance of the crisis and need of total renewal is opened. This openess is what I have been waiting for as it announces the total culture change needed to address the shaping of a new paradigm and corresponding new complex social structures such as sustainocracy. The crisis is reaching the general public now definitely. Capital injections saved the speculanting institutions but not society. The problem of greed was resolved and now poverty could stand up and protest.
But in Spain, from a sustainable progress point of view, the government executives were still hiding between their wall of negation. This will be the case in every government around the world. Reluctance to let go of old authorities and structures is largest when no alternative is know.Experts are consulted from inside the system only. Expertise from outside, like the one’s I am offering, are not recognized let alone taken seriously. One will fight against change simply because one does not know where to change into. When I presented sustainocracy in Madrid the first reaction was defensive but the seed has been planted. Before my presentation they had no choice, now they do, just like the population. Just like in Holland before, it will do its psychological work (like this blog), and some time in the near future the officials will lower their defences and accept shyly the hand that I reach out to them from the new world.
We are reaching the natural point of a psychological break through, because resistence does not seem to work but also because an alternative shines through at the end of the tunnel. I hope to find enough executive interest to join me in a world changing congres on 12.12.12 to let the crisis behind us and definitively open up to sustainocracy around the world. Sustainable human progress is more important after all than keeping up artificial, obsolete systems, even if they are called politics or banks. Capital injections did not bring back stability, it just saved some banks for some time.
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 