Capitalism is Dead. Long Live Capitalism. By Gary Hamel
“So what stands in the way of creating a conscientious, accountable and sustainable sort of capitalism—a system that in the long-term is actually habitable?
It is, I think, a matrix of deeply held beliefs about what business is for, whose interests it serves and how it creates value. Many of these beliefs are near canonical (at least among CEOs of a particular generation or ideological bent). They are also narcissistic and archaic. Among the most toxic …
1. The paramount objective of a business is to make money (rather than to enhance human well-being in economically efficient ways).
2. Corporate leaders can only be held accountable for the immediate effects of their actions (and not for the second and third order consequences of their single-minded pursuit of growth and profitability).
3. Executives should be evaluated and compensated on the basis of short-term earnings (rather than on the basis of long-term value creation, both financial and social).
4. The way to establish a business’ social credentials is through high-minded mission statements, green-tinged products and a fat CSR budget (rather than through an unshakeable and sacrificial commitment to doing the right thing).
5. The primary justification for “doing good” is that it helps a company to “do well.” (The implication: a company should do good when there’s an upside and something less when there’s not).
6. Customers care a lot more about value for money than they do about the values that were honored (or defiled) in the making and selling of a product.
7. A firm’s “customers” are the folks who buy its services (rather than all those whose lives are impacted by its actions).
8. It’s legitimate for a company to make money by exploiting customer ignorance, exaggerating product benefits and constraining customer choice.
9. Market power and political leverage are acceptable ways of countering a disruptive technology or thwarting an unconventional competitor.
10. Business is about advantage, focus, differentiation, superiority and excellence (and not about love, joy, honor, beauty and justice)”.
The article is here.
This is also the forward of Umair Haque’s book The New Capitalist Manifesto.
And of course you MUST read this book….
The Listening Up Manifesto by Umair Haque
“If I wanted to put it a little less nicely, I’d say this. Marketing as we know it - and as we practice it - is based on the premise that a handful of imperious companies could, from the misty heights, talk down. That they could - if they invested enough cash in the black arts of persuasion - order, control, subjugate, command, and dominate. Companies spent the last century talking down because the fundamental assumption of the industrial age paradigm of marketing was Skinnerian: given enough messages, you’d be conditioned to buy, buy, buy on eternal autorepeat - like a mouse eternally chasing a sugarcube perched just off the edge of a wheel. See? There’s that assumption that I’m a rube again.
Except, of course, I’m not. Today, I’ve got more than enough information, knowledge, and relationships at my fingertips to figure out that most of these messages are - let me put this bluntly - Big Fat Lies. Conversely, what I don’t have, in the teeth of a Great Stagnation, is money to spend on useless, toxic junk, or time, in my harried life, for overweening, self-indulgent bullsh*t artistry,The patch is here. Umair Haque at Bubblegeneration is back !
Hence, marketing as we know it is obsolete, kaput. All the above is why most campaigns are brand-destroyers, money-losers; it’s why “brands” are a devalued asset, whose returns are dwindling; it’s why the half-life of companies is shrinking; it’s why people and communities exact steeper and steeper discounts, price-cuts, and margin-crushing concessions from the companies once known as the masters of the universe”.
How Apple Just Disrupted the Cable Guys
Evan Hansen for WiredSo why is Apple TV different? Because Steve Jobs has not just created a new set-top box. He’s actually created a new media ecosystem built around the mobile phone.
You need a new ecosystem if you’re going to dislodge cable. Cable controls the whole stack, as people in IT like to say. From the content owners, which are addicted to the huge licensing fees only cable can afford to pay; to the distribution networks; to the consumer devices; to the eyeballs; to the advertisers: Cable owns the stack.
If you want to beat cable, you need to create a whole new way of reaching consumers and changing their habits. Has Apple done that? I think so.
With Apple TV, the phone is not just an iOS controller, it is the hub of a new personal mobile media center. Don’t get distracted by Apple’s video rental service. It sucks, for now, and won’t get people to cut the cable. But they will buy the Apple TV box, because it is cheap and they have iPhones and iPods and iPads, and they see the inexorable logic of closing the loop between their Macs and their phones and their mobile media devices and their TVs.
This loop will make it really easy for people to start consuming new kinds of content on their TVs. I bet they’ll start to use it. A lot. This is what is disruptive about the new Apple TV, not the $99 price or the rental service. Apple TV is a paradigm shift, because you always have your phone but no one lets you integrate your phone into the media center.
Guess what? Apple just did that.
People generally only think about the network/lock-in effect of Apple’s devices/services when they’re thinking about how dangerous it is. But just like with Microsoft, it’s dangerous because it works. It works really, really well”.
YouTube Ads Turn Videos Into Revenue
“Salar Kamangar, YouTube’s co-head, who also co-founded Google’s AdWords search advertising program, started spending his time figuring out how to make money on the video business. YouTube gives Google the chance to get a piece of the television ad market, Mr. Kamangar said, by bringing videos straight to the television over an Internet connection, or Internet protocol, as the industry calls it. “Ads can be a lot more effective when they’re delivered over I.P. instead of cable or broadcast, because they’re delivered personalized to you.” YouTube now offers several types of ads, including display ads on its home page and on the video pages, ads that promote videos and ads that run in the video stream or pop up on the bottom of a video”. From NYT’s “YouTube ads Turn Videos Into Revenue”. Mark Cuban, where are you?
It’s depressing how creative some people are…
I was researching some creative ads for my next assignment. I thought I’d share some of the more interesting ones. Why? Because I have nothing better to do and to be honest, it’s depressing how creative some people are.
Baron Wells is a new clothes label. One of the co-founder Dominic Volini explains the sens of purpose behind his venture :
“How would you describe BW’s code of ethics?
I wouldn’t say we have a code of ethics – it is more like a soul and conscious. We need to be a profitable business but are conscious of our impact and the factories we choose to work with and the components that go into the collection. Whenever we can produce local, we do. Whenever we can source something more sustainable, we do. The one caveat is that we don’t let these restrictions diminish our sense of style and level of craftsmanship. If something is much easier to make in Italy or Japan, we will do that. Quality is what we seek – not cost structures”.
Nothing revolutionnary but it seems that these kind of singular voices (thousand miles away from junk fashion) are suddenly more audible…
And i’m stunned by their creativity in all the value chain (and not only in their communication, which is also brilliant).
Via Commerce with a conscience and The Silver Lining.
The first video from the National’s new album “High Violet”
Harakiri’s agency
In a recent post at the 99% blog (part of the Behance Network), Mark McGuiness explains why you must “Build a Business, Not Just a Client List”
“This is the classic dilemma described by Michael Gerber in The E-Myth – sole traders start out with dreams of independence, but find themselves trapped by their own business. They spend all their time working in the business (doing client work), instead of on it (building the business).
….
4. Products - turn your knowledge and skills into physical or digital items for sale.
If you can deliver a professional service for clients, you can certainly create your own product range. Doing this successfully means you develop streams of income that increase over time – and it frees you from the treadmill of hourly or daily”
I would go a step forward.
In his essay “Content will kill your agency”, Marcus Brown explained in a radical move :
“The basic idea is that content will kill the agency you work for; that the current agency model (or versions off it labled as new), the work that agencies do, how it’s reviewed and rewarded and the channels that are used to transport it all are doomed. Unless, that is, your agency starts creating content”.
In other words, if you run an agency, you have to imagine a value proposition that will kill your business as you know it. No choice. Prepare your own destruction. Sorry.
(Hat tip Leigh for the pointer)
