The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business

Competitive strategies say, “Here’s how we’ll get people to buy our stuff, no matter what.” A philosophy says, “Here’s how we’ll make stuff people want to buy, no matter what.”

in the twenty-first century, the most disruptive, profitable, and valuable path to advantage isn’t differentiating stuff, but making a difference to people, communities, and society.

The unvarnished truth is that capitalism is past its prime. It’s an aging paradigm that has hit the point of maturity. It was built in an industrial age, and the rust and damage on its weathered iron and battered rivets are beginning to show.

industrial era capitalism’s cornerstones undercount costs (ignoring many flavors of loss and damage) and overcount benefits (overstating how much products and services make people durably, tangibly, and meaningfully better off).

Philosophy is concerned with discovering “first principles”—the fundamental laws that explain the world around us. So it is with organizational philosophies; they are concerned with discovering, articulating, and living the first principles of value creation—like Google’s set of corporate principles. They are fundamental laws that explain how we wo

Strategic agility is concerned with diversifying where, when, and to whom we can sell. A machine that would let us employ any business model in the world to sell our stuff in the blink of an eye would make us maximally, strategically agile.

It’s as if when we feel happy, it’s because increments of happiness are simply transferred from one person to another and then back again, or, worse, because we are borrowing happiness from our future selves. Here, then, is my suggestion; capitalism as we know it has hit a glass ceiling of happiness—a limit to the amount of happiness and very happy

That’s resilience, and it happens by crafting a philosophy that emphasizes the first, fundamental principles of value creation, rather planning a strategy focused on value extraction.

value chains as the means of production, value propositions as the means of positioning, strategy as the means of competition, protecting marketplaces as the means of advantage, and inert, fixed goods as the means of consumption.