Managing Future Enterprise

Our modern forms of venturing lead into the ‘paradox of destructive wealth creation’. It consists in the fact that our individually rational and, in itself, highly successful economic behaviours lead, on the group level and the level of the whole system, to an outcome which places the social, ecological, and economic sources of this wealth creation process in existential jeopardy. This development demands a new type of economic viability, in which enterprises break with the mental patterns and the shackles of thinking in terms of scarcity, profit, competition, and growth. To this end they must adapt to the principle of the awareness economy is the active creation of resource and value-adding cycles of participation that fuel holistic, multi-dimensional value creation on all levels, from individual people to companies and entire societies to nature itself. The sum total of all of the transactions between the individual participants will create new and more resources on all of these levels than were consumed to that end. The end result is a natural, multi-dimensional resource creation process that feeds, grows, diversifies, and unfolds the system as a whole.

Businesses are, first and foremost, cooperative systems. In them, people cooperate with other people to remedy a want, that is, create a substantial benefit for other people. Therefore all organizations are spaces organized by values. These include, first, the values of the organizational culture with which they organize themselves as performance teams and, second, the values that determine the benefit, i.e. value proposition according to which the company gets active for its target audience. Organizing the landscape of corporate values therefore is the core process of corporate value creation. It incorporates raising social capital for fostering a corporate culture devoted to develop high performance teams which deliver substantial benefits and added value on all levels of the company itself and its surrounding systems. Viable companies do so by activating the human factor in such a way that they create an awareness culture for the formation of value creation cycles in line with the laws of nature.

Corporations will remain viable if they manage to replace our current procedural thinking with systemic thinking that feeds into three more general effects: Decoupled resource creation, sustainable value cycles, and multidimensional, integrated participation networks. To this end they have to rearrange business management and strategies in such a way that they serve the development of value adding networks. Truly viable organizational and network cultures activate the social dimension of shared values in such a way that the value created by the company is reflected in its cultures. As soon as companies recognize and appreciate that the creation of values is their most essential value creation process and their only means of ensuring lasting viability, they will understand that this process needs a different set of instruments than the established indicators used in traditional management (such as balanced scorecards, EFQM). The holistic and integrated instrument panel they need is the values cockpit. It measures the principal and secondary values and the changes in the awareness capital, social capital, and values capital at work.

Companies are cooperative systems. They are formed by people to create some benefit with other people that they could never create on their own. This simple fact underlies the necessity formula of all enterprise: H ₃ O “Humans with Humans for Humans in need of Organisation”.