The WWII era, with its post-war capitalist bubble, is now extinct.
Capitalism is dead!
The 100-year-old edifice of capitalism is cracked. It finally began its death throes in the last quarter of 2008 with the great lurching and cascading collapse of the global tower of capital.
The whirling, howling, cacophonous wilderness of the global marketplace has taken its inevitable toll on the capitalist system – with its ferocious fads, toxic wastes, vicious moods, callous explosions and cruel, Darwinian extinctions, the global marketplace has put capricious end to the blind and righteous rivalry between cosseted CEOs in medieval, double-entry boardrooms.
The CEO Delusion
The capitalist belief that CEOs can be relied on to ensure the survival and growth of the enterprise is a delusion; one that is not supported by the evidence (Welch, Jobs and Murdoch are the kind of exceptions that prove the point). This belief has also proven to be a very costly leap of faith for shareholders, employees and customers alike.
Cost of CEOs
When you consider the global cost to shareholders of CEOs over the recent era, the ROI has been disappointment on a Shakespearean scale.
Intellectual Capitalism
I have written about my belief in Software For Your Brain – that we need to go beyond capitalism to intellectual capitalism, where the brainpower of the stakeholders – shareholders, employees and customers – is used to lead the enterprise.
Sack the CEOs and harness the enterprise brainpower to grow the business!
Shareholders around the world have seen extravagant expenditures of their wealth squandered by CEOs with their arm-waving and talmudic reading of balance-sheets and P&Ls, like the obsessive, pre-scientific study of entrails. Less than one CEO in a hundred could give an intelligent, educated account of what strategy it would take for their business to survive in the rapidly evolving environment of the next decade.
Like the Theory of Communism, which lasted 70 years before it became obsolete, the Theory of Capitalism is dead. Bereft. Discredited. Empty. Depressed. 2008 began the global assault on capital, which has so overwhelmed the market that we find ourselves in an economic war involving every national economy in both hemispheres. WWIII: The Great War on Capital of 2008.
“Economic Pearl Harbour”
Even the guru of capitalists, Warren Buffett, admits the US economy has “fallen off a cliff”, describing the crisis as “an economic Pearl Harbour”, as concerns spread about the US administration’s fitful attempts to halt the collapse of the US banking sector.
The leading investor, an informal adviser to President Barack Obama, whose financial diagnoses are widely respected – although he conceded he failed to predict the severity of the crisis – said the economy had come “close to the worst case” imagined, and that recovery would be slow.
Mr Buffett, one of the wealthiest capitalists in the world, said the entire banking sector had been hours from collapse in September, and would have imploded without the $US700billion ($1trillion) Wall Street emergency bailout.
Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson received the world’s first PhD in Lateral Thinking for his discovery of a whole new strategy for selling. In 1979, he and Edward de Bono founded the School of Thinking in New York City. Since that time, he has authored five books and advice on thinking, selling and leadership has been sought by leaders of some of the most prominent organisations in the world, from The United Nations and The White House to IBM, Fujitsu, BMW, Telstra, ANZ and the Australian Sports Commission.
This article was originally published on Hewitt-Gleeson’s blog.
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