(First of a series. In this series we examine epochal changes taking place in the bedrock of capitallist business culture. These changes bear consiiderable familiarity to the values that Abraham Maslow attributed to people who had reached the lofty heights of self-actualization. The postings in this series are adapted from Firms of Endearment© 2006 – which means our publisher will get upset if it
sees the material in this series appear elsewhere without permission.
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It has become fashionable to view recent changes in people’s worldviews as a product of 9/11. However, the events of that infamous day simply brought into sharper focus changes already reshaping the world.
Newspaperman John Perry, former White House speechwriter and editor of several newspapers, views the roiling waves of change sweeping over us as major realignments in science, technology, medicine, education, the arts, religion, economies, demographics, social systems, governments, and in institutions, private and public, the world over. Perry believes we are in the midst of a society-wide moral renaissance:
Most compelling of all, fundamental beliefs and value systems are realigning. On balance, most of those realignments are for the good. This is, accept it or not, actually becoming a better world – and at no previous time in modern history has that statement been possible.
Despite daily large font headlines calling attention to serious mischief in every institutional category, evidence of a moral renaissance courses through contemporary literature. With more than 22 million copies sold, Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life, a book about higher purpose in life than indulging one’s worldly self, has become the best-selling non-fiction hardback in history. People are hungrier than ever for a durable sense of meaning in their lives. This is a defining characteristic of the Age of Transcendence.
In the business book category, recent “morality” titles include Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Good Business: Leadership, Flow and the Making of Meaning; William Greider’s The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy; Richard Barrett’s Liberating the Corporate Soul: Building a Visionary Organization; and Marc Benioff and Karen Southwick’s
Compassionate Capitalism: How Corporations Can Make Doing Good an Integral Part of Doing Well. Benioff and Southwick speculate about how the world would change for the better if every company donated a meagerly one percent of its sales, one percent of its employees’ time and one percent of its stock to better the communities in which they operate.
Business has yet to broadly come to terms with the ebbing influence of materialistic values on what people want from life that is the inevitable result of an aging society. However, this sea change in values is changing the calculus of supply and demand in large ways.
In psychoanalyst Eric Fromm’s terms we are transitioning from a having society to a being society. Having societies are steeped in self-centeredness and materialism. Being societies have an others-centered focus, and are deeply vested in high ground moral values.
The consumer economy has been grounded in a materialistic having focus for a full century. That focus is now being diffused by rising desires for a sense of meaning that cannot be drawn from material things. Consumers may still want a given product, but along with that product many want a high road experience that connects with their more mature being focus. For example, shoppers at pricey FoE Whole Foods pay substantially more than they would pay for eggs at Kroger’s just for the good feeling that they are doing right by purchasing eggs from free-range hens.
Obviously, material appetites are not disappearing from society. Materialistic values and behavior are a fact of life. Young people in particular will always have hearty materialistic appetites. They express their identities and give evidence of their accomplishments and potential through the material things they acquire. But mainstream culture increasingly reflects the being focus that emerges at upper levels of psychological maturity as the thrills of “things” ebb. This is dramatically changing the calculus of supply and demand and challenging companies everywhere to reexamine the business they are in.
DBW
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