| Needless forest-destroyers |
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Reading is good. Books are good. But not all books are good. Some are annoying and over-rated. Usually I don't waste my time on them, but every so often I do.
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The Support Economy | Read this book if you must! |
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Zuboff is a professor at Harvard Business School, Maxmin a former turnround manager. Husband and wife team, they have written a book predicting the end of Managerial Capitalism and its replacement with what they call Distributed Capitalism.
Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, co-author of Primal Leadership, said 'The Support Economy is a dazzling display of intellect with heart - brilliant, important, and sound. Read it or be left behind in the dust’. Yesterday I moderated a discussion with the authors at the Harvard Business School Alumni Club of London. Daniel, I'm choosing dust. Zuboff and Maxmin are experts at playing on the heartstrings of their audiences. They describe in aching detail the frustration of victims of service failures, the feelings of powerlessness of the consumer when things go wrong, or just don't go right in their lives. They emote. They feel your pain. And they understand the power of escapism. Don't like automated phone answering systems? The problem is Managerial Capitalism. Toddler not sleeping through the night? Managerial Capitalism again. Blizzards stranded you at the airport? You guessed it, Managerial Capitalism's fault. Didn't realise that Worldcom was a pyramid scheme back in 1997? Blame the system. I'm sure it's a show that goes down well among the economically illiterate. And it's not to say they don't have interesting things to say. They are right to point out that today's consumers require unprecedented levels of service and product personalisation. They are right to point out that most corporations are failing to meet these needs. Meeting these needs will indeed increasingly require federations of individuals and companies, sharing information via new technology. What they signally failed to demonstrate is that any of this constitutes the beginning of a new era in capitalism. Why are today's service failures not just the new markets of tomorrow? Sure, the companies that meet these markets will be more flexibly staffed, more flexibly financed, more effective users of technology, more networked with allies and home workers than the companies of today. But will they be different in kind rather than in degree from the joint stock companies that dominate today's economic landscape? Zuboff and Maxmin are proud that their book does not contain any case studies, because, they claim case studies are useless in the face of discontinuity (funny, most case studies I know are descriptions of discontinuities, large and small). They not only failed to come up with an example of a Distributed Capitalism organisation, they failed to describe what one would look like. So their description of the present is interesting, but their hypothesis for the future can be neither proven nor disproven. What use is it then? "Suppose you were an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely for clarity would expose your lack of content." So wrote clear-thinking neo-darwinian Richard Dawkins in his review of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's devastating demolition of postmodernist intellectuals. When pressed to justify their claims for the end of Managerial Capitalism and the beginning of something else, which they admit they cannot describe, Zuboff and Maxmin fall back on their mantra about the new Copernican Revolution: Value will no longer reside in the Corporation, but in the Individual. It sounds wonderful. At no point do they define what they mean by Value in this context or how it is to be measured. Cash? Cash flow? Potential lifetime expenditure? Or are they talking about Energy and Entropy - or why not Validation and Identification - like every new-age charlatan trying to tap into the angst of an age whose material needs have been so dramatically fulfilled that their biggest problem is dealing with those inevitable moments when Starbucks gets your order wrong? Some things won't change: some industries are capital intensive and their products and services are managed in batches, not continuously (airlines, manufacturing, etc). They can increase their flexibility year on year, but they can never provide infinitely variable products. So they can never meet every consumer's needs fully. It's a pain, but please let us be sensible and blame the laws of physics, not evil or stupid managers. Also, as long as there are large numbers of people with more savings than they can productively invest in the business endeavours of their family and friends, there will always be the need for professional managers. Professional managers will never care quite as much about customers as owner-managers. Again, it's a pain, but hardly cause for revolution. Zuboff and Maxmin have missed the point: Managerial Capitalism is not about one-fits-all production techniques or lowest-common-denomination service. Managerial Capitalism is about the efficient distribution of finance, assets and risks in an economy. Does it fail to meet all needs? Sure. Does it contain the self-healing mechanisms as a system to to keep addressing these failures, year in, year out? Look around you.
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