Countless examples abound where the forces of INTANGIBLE assets align is ways that allows them to detach from their shackles and float like a gyroscope. Invisible internal forces allow new social entities to organize, travel, produce, and consume seemingly without structure or anchors. Yet they influence the most tangible of assets in their path.
Next Economic Paradigm
The next step is to harness this social energy toward sustainable productivity. Then, and only, then can we arrive at the new economic paradigm (albeit one that may be largely unrecognizable from what we know of today).
The United States has a skills crisis
Millions of smart, motivated, and skilled people are out of work. Meanwhile companies complain that they cannot find the skills that they need to fill open positions. Predictably, the arguments rage polarized; companies are unwilling to train, the education system is unwilling to teach, etc. But I don’t think that is the problem.
A Function of Time
The lag time in the traditional competitive cycle remained the same; measured in months for a marketing campaign, or years with a product development cycle, or even decades as with an aircraft program. Government is also slow to act with election cycles, public debate, and assorted diversions. Likewise, education system curricula can take 3 to 5 years to go through the release process.
Like car crashes, bubbles pop when the system is too slow to respond.
Meanwhile machine enabled social technology is developing so fast that companies do not have time to respond in competitive manner. Everything becomes a bubble as companies find themselves playing in a game that can crush them at any moment by any number of forces; financial, economic, political, regulatory, public relations, wiki leaks, Facebook, YouTube, Smart Phones, etc. Even strategic partnerships can unnecessarily and irrevocably tie an institution to the possible misfortunes of associates, with no prior predictability or analysis – until it is too late.
The Tangibility Of Tangibles
The corporate structure that is supposed to be the MOST TANGIBLE assets that an institution can hold is what effectively nails them to the floor. The bottom line is exactly that, the bottom of the value barrel. Companies that cannot see past the bottom line, can only see the bottom – and that is where they are staffing today.
The Value Game
Although developed independently, The Value Game (described here, here, and here) resembles a form of Michael E Porter’s 5 forces of corporate competition – except moving at hyper-speed to generate internal forces like a gyroscope. Players have neither the time nor the incentive to compete with each other, rather, they compete with a game that produces both tangible and intangible assets in a common accounting system creating new value at an astonishing speed.
Of course, the corporation will not disappear any more than industrial revolution eliminated the agrarians. However, you can bet that the differences will be equally profound.
