This is an excerpt from What Matters Now — Re-Capitalism, by Chris Meyer.
"Marx read his Darwin but he got it wrong— capitalism doesn't self-destruct, it adapts."
-- Tom Stoppard, Rock 'n' Roll
Capitalism is not immutable — it's changed before (remember industrialization?) and will again.
Darwin wrote about the finches of the Galapagos Islands, observing that the shape of each population's beaks matched the form of the particular flowers that provided their food. Think of businesses as the individuals of the capitalist species. The shapes of companies will evolve as the world changes around them.
What changes? To big ones: the world's growth will no longer come from the high-income economies (the consume 77% of world GDP today — only 32% by 2050.) Second, just as industrial technology shaped the society of the United States' in the 20th Century, information technology will be the basis of the emerging "digital native" economies in the 21st. Like finches, businesses will change their shapes to make their living in this new low income, high growth, globally connected, information-intensive environment.
How? They will learn to price and market goods whose marginal cost is zero. They will learn to profit from giving away value. They will prefer collaboration to competition. They will assume responsibility for the newly measurable "externalities" they impose on their societies.
If you live or operate in the developed world, you've got a problem — you have a lot to unlearn, and no short-term incentive to do it. But better not ignore the competitor with the strange-looking beak.
Chris Meyer, co-author of Blur, The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy, is writing a book about the evolution of capitalism. HBR blog, "You Call That Capitalism?" at http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/hbr/meyer-kirby/.
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