Ump on a Blog

In case you’ve been in a cave for, say, the last two years, you’ll notice that there has been a serious sea change in America lately. We are collectively realizing that turning the reins over to corporate interests and the government they bought was a huge mistake, and has resulted in the turnoil that we are currently experiencing. America is looking for a new direction, and has a new government to help that change come into focus.

So far that change has taken the shape of some serious money being spent, and some even more serious spending being proposed, to tackle the problems of corporate rescue, job creation, economic recovery and banking stability. Beyond that, we are looking at changes to corporate (especially financial sector) regulation, health care reform, environmental and energy policy advancement, and foreign policy repairs including the cessation of hostilities on two fronts overseas.

But today I want to take a look at the next step, the frontier that will soon be visible as America empowers a new group of prime movers to change the landscape. As corporate magnates were labeled “fat cats” following their back-alley financial indiscretions, the trust the public had in them was thrust into reverse, and their influence disappeared nearly overnight. The U.S. has a new wave of thinkers, teachers, philanthropists and social entrepreneurs that will craft the agenda for the next generation, and depending on how successful they are, perhaps the next century. Today I will present the crux of that agenda to you, as a preview of what is about to take center stage.

For a long time, the kooks on the left have been hosting rallies and holding marches and chaining themselves to spotted owls under the banner of the following underlying concepts: corporations are evil, governments are just corporate shills, women and poor people are getting the shaft, health care sucks, the environment is decaying, and if you don’t stop eating cows you are all going to face God’s wrath… except we don’t believe there is a God, so never mind — you’re just really, really mean!

Those ideas are still alive and well in the lunatic fringe, but they have morphed into concepts that are now championed by some people with genuine practical ideas about fixing some of these problems. Young ideologues and motivated B-school grads have gravitated to a mirco-preneurial model aimed at coupling small up-front investment with highly-repeatable results to achieve long-term gains. Which problems are being solved and in what way is too lengthy to go into here, and the degree to which they are being implemented ranges from, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” all the way out to functional and successful projects in wide-scale field trials, and even successful business models.

Instead, I have identified a series of concepts that comprise the new paradigm. All of these projects encompass at least one, and in many cases all, of the concepts below. It represents a significant and world-changing transformation from the current capital- and corporate-centric framework our socio-economic structure is built upon.

Humanitarian Focus: advancing human interests in the areas of education, health care, hunger, housing, equality, human rights, employment, and circumventing corporate “non-solution” solutions

Gap Identification: finding those areas where neither the market nor governments have gone or will go, and step in to fill a humanitarian need

Empowerment: providing the tools, expertise, and seed funding to facilitate community-based self-sufficiency, and sometimes small-scale profit

Sustainable Local-Source: using the natural resources available in a given region in unique ways, either as the means of actually solving a problem, or as a crop to provide capital to fund a solution — sometimes converting corporate waste into profit for the corporation and funding for the project

Open-Source: the free and open exchange and leveraging of ideas for the purpose of alleviating dependence on expensive and proprietary corporate options

Collaboration: partnerships between not-for-profits, sometimes involving NGO’s, government agencies and even for-profit companies, with the expressed goal of achieving mutual self-interest and expanding the pie — instead of increasing the size of the piece any individual receives

Shortened Free-Market Leash: identifying and impeding corporate practices that ignore overall costs, either by legislative action, legal hindrance, direct supply- or demand-side intervention, and even collaboration or formal partnership

Hair Of The Dog: using corporate tricks to outwit corporations, and employing market-based solutions in conjunction with corporate collaborators to leverage social impact while increasing business profits

Non-Financial Rewards System: more than just barter, but also identification of non-monetary rewards that motivate both providers and recipients, and supplanting the materialist incentives — often with better success than is achieved with money

The hyper-capitalist mercenaries that are slaves to the old way of doing things will dismiss this as folly, saying the only true motivator is greed and self-interest, and predicting the new paradigm’s imminent demise. But they’re fooling themselves, and it’s easy to see why. Each of the new-paradigm projects I have caught a glimpse of has been unique and ultimately driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, but has also provided a literal template for copycat projects in other geographical regions, as well as a conceptual template for similar projects using different tools in another vertical market or social space. In other words, new-paradigm projects are well-managed, reciprocally adaptive, present low barriers to entry, and are easily replicated with non-expert protagonists in most corners of the globe. As a result they are spreading both vertically and laterally at a pace that makes traditional start-ups look like lemonade stands.

The reality of the matter is, in order to survive a for-profit start-up needs one of two things: a huge pool of cash, or a steady income stream. If those are never achieved, the project folds no matter how good the idea may be. Most of the new-paradigm projects I have looked at get off the ground and effect change with little more than an iPhone’s worth of funding. Additionally, since the retail impact is human instead of monetary, the non-financial rewards system employed by most of these projects is usually brimming over — enough to keep key players engaged and motivated even when the pool of resources is bone dry. This means that good ideas survive, and many of them thrive, even in the most desperate and bleak of circumstances. Face it: this is coming, and once it reaches a tipping point it is going to take over.

What does this mean? Many things. Will we all still have jobs? Sure. Will the economy change? Not overnight, but yes, and in two or three generations we will hardly recognize it. Will corporate America adapt to this change? They always have in the past, and there’s no reason to think they won’t this time either. We’ll just see a lot more good things come to pass, and we’ll have the opportunity to help out with, and even profit from, a transformation that will humble us all and create a world we can be proud of.

The good news is, regardless of our political disposition, there is some aspect of these new-paradigm projects that will affect everyone in a positive way. There is something for each and every one of us to get excited about just around the corner. Keep your eyes open, think about what you would like to do to fix what’s broken, and it just might be you whose dreams change the world.