The following is an excerpt from Standing on the Sun: How the Explosion of Capitalism Abroad Will Change Business Everywhere by Christopher Meyer, with Julia D. Kirby. Meyer is an innovator and the founder of Monitor Talent. For more about the book, visit www.christophermeyer.com/standing-on-the-sun. This excerpt comes from Chapter 2: Cambrian Capitalism.
Cambrian Capitalism
Runaway feedback, the peacock's tale, and the evolution of capitalism
One hundred years from now economists will look back and say the father of the profession wasn't Adam Smith—it was Charles Darwin.
—Robert Frank, 2011 Aspen Ideas Festival
In 1992, Chris was facilitating an annual strategy offsite for the senior management team of MicroAge, one of two Fortune 500 companies in Arizona at the time. The discussion turned to a new class of competitor and its possible effect on MicroAge. After ten minutes of increasingly concerned discussion, the VP of sales exploded: "It's a war out there, and these guys are getting ready to attack us! We have to be ready to hit them first, before they can build momentum."
The President, Alan Hald, responded, "Maybe, but could we consider another way to think about it? What if it's not a war of us against them, but more like an ecology, in which they're a new species with a niche distinct from ours, and we're both better off by coexisting?"
Chris was startled. He'd been following the literature of complexity theory (more formally, complex adaptive systems), which often suggested parallels between biology and economics. And he had tested some of the ideas with businesspeople, most of whom reacted with bemused skepticism. Now, for the first time, he was hearing a corporate executive try to sell this concept to his team. (To be honest, though, it didn't get much uptake, except from Hald's equally innovative Chairman, Jeff McKeever. The VP of sales responded with an ostentatious eye roll.)
Complexity theory went on to enjoy a vogue in the mid-1990s after which much of the punditocracy considered it pass
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