Has Worship Of The Golden Bull Been Interrupted?

Bloomberg buckling to the demands of the 1% that he kick the OccupyWallStreet demonstrators out of Zuccotti Park the other day worked out badly. Predictably, the movement grew larger in size and determination-- and marched on the New York Stock Exchange and nearly shut it down-- a glorious, if mostly symbolic, victory for the 99%. Bloomberg has been reduced to lying to reporters and fearmongering among outer-borough voters that the dirty, bongo-playing, defecating hippies want to shut down the subway system. And the Austerity regime being pushed by the 1%... how's that working out?

Well, in Europe, where it's already been implemented to a great extent, social cohesion is breaking down at an increasingly rapid rate and Austerity itself is proving a monumental disaster, not just in Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Italy, but in the U.K. as well.

Unemployment hits 2.6 million, Bank of England slashes growth forecast-- and Osborne will have to raise borrowing to even higher levels than Labour planned.

Government borrowing is expected to rocket to levels higher than was envisaged by Labour, despite George Osborne's deep spending cuts.

On a day when youth unemployment rose to a record 1.02 million, figures slipped out by the Treasury revealed how the Chancellor's deficit reduction plan has been blown off course by anaemic growth levels and high jobless figures. Labour claimed the pain of £40bn of cuts and tax rises had not been worth it.

As for the mass of Americans who are trying to get by with their lives and only have a vague idea of what OccupyWallStreet is-- many having heard only through corporate media that it's a bunch of dirty, violent hippies who defecate on the street and rape and shoot people-- polling is heading south on the brand but powerful on the message. A poll by the Public Religion Institute found that 67% of Americans agree that government should do more to reduce the gap between rich and poor, which a large majority says is growing. 69% favor hiking taxes on millionaires. 57% favor eliminating tax breaks for corporations. 67% oppose cutting federal programs that help the poor. That's pretty much the OccupyWallStreet anti-Austerity program.

On Wednesday Tim Leberecht wrote persuasively about the opportunity to realign society's collective moral compass by understanding the values that underlie our economies and by reconciling the agendas of business with the true needs of individuals. "Clearly," he wrote, "the bond between society and business is broken, and the legitimacy of companies is at a new low point. Movements such as Occupy Wall Street express a growing indignation over the disconnect between the perks for a few and the rights of many. When Harvard undergraduate students stage a walkout of an Economics 101 class in sympathy with the Occupy movement to protest the ‘corporatization’ of education, it might indeed indicate the beginning of a 'New Progressive Movement.' It is not just the redistribution of wealth that’s being scrutinized, however. What citizens, in the U.S. and elsewhere, demand are new, more collaborative and inclusive models of value creation that produce meaning as much as profits."

Many leading business thinkers, from Gary Hamel to Michael Porter are listening to this groundswell. Beyond conventional concepts of corporate social responsibility, the discourse has shifted to more fundamental questions that prompt us to rethink the very gestalt of the enterprise. Hamel proclaims the “reinvention of management” to make our organizations more human-oriented, Porter promotes the concept of “Shared Value,” and Umair Haque heralds the “Meaning Organization.” Rosabeth Moss Kanter, in a signature piece for a special issue of the Harvard Business Review on the ‘Good Company,’ makes the case for the enterprise as a “social institution” that thrives on a shared social purpose, a long-term view, emotional engagement of all stakeholders, community-building, innovation, and self-organization. In a similar vein, but at the macro-level, the economist Robert C. Solomon, in his book A Better Way to Think About Business-- How Values Become Virtues, asserts that “Market systems are justified not because of efficiencies and profits, but because humans are first and foremost social and emotional beings, and markets provide a sympathetic community for social exchange.”

And yet, the reality in many companies today is that there appears to be a gap between the articulation of lofty principles and their application, despite all the talk about purpose, social power, emotional engagement, and community-building. A 2010 survey by Deloitte showed that nearly half of the workers polled who plan to seek out a new job say they have been motivated by a loss of trust in their employer. Startlingly, 46 percent of those surveyed reported a lack of transparency in their current company’s internal communications. Forty percent said they have been treated unethically by their employer.

...[T]he most acute and possibly widening gap is between individuals and governmental institutions. People-- and not only young people who grew up online-- are adapting quickly to social technologies; think of Facebook’s population, at more than 800 million to date, nearly triple that of the U.S. and rapidly approaching those of India or China. In a hyper-connected, trans-national world, people move faster than institutions, as we have witnessed in the Arab Spring and experience on the Social Web every day. Social power evolves into movements long before institutions decide where they want to move, and in the lack of action, activism is born.

The new social movements may be leaderless and have multiple and even conflicting agendas (see Occupy Wall Street) but it doesn’t matter when the platform is the medium and social technology-enabled collective action, bottom-up, is driving radical, immediate change that can be aligned with a more succinct purpose later. The point at which agency becomes more important than agenda is the very point at which social power becomes stronger than institutional authority. This is a true leveling of the playing-field. As economist Bernard Lietaer pointed out in a recent talk at the Poptech conference: “In the information age, every country is developing. There are some who realize that and some who don’t.”

Those who do, trust the power of social technologies, the principles of self-governance, and the passions of entrepreneurs and other change-makers to restore trust in business and create the social capital we need for a new social covenant. Only if we move from a merely transactional to an interactional concept of business, will our economies produce the morale we need to live in connected, happy, and sustainable societies, and the Values Gap will come closer to closing.