Once upon a time, businesses were small: mom and Pop stores catering to a local market.
Fossil fuels arrived in the 1900s, and businesses needed bigger machines and more people.
This industrialisation powered a century-long business boom.
Lots of wealth was created, and businesses became valuable.
Stock markets formed to measure this value: short-term reporting forcing relentless growth.
Management practices were born because businesses were harder to control.
As society changed, so the employee changed: more opinionated, less obedient.
People started to see the cracks in business for the first time.
Business wasn’t good for everyone, and some people were getting hurt.
Leaders had to recognise that their followers could choose – or not choose – them.
Leaders were forced to look inward, asking bigger and better questions of themselves.
The leadership terrain started to mature, and concepts like ‘purpose’ were born.
Then Covid hit, and people saw their lived experience of business more clearly.
Turns out, they weren’t very happy with their work and they’d rather stay at home.
This period changed business overnight, as businesses had to respond to this rejection quickly.
As things were starting to settle, AI joined the fray.
The future of business – and society – is now up for grabs: no one knows what the future holds.
Society continues to get less healthy and less happy: a slow, systemic collapse.
No aspect of society isn’t run like a business, so business is our main hope to fix society.
If society is going to heal, business needs to lead the way because no one else is coming.
It needs to be a different version of business: wiser with a longer-term perspective.
Businesses and leaders know this change is needed, but most don’t because they’re stuck.
So the pain will likely increase until, eventually, new ways of doing business will be adopted.
A lot of collateral damage will have been caused to people and the planet in that time.
Unnecessarily, because the new way is here already – you just have to choose it.
And so we’ll all be writing the continuing chapters to this pantomime together.
How will it read?