EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Toward a New
Business Era

OUR SOCIETY, facing momentous challenges in the closing years of the twentieth century, needs visions of the future so attractive, inspiring, and compelling that people will shift from their current mind-set of focusing on immediate crises to one of eagerly anticipating the future—a future where the health and well-being of the earth and its inhabitants is secure.

In this book we create such visions for the world of business. We focus on business for two reasons. First, it is arguably the most powerful institution of our society and the major force affecting world conditions. Second, individual business corporations will survive only if they undergo a major shift to address individual and societal needs and become more democratic in their processes. We present a vision of the current and future role of business in order to foster dialogue in search of positive and proactive responses to the challenges business currently faces.

Hallmarks of a Changing World

To meet the challenges posed by a world that is changing at an ever-increasing pace, we must become acquainted with the changes that are occurring. We have identified seven trends that we believe underlie the emergence of a new worldview.

Shift in Consciousness

Increasing numbers of people around the world are concluding that consciousness is primary, that the mind or spirit has a reality comparable to material objects (Harman 1988; Renesch 1991; Cook 1991; Rothschild 1991). In reexamining the assumptions, values, and directions of their lives, people increasingly see themselves as the creators of their realities. They place emphasis on interconnectedness and wholeness—of everyone and everything—and affirm the central role of inner wisdom and inner authority (Harman 1988, 1992). More often than not, they are committing themselves to make a difference in the world.

The shift in consciousness is more than just rapid and profoundly challenging; it is paradigmatic, representing a fundamental change that calls into question our entire worldview and all the conscious and unconscious assumptions on which that worldview rests. Each of the remaining trends we identify is a natural companion to or consequence of this shift in consciousness.

Disenchantment with Scientism

There is a growing disenchantment with scientism, the tendency to reduce all reality and experience to mathematical descriptions of physical and chemical phenomena. Since the time of Descartes, we in the West have stressed rational truth: it has been widely accepted that science and scientific processes are the way to determine truth and that rational intelligence and logical thought are the most valuable abilities we have. But these attitudes are now being questioned in the light of growing evidence that there are many experiences and events that cannot be explained if what is “real” is only that which can be touched or measured (Harman 1988).

Inner Sources of Authority and Power

The growing credence accorded those processes and experiences we cannot explain or measure is reflected in an increased reliance by many people on an inner source of authority and power, “unconscious knowing” (Harman 1988). This unconscious knowing is revealed to us through such familiar experiences as inspiration, creativity, revelation, and intuition; for some people it may be communicated through a higher self or inner self-helper (Damgaard 1987; Speck 1935).

The new appreciation of “authority from within” is being reflected in the desire of many persons to live and work to their full capacity. People are exhibiting increasing reluctance to have others make their decisions for them or to determine how they are to live and work. This is fomenting revolution in the workplace (Rifkin 1992; Stroh, Reilly & Brett 1990; “The Battle for Control” 1992) and in the global political landscape.

Respiritualization of Society

Many in the Western world are responding to the lack of a sense of balance, purpose, and personal power by bringing spirituality into their lives and work (Harman 1988; Harman & Hormann 1990). People are increasingly engaged in a search for such things as meaning, purpose, inner authority and peace, truth, love, compassion, self-worth, dignity, wisdom, a higher power, and a sense of unity with others—and the means to express them.

Decline of Materialism

We have begun to see a basic reorientation of values (e.g., Strom 1992a,c; Rose 1990; Harman 1982; Schwartz & Ogilvy 1979; Norton 1991) manifest, for instance, in global politics as shifts from competition to cooperation. Other such value shifts are from exploitation to caring, from materialism to spirituality, and from consumerism to a concern for social and economic justice. Greed has become less acceptable; there is a movement away from materialism toward intangibles such as honesty, truth, courage, conviction, self-worth, the quality of relationships, and personal fulfillment.

Political and Economic Democratization

The rising up of oppressed peoples of the world to demand greater political democratization is a global trend well documented by the media. Less well known are the campaigns by partisans of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), which calls for new value systems, stressing in particular environmental sustainability and economic justice. This viewpoint argues for responsible accounting for environmental resources such as air, water, and soil (Ekins 1986b) and an end to economic imperialism, the domination of global economic activities by the Western powers (George 1986). It also stresses the need to recognize the reality of global interdependence.

Beyond Nationality

Many analysts and social commentators see our civilization evolving into a world beyond nationality (Pollack 1992; Blumenthal & Chace 1992; “The Battle for Control” 1992; Gelb 1991; Wright 1992). Nation states, including many defined solely on ethnic and linguistic grounds, will form regional groupings linked together economically and technologically in an interdependent, “borderless world” (Ohmae 1990).

Bioregionalism is emerging as the guiding concept for such regional groupings (see, for example, McHugh 1992). In this view, the Earth is divided into ecologically unified areas sharing habitat, soil, climate, and faunal similarities (Sale 1986; Anderson 1986).

The trends toward economic democratization and global interdependence remind us that globalization is more than merely putting a factory in each major region of the world or shifting corporate loyalty away from a particular country or tackling global problems such as acid rain and technology transfer. Globalization comes down to facing the challenge of reworking our contemporary value system, which assumes that information is proprietary; that bigger is better; that material growth leads to happiness; that the world is one vast “global shopping center” and the Earth a “gigantic toolshed” (a phrase coined by Clarence Glacken [Ehrenfeld 1978, 177]); and that central planning, efficiency, and the rationalization of power are natural and appropriate, regardless of locale or culture.

Emergence of the Fourth Wave

We have adopted and extended Alvin Toffler’s concept of waves of change, introduced in his book The Third Wave (1980), to serve as the framework for our vision of business in the twenty-first century. The First Wave of change, the agricultural revolution, has essentially ended and will not be of concern here. The Second Wave, coincidental with industrialization, has covered much of the Earth and continues to spread, while a new, postindustrial Third Wave is gathering force in the modern industrial nations. We see a Fourth Wave following close upon the Third.

The Second Wave is rooted in materialism and the supremacy of man. From this orientation flows a stress on competition, self-preservation, and consumption, which has led to such current problems as pollution, solid-waste disposal, crime, family violence, and international terrorism. The Third Wave manifests growing concern for balance and sustainability. As the Third Wave unfolds, we become more sensitive to the issues of conservation, sanctity of life, and cooperation. By the time of the Fourth Wave, integration of all dimensions of life and responsibility for the whole will have become the central foci of our society. The recognition of the identity of all living systems will give rise to new ways of relating and interacting that nourish both humans and nonhumans.

Each wave has a distinctive worldview, epitomized as:

Second Wave—We are separate and must compete.

Third Wave—We are connected and must cooperate.

Fourth Wave—We are one and choose to cocreate.

A New Role for Business: Global Stewardship

The business of business is not only business. In recent decades, business has emerged as the dominant institution in global culture (Hawken 1992). The other institutions of society—political, educational, religious, social—have a decreasing ability to offer effective leadership: their resources limited, their following fragmented, their legitimacy increasingly questioned, politicians, academics, priests, and proselytizers have neither the resources nor the flexibility to mount an effective response to the manifold challenges we are facing. Business, by default, must begin to assume responsibility for the whole.

Most corporations today are Second Wave, centralized and hierarchical, focused on values like profit, efficiency, bigness, and growth. The Second Wave’s derivation lay in the army model, even its language and goals reflecting this military origin: survival, self-preservation, beating the competition, winning. Success is measured by the bottom line, the generation of profits, and long-term time horizons are defined as five to ten years.

The range of corporate activities is narrowly confined to business and things economic and technological, and CEOs are accountable only to their stockholders. Corporate attitudes and policies reflect nationalistic concerns, and globalization is regarded as a process of economic investment in foreign countries. Business is viewed as a way to make a living.

Now business is being pressured to become a more responsible and more multipurpose institution. Its original purpose of generating profits through the production and distribution of goods and services must continue for the company to survive, but in Third Wave society, business is also coming to be regarded as the producer of moral effects (Forest 1991), the creator of much more than a financial bottom line.

The transition between the Second and Third Waves entails the corporation coming to see itself as a creator of value. Its philosophy of doing business undergoes a profound shift as it focuses more on serving the needs of its various stakeholders (now defined as all parties who have a relationship to the firm, not just its owners) than on production per se. This is done in the belief that if the corporation serves the customer, employee, and community, then the customer, employee, and community will serve it (Bennett 1991; Norton 1991). Strategic thinking is reoriented to anticipate future needs independent of the corporation, and business is increasingly regarded as a vehicle through which people can grow and serve others.

A host of new questions epitomizes the shift from Second to Third Waves: The old “Are we making money?” becomes “Are we creating value?” “Are we beating the competition?” shifts to “Do we understand the need?” “Are we gaining market share?” emerges as “Are we providing the right level and kind of service?” Asking such new questions and doing business in the Third Wave mode requires a basic shift of consciousness away from fear toward trust, away from the need for control toward giving up control, away from rigidity toward a learning culture.

The Fourth Wave corporation will recognize its role as one of stewardship for the whole in addition to providing goods and services to a particular customer base. It will have shifted its self-image from that of a primarily manufacturing to a primarily serving organization (Harman 1982) and will act as a leader in addressing global issues, focusing on what is best for all. The model of servant leadership originated by Robert K. Greenleaf (see, for example, Kiechel 1992) will become the corporate ethos of the Fourth Wave.

Business can take a leadership position in global responsibility and citizenship by doing the following:

Make the intellectual shift from wanting to beat the competition to wanting to serve the world.

Set as its primary focus the identification of needs—as the citizens of the world define these for themselves.

Recognize and capitalize on the advantages of a global organization committed to stewardship: its transnational character, its diversity of personnel, its wealth of global interests and distribution channels.

Recognize that the organization is a composite of the individual people within and appended to its structure.

Think globally while acting locally.

Corporate Wealth Redefined

As corporations move in new directions, they will need to find new ways to define wealth. Alternative economists have created a variety of techniques for social accounting (Leipert 1986).

These include the following:

Universalization of capital ownership, which is not as radical an idea as it may seem when one considers the near universality of stock ownership represented by the holdings of pension fund systems.

Internalization of the social and environmental costs of doing business, which are currently treated as externalities.

Capitalization of natural resources with the creation of pollution credits that savvy companies such as 3M are already turning into saleable assets.

Resource accounting, a new form of capital accounting at the macroeconomic level (Ekins 1986b), has been designed to ensure that our resource bases are not destroyed. It strives to describe such things as the state of the resource base, the depreciation of natural assets, the depreciation of manufactured assets (the infrastructure), the use of human resources, and the maintenance or deterioration of human health.

In addition, progressive business analysts are identifying new forms of wealth, such as intellectual capital, creativity, and intrapreneurship. All of these forms of wealth depend on people (Wriston 1990).

In the Second Wave corporation, wealth derives from creating a positive bottom line while satisfying employees and making a good impression on consumers. It is profit-driven, with little incentive to consider social accounting and other such reforms.

The Third Wave corporation will be more supportive of social and resource accounting as it begins to change its underlying value system.

Fourth Wave business will have a wider agenda, reflecting its leadership role and its acceptance of responsibility for the whole. It will ask, “What are we doing to improve the health of the planet?” Social and resource accounting will be the convention, and ownership of business will be universalized in the communitarian ethos then prevailing.

Seeing the corporation in this Fourth Wave way has significant implications for its internal structure and governance.

Evolving Forms of Corporate Structure

It is becoming clear that new organizational structures are needed for corporations to flourish in the future. Current critics of corporate structure note that the Second Wave model, characterized by hierarchy and an authoritarian form of management, is inflexible, leaving organizations unable to respond quickly to change. It disempowers people and fosters divisiveness, double agendas, and destructive conflicts. A variant of the traditional hierarchy, the matrixed organization, divides employee loyalties and thus splits the decision-making process, creating inefficiencies and low levels of trust.

There is no incentive in a Second Wave corporation for a manager to abandon the traditional role, which insists that he or she is in charge. Given the information revolution in the last ten years, this image is as outdated as it is destructive. Rather than continue the illusion that knowledge and wisdom reside in management alone, managers must come to see the corporation as a learning organization for all levels of employees, including themselves (O’Toole 1985; Naisbitt 1984; Senge 1990).

More effective today than the matrix model is the business unit model. Although still Second Wave, the business unit model affords the benefits of autonomy, unified loyalties, single focus (the recognition of and response to market need), and flexibility. Businesses such as General Electric that have shifted toward the business unit structure are flourishing. Those stuck in the centralized or matrixed structure seem likely to face implosion (collapse into themselves).

One way out of the current corporate dilemma threatening implosion is to create an environment in which people feel safe and supported. Such an environment fosters true diversity; that is, it recognizes and appreciates the differences of employee styles and experiences, as well as differences of race and gender. The creative, imaginative oddball is valued as much as the conventional worker. Creating a safe environment also entails the establishment of a clear priority of tolerating each other’s frailties and needs.

We envision the Third Wave corporation moving into the team-value model, which is driven by the desire to create value. Functioning in an environment of truth-telling and integrity, business under the team-value model is undertaken collaboratively with coworkers and customers. It is also democratic, with everyone on the team being equal. Managers are elected by members of the team to serve as an interface with other groups. Like the business unit in its autonomy, the team-value organizational model also shares the advantages of flexibility and responsiveness to changing market needs and trends.

The corporation of the Fourth Wave will be structured according to a community model. Because the Fourth Wave in general will occur after a shift in global consciousness, it will manifest many features that seem unrealistic to us today; for example, the devaluation of money as the primary motivator, the absence of hierarchy, and the elimination of external employee evaluation. Like the Third Wave model, the corporation-in-community will be democratic, participatory, and focused on the customer. It will further be driven by a shared vision and will likely operate as much by intuitive processes and techniques as by the logical and rational methods we find familiar today.

The Corporation as Community

The long-term health and prosperity of the contemporary corporation depends on more than its response to globalization or reform of its governance and structure. An equally important factor is how the corporation chooses to respond to the demands of its community.

In acting locally, the corporation functions as a responsible member of its external community, illustrated, for example, in the current concern for education demonstrated by Xerox corporation or for the environment by Du Pont. The corporation, however, must also come to recognize the need to foster its internal community.

Community is manifested in two ways: as a group of people and as a “way of being” that unites group members. The first type of community is formed by bringing people together in place and time. The second is created when barriers between people are let down (Peck 1987). Under such conditions, people become bonded, sensing they can relyon and trust each other, which produces effective team efforts. When people achieve this feeling of community, their subsequent achievements are nothing short of miraculous.

Second Wave corporations have tended to view community as something external to corporate life. The Third Wave corporation will recognize that it has an internal community, one that extends beyond employees to encompass their families as well. It will deal with employees in a multidimensional way, not simply as cogs in a wheel but as whole persons with emotional, psychological, spiritual, and physical needs; family demands; and personal interests and concerns as valid and as important as the job.

In the longer term future, the close integration of corporate work and family life will be crucial to the success of the corporation (Noble 1992). With feminization of the workplace, corporate leaders will come to realize that prosperity depends on viewing employees in the totality of their humanness as physical, emotional, and spiritual beings. At this point, business will shift into a Fourth Wave perspective, taking a leadership position to ensure the overall health and well-being of its family members.

Fundamental changes in the values that guide how corporations act toward their employees will provide the foundation for building community. Changes that will move corporations from the Second to the Fourth Wave, through a transitional Third Wave, include the following:

Diversity Embraced

The achievement of a truly diverse workplace in racial, ethnic, and sexual terms will produce a profound shift in values and a richer, more diverse set of perspectives about the corporation’s customers, goals, performance, and role in the wider society.

Truth and Openness Promoted

An environment of truth—a climate where, in the words of one insightful Du Pont manager, “putting the dirt on the table” is customary and accepted—is necessary for change, healing, and growth, both in individuals and in business. Without an environment where truth is valued, fear becomes pervasive, differing from one situation to the next only in intensity. Resistance to change correlates directly with the level of fear in a given environment. Moreover, without an environment of truth-telling, people fall prey to ethical debasement.

Structural Violence Ended

To be successful in creating a climate of truth and openness, corporations must put an end to structural violence. Structural violence is most commonly seen in the business arena in our management practices. Employees live in fear of being punished, of being intimidated by the boss and shown to be of questionable value to the company or to themselves. Even though blatant punishment is an infrequent occurrence, it does happen, and when it does, it sends a strong message to the remaining people in the organization to beware.

Balance and Moderation Encouraged

The term “addiction” conjures up drug users and alcoholics. But addiction is coming to be more widely defined. Corporate consultants now speak of the corporation itself as an addict and as promoting insidious forms of addiction within its employees (Schaef & Fassel 1988).

How does the corporation do this? The stressors inherent in the tension-riddled matrix organization—arising, for example, from the conflict between business team and functional management’s goals—that might drive an employee to drink come immediately to mind, but this is only one way the corporation fosters addiction. Much more problematic is the overt encouragement of workaholism.

Another form of company addiction is the pervasiveness of codependency, or a denial of reality, at all levels of the corporation. Information is filtered, most often unconsciously, so that only partial truths are told. The reporting or discussion of bad news is avoided (the “elephant in the living room” is ignored) because people live in fear of hurting others or of being hurt themselves.

Across the country, in boardroom and bedroom, contemporary Americans are beginning to face the reality of this problem (Fassel 1990; Hawken 1992; Herman & Hillman 1992).

Employee Health and Well-Being Supported

An awareness of the value of the “wellness workplace” (Naisbitt & Aburdene 1985) will move the Second Wave company into sharing responsibility for all-around employee well-being (Third Wave) and then into a leadership position where the corporation includes the goal of employee well-being among its other articulated goals and commits its time and resources to that end (Fourth Wave).

In a wellness workplace, it will be recognized that the cheapest way to handle the costs of medical care is by keeping the staff healthy. Preventive medicine will be the order of the day. Health clubs, recreation centers, and smoking cessation programs (coupled with rigorous nonsmoking policies) will be widely available, provided by the company. For their widely recognized benefits in stress reduction, meditation rooms will be a common feature in every company facility and workers’ daily schedules will have meditation breaks, similar to the currently ubiquitous coffee break (Siegel 1985).

Besides being preventive, corporate health care in the future will be holistic, attending to both body and mind.

In its role of fostering community, the corporation will shift to new models of governance, engendering deeper levels of trust, caring, and sharing throughout the internal corporate family. By the time of the Fourth Wave corporation, well into the twenty-first century, the corporation will have taken on a new leadership position in society. Its customers will have been integrated (but not assimilated) into corporate life, and its employees will have reached a level of personal and professional integration such that their lives will have permeable boundaries: people will be able to be the same at work as they are at home. No longer will there be a need for false fronts or the studied reactions so necessary in the codependent corporation of the present. The environment—at home, at work, in the world at large—will be healthy and health supporting.

Ecology and Economics: Toward a Common Cause

Environmentalism is teaching us that we can no longer regard environmental protection as a problem or regard ecology as antagonistic to economics. Rethinking some of the basic assumptions that lie behind the operation of business today presents many opportunities and can offer the proactive businessperson a significant advantage.

That this is not now widely recognized is due in part to ignorance of some basic natural laws:

The growth of natural systems is finite. No matter what the system, be it an individual human body or the global ecosystem, biogeochemical reality tells us that unlimited growth leads to disaster. In the individual, this is called cancer; in the global arena, it is called solid-waste problems and pollution (Murray 1974).

Everything must go somewhere (Commoner 1971). This principle explains why we have our current solidwaste disposal problem: the environment’s capacities to absorb more have been exhausted. It is the physical law underlying the necessity of recycling, which is also desirable as a way to conserve valuable natural resources and free us from dependence on dwindling reserves of materials such as oil.

Competition discourages diversity (Murray 1974). The basis for this is the competitive exclusion principle: when species (or businesses) rely on the same limiting resource—when, in other words, they are compet ing—they cannot coexist indefinitely; one of them will supplant the other over time. In contrast, economists would have us believe that competition encourages diversity and stability.

The law of the retarding lead, or The dominant species is slow to respond to change. Ethnologists and ecologists (e.g., Keyes 1983) have noticed that change and creative adaptations to new conditions in the environment tend to be made by individuals who are not dominant in the culture or ecosystem. In terms of business, this means that the new, small start-up entrepreneurial companies or the people working for large corporations who are allowed to be intrapreneurial are likely to be the source of the changes, inventions, and new techniques that permit long-term viability.

Nature knows best and Everything is connected to everything else (Commoner 1971). Ignorance of these natural laws by economists has led both to the “tragedy of the commons” and pollution.

Businesspeople can turn these laws to their advantage if they are open to rethinking how business operates. Some twenty years ago, for example, Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan & Powers 1989) suggested how businesspersons could use the competitive exclusion principle to their advantage. McLuhan noted that competition creates resemblance. By that he meant that when companies fall into competition over a market niche, they tend to grow more alike. The longer this process persists, the greater their competition and the harder it becomes for them to gain market share. The way out lies in changing the rules of the game. Savvy businesspeople can use the opportunities sited in environmentalism to do this. Du Pont’s decision to opt out of the production of chlorofluorocarbons, constitutes one such example.

Besides providing a competitive edge, environmentalism provides investment opportunities, particularly in the “Sunrise Seven” industries and for companies practicing the “Four Rs.” The Sunrise Seven are industries involved in pollution control, recycling and resource substitution, energy efficiency, ecologically tailored energy supply, environmental services, information technology, and biotechnology—all of which have clear wealth-creating potential and long-term viability (Elkington 1986). Businesses that move into the Four Rs—repair, recondition, reuse, and recycle—will flourish as environmental rehabilitation becomes imperative in the Third Wave conservationist era.

By the time of the Fourth Wave, we foresee a shift beyond conservationism, to preservationism, or deep ecology (Devall & Sessions 1985). The deep ecologists call for a fundamental spiritual reawakening on the part of people to the sacred quality of nature. At this point, Earth is likely to be seen as an entity in itself, Gaia, a living being with consciousness. Humans will have come to realize the truth of Buckminster Fuller’s dictum, “We are not in control here,” and thanks to this humility, we will no longer regard the earth as a “gigantic toolshed.”

Our values will be transformed. Contributing one’s talents and satisfying higher needs will take precedence over accumulating material possessions. We will work as much to serve the health of the planet and to fulfill our personal purpose as to earn a paycheck. Economic justice and sustainability will be key themes undergirding much of what we do and stand for, both privately and publicly.

Use of Appropriate Technology

Because technology is heavily implicated in our environmental crisis, it is clear that business will have to make significant technological changes to meet the needs of the future. Two cultural trends are encouraging action in this direction.

The first of these is the growing disenchantment with scientism, which denies or disparages nonrational ways of knowing in its stress on the empirical testing of reality (Pascarella 1986). The second trend is the movement for an “appropriate technology” consonant with the laws of ecology and serving to foster sustainability and environmental integrity.

More than just environmental considerations make a technology appropriate (Elkington 1986). Cultural factors must also be considered: population size, educational levels, social structures, the available labor pool, the resource base, market conditions, and infrastructure. Questions of values also arise, since technological development is fraught with moral and philosophical aspects.

This poses a significant challenge for Americans, who generally have an aversion to recognizing the moral content of political discourse, but in the application of technology, it is unavoidable. Contemporary technologies, particularly biotechnologies such as genetic engineering and “algeny,” the marriage of biological and robotic technologies (Rifkin 1983), are so powerful and so consequential for the long-term quality of our lives that public articulation of the moral limits of technology is now essential. Some advocates of appropriate technology now call for the institution of social, economic, and political impact statements for new technologies that would resemble the currently required environmental impact statement.

Other challenges also arise. These include educating the public and business in the elements of technology assessment, to obviate the need for issues (and values) to be decided solely by “experts.”

Developing review procedures and public education programs relates to another challenge: intentionality. We are long past the time in our evolution when we can continue to act without awareness of just what it is we are doing. We must, in short, begin to act intentionally. Unfortunately, most people live their lives in unconscious repetition of deeply ingrained habits. Learning to live intentionally will most likely happen in the context of the Fourth Wave corporation.

In the face of the rising societal awareness of the importance of ethics, the corporation faces the challenge to institutionalize the process of ethical decision making. Some companies are creating a position of corporate ethicist, an employee whose charge is to analyze the boundary conditions and strategic constraints on the corporation in the light of environmental, technological, political, societal, and economic factors.

By the time of the Fourth Wave, technology will reflect a collaborative and ecological ethos. Fourth Wave people’s attitudes about information and the power it represents will be very different from ours. Power will lie within each person, so transfer of information is likely to be freer and may occur in forms much faster than anything we can conceive of today.

Leadership in the Era of Biopolitics

Our world is moving quickly into the biopolitical era, thanks to recent advances in biotechnology, the environmental crisis, and global democratization. As we make the transition to this new era, corporate leaders will accept new roles and take on new responsibilities.

Biopolitics, the politics of the future, will deal with our ability to produce change in living systems. In contrast to politics, which encompasses nations and gradual evolutionary change, biopolitics will encompass the whole Earth, or the biosphere, and exponential rates of change.

Another difference from conventional politics will be the “collapse of privatism” (Anderson 1987, 361). The traditional distinction between public and private will become blurred because private values will be recognized as extremely consequential to public welfare. In the biopolitical environment, no one will be able to claim he or she is apolitical. We all breathe the air, we all live in an ecosystem; therefore, we are all inextricably part of the political process.

The central player on the global biopolitical scene will be business, since it will have institutionalized a concern for environmental preservation. Leaders in business will become de facto leaders of biopolitics, and in this dual capacity, such men and women will need a host of personal and professional qualities.

Chief among these will be personal maturity. At a time when the corporation will have emerged from codependency and unconsciousness, its leaders will necessarily have done likewise. This will be manifested in a level of consciousness that enables each leader to be aware of his or her conscious and unconscious mind. No longer living in self-deception, these leaders will be capable of clear thinking and effective action. They will have learned to control their innate urge for omnipotence.

Equally important, the leaders of Fourth Wave business will be ethically sensitive, in touch with the feminine as well as the masculine in themselves, and supportive of the reorientation of values that the feminine represents. In this as in other ways, the heads of business will not be able to ignore their role as moral leaders.

With these attributes, Fourth Wave biopoliticians will address some awesome tasks. They will influence public dialogue while fostering the integration of economic, environmental, technological, and social problems. To a large extent, they will define the future direction for the evolution of the Earth. They will do this amid a society facing the challenge of living on the slope of a steep learning curve (Anderson 1987), where change is rapid and disorientation a constant threat. As learning organizations, corporations will help move society along this curve, their leaders serving as role models for our adaptation and maturation into Fourth Wave civilization.

Business in the Twenty-First Century

Consider the following visions of the new corporation:

As an exemplar for other institutions in society.

As a global citizen acting locally, while thinking globally.

As an advocate of the living economy, practicing social and resource accounting.

As an organization committed to serve, aware of its identity as a producer of moral effects.

As a community of wellness, aware of the full range of its corporate stakeholders.

As a model of environmental concern.

As a pioneer in appropriate technologies, skilled in technology assessment.

As an organization led by biopoliticians who are fully aware of their responsibility to realize the destiny of modern men and women.

This work is offered as a critique-cum-vision in the hope that it will spark discussion of the reality gap and offer some inducement to shared truth-telling. Business success in the next millennium will require moving into a new game that has already begun. Given correct information and time to wrestle with the issues, our businesses and our society will make constructive decisions. But we must all take care lest, by operating out of fear or an “I have the answer” attitude, we lock ourselves into repeating mistakes of the past.