You know you’re wrong when…

When a billionaire tells other billionaires they’re wrong, things are really askew. Especially when those billionaires don’t bother listening to the first guy. And yes, it’s almost always a guy. In this case, it was a guy saying the truth well over a decade ago, before the debacle became an abject failure for the majority of us. Here’s the truth: capitalism left unchecked tends toward concentration and collapse.

But. Capitalism, when well managed, is the greatest social technology ever invented to create prosperity in human societies. The key, in my mind, is the part about capitalism being well managed. What we have now is worse than ever.

Capitalism, when well managed, is the greatest social technology ever invented to create prosperity in human societies. But capitalism left unchecked tends toward concentration and collapse.

Nick Hanauer, 2014

Back in the 1990’s when I studied with Peter Drucker, I didn’t realize why so many CEO’s disliked him intensely. Now I know it’s because he was saying then what we now know to be completely true. When a society becomes dominated by the ultra wealthy on the backs of the majority of the people doing the labor to support that society, it will start to disintegrate, either quietly or violently – or both. It’s hard to say how ours will continue given where we are now.

But when one says the word management in the post-move-fast-and-break-things world, one is almost always castigated and either shown the exit or parked in a corner, whichever is cheaper for the company or context. How dare you raise the issue of entropy or chaos or organization or management. Especially if you’re me (female and not young, subservient or beautiful).

I am only the messenger. I see what’s coming, I point it out, I get told I’m crazy or looked at like I have two heads. What comes after that? A lot of dudes saying what I already said but because they realized it, now it’s a real thing.

I thank you for your 2014 memo, Mr. Hanauer. If I’d had a few connections or friends like yours in the late-1990’s, maybe we’d be friends. We both saw the same things coming in the early days of the internet. I wasn’t in a position to make decent money back then, so here I am working for someone else at an age when I could be winding down or investing time in volunteering my skills to help others get a toe hold in this backwards economic system we’ve been tethered to. You’ve done quite well for yourself and in case it’s not clear, I’m envious. I don’t want more things, I simply don’t want to have to worry about whether I have enough money to live on while my parents go through their later years. Do I resent them sometimes for benefitting from this system and not seeing how they were pulling the ladder up behind them? I do. But I can’t do much about it now except work to help people understand that there is a better way. Stakeholder capitalism.

My point of view is heavily shaped by Drucker, my former mentor and teacher. In a Forbes article from 2022, the author rightfully titled the piece “Peter Drucker: Prophet Of Stakeholder Capitalism” where he writes about the difference between shareholders and stakeholders. Clearly, the powerful and ultra-wealthy don’t want to hear any of this but if they’re not careful, the fate of Brian Thompson could be theirs in the not too distant future.