A Phase Change To The Creative Economy

Extracted 02FEB2012 from http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/01/31/is-the-us-in-a-phase-chan...

In a stunning article in Vanity Fair, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz asks the critical question: is the US economy going through a fundamental shift in the nature of the economy?...

“We must shift the focus of companies back to the customer and away from shareholder value,” says Roger Martin, Dean of Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, in wonderful his book, Fixing the Game (2011). “The shift necessitates a fundamental change in our prevailing theory of the firm… The current theory holds that the singular goal of the corporation should be shareholder value maximization. Instead, companies should place customers at the center of the firm and focus on delighting them, while earning an acceptable return for shareholders.”...

The Fortune 500 must master the management principles needed for continuous innovation that delights customers. The command-and-control management of hierarchical bureaucracy is inherently unable to delight anyone–it was never intended to. To delight customers, a radically different kind of management needs to be in place, with a different role for the managers, a different way of coordinating work, a different set of values and a different way of communicating. This is not rocket science. It’s called radical management...

Just as video went from a handful of broadcast networks to millions of producers on YouTube within a decade, a massive transition from centralized production to a “maker culture” of dispersed manufacturing innovation is under way today...

What is needed now is a focus on the opportunities offered by the future. We need a clear understanding of the nature of the journey that we are negotiating and intelligent action to get through the transition as quickly and painlessly as possible. The Creative Economy is a huge opportunity that awaits us.