The second opening keynote was delivered by Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab and a strong advocate of a radical changed capitalism. Like Tim O'Reilly did with the web, he calls this Capitalism 2.0. Maybe we'll see Capitalism 2.0 Conferences soon?
Haque's diagnosis is brilliant, but not easy to grasp for hardcore capitalists. According to Haque, capitalism is fundamentally broken. But he has some ideas on how to fix it. In a recent blog post he writes:
It is no coincidence that so many industries are in trouble simultaneously and so fast. The growth of the Zombieconomy is a Jupiter-sized wake-up call to today's leaders.
Here's the real problem.
Capitalism 1.0 is built on an obsolete set of ideals. What the 21st century needs are better ideals, to build a better kind of business on.
Fundamentally, we need organizations that can behave very differently. Telcos are a great example — they've been fighting tomorrow for decades. And the bill is now coming due.
That's a tough set of lessons to internalize. Recently, I gave a talk on Constructive Capitalism to a bunch of senior guys at a major international organization. They debated with me for close to an hour whether a better kind of capitalism was really necessary.
Frankly, I thought it was a bit funny that the debate was necessary at all. Hey, look — it's the simultaneous collapse of significant portions of the manufacturing and service sectors. Convinced yet?
Please don't forget to rate Umair Haque's keynote on SpeakerRate.
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