Business in the 21st Century

Umair Haque, the director of the Havas Media Lab shares five questions (and possible answers) he believes can generate valuable insights on how to thrive as a business in the sometimes dizzying world of the 21st century. Haque says that to mitigate the effects of the gloomy economic future, people need to radically change assumed operating procedures and re-wire the fundamental ways they do business. He discusses how to manage a world based on decreasing consumption and how to build on two-way value chains such as the member submitted culture of Threadless.

He explains:

Tomorrow will not be like yesterday. This is no mere recession: it’s a tectonic global shift in savings, consumption, and investment. Today’s macropocalypse is a rupture in the global economic fabric - and the next half-decade will be spent reweaving it. It is not a temporary departure from business as usual, an illness - it is a structural transformation, a lasting change.

20th century business isn’t fit for 21st century economics. Yesterday’s businesses were built for a world of overconsumption, artificially cheap production, symmetrical competition, and macroeconomic stability. That was yesterday. Today, the herd of industrial-era dinosaurs is going to be mercilessly culled - unless they can evolve to fit a radically altered economic environment.

Harvard Business: “A User’s Guide to 21st Century Economics”