SIX Propositions
For the NEXT Generation

ONE: People Circulate. Institutions Learn

TWO: It's All In the Connections

THREE: Managers Build Institutional Wealth

FOUR: Employees Are Engaged As Individuals

FIVE: Combine and Innovate

SIX: The Individual's Work is Essential

Why New Propositions? Is This Just Another Fad? During the Agricultural Age, the basis for wealth was land and natural resources. During the Industrial Age, the basis for wealth was capital and machinery. During the Information Age, the basis for wealth is knowledge. (Toffler, PowerShift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century, 1990) The most fundamental reality for economics was transformed when power shifted from wealth based on things made of atoms to bits of knowledge, which can move at the speed of light and have no physical reality. Unlike all previous bases of wealth – land, natural resources, money, machinery – knowledge can be given away by a person who has it, but not lost to that person. The fact represents a revolution in the very nature of economics. (Negroponte, Being Digital, 1995).

We have moved from a zero-sum game (one in which a gain for one side always entails a loss for the other) to one in which we can share, but not lose. In the old economy, scarcity was assumed, and always increased a thing’s value. In this new economy, abundance can be assumed. We have shifted from a worldview with a core proposition of “either/or” (either you have it or I have it) to one that accommodates a “both/and” possibility (both you and I can have the same thing… all of it, and more). In the natural world, this may be akin to repealing the laws of gravity. If the natural law of gravity changed its basic properties, most of our machines would not work. As the economic laws of wealth transform, most of our organizations don’t work. That’s what’s happening to us today.

Here are six propositions about work, organizations and people that were created based on these new realities.