Transformation Of Business
an interview with Willis Harman, by Sarah van Gelder
from Business On A Small Planet (IC#41), Summer 1995, Page 52
Much of the news about the transformation of the global economy is bad news - people losing
their jobs, companies running to low-wage countries, linear material and energy flows wasting
and damaging the natural world. But there are some signs that this transformation may go
deeper than many think - and that it may take us to a more sustainable form of business.
Sarah: What would you say is at the root of our culture's way of doing business?
Willis: Well it seems to me that every society has some kind of an organizing myth; traditional
societies had one, medieval society had one, we have one. Very central to our modern myth is
the idea that it's perfectly reasonable that the economy should be the paramount institution
around which everything else revolves, and that economic logic and economic values should
guide our decisions. This all seems so natural that we never think to question it, and yet there
are profound reasons why we should question it.
The domination by the economy rests on these basic assumptions:

any organization must grow or die

the economy as a whole must grow exponentially

labor productivity must continue to increase

owners have the right to receive maximum return on their investments

unbridled competition is a good thing with a few minor exceptions.
But if you were to look at the goals that not only this society but any human society seems to
aim toward, you would come up with a very different set:

we want a wholesome environment in which to raise our children

we want a good relationship with nature

we want to feel safe

we hold dear certain values like democracy, liberty, the rule of law, equity and justice
and so on.
It turns out that if you look at the assumptions underlying our economic system - especially the
ones regarding the prerogatives of ownership - and then you look at the goals we humans have
about how we want to live our lives, there is no compatibility. The assumptions can never lead
to the goals.
And yet this incompatibility passes unnoticed. I think that's because the assumptions about
economic progress seemed to work rather well during the time when you could equate material
progress with general benefit. But that equation doesn't work anymore. We now have a system
that works to the benefit of the few and penalizes masses of people today and in the future.
Sarah: Are you suggesting that the legitimacy of our current system is eroding?
Willis: Well, first of all legitimacy is in the eyes of the perceiver. How do people come to
perceive institutions as legitimate? Typically, it has been because either they are duly
constituted, like a government that has a constitution or a business with a charter to do a
specific thing, such as to build a canal. Or it can come from the fact that the institution embodies
generally approved values and goals. It can come from various historical reasons, or from the
fact that the outcomes of the institution - the products of its actions - are generally considered to
be good.
The whole business system is losing its legitimacy on all of these counts. It never was duly
constituted to do the things that it does. Corporate charters don't give businesses the license to
do the things worldwide that they do. Those are simply powers that developed and have not
been challenged.
The economic and financial values that tend to predominate in business are not good for the
planet, they are not good for future generations, and they’re not good for us. So it does not have
legitimacy on that count. Its products are sometimes questionable, the effects of its activities on
the environment are often destructive, and its promotion of consumption goes counter to the
need for long-term sustainability.
So we're beginning to hear talk about the need for whole-system change. Of course to many
people, that seems a pretty improbable thing. But then to many people, significant change within
the corporation was an improbable thing not too long ago, and we've seen tremendous changes
in that regard.
The reason whole-system change is not improbable is because of this factor of legitimacy.
When I talk to business audiences about this, I sometimes ask this question: If you had been
looking in the right places you could have seen, say in 1980 in the Soviet Union - the forces
developing that eventually resulted in the withdrawal of legitimacy from world communism in
1991. Following this quiet withdrawal of legitimacy, the order quickly collapsed.
So the question now is – If the challenge to what you might call world capitalism (and by this I
don't mean small businesses, but the network of powerful corporations and financial institutions
that has spread around the world and is not responsible to anybody) – if the challenge to world
capitalism in that sense were growing, would you notice? Would you be looking in the right
place to see it, or would you be caught by surprise as most people were when world
communism suddenly disappeared as a major force on the planet?
I anticipate that indeed that legitimacy challenge is going to mount, and when it gets to a certain
size things will change much more rapidly than you would ordinarily expect them to change.
Sarah: If the economy as it is now configured is losing legitimacy, what is emerging to take its
place?
Willis: The answer centers on the organizational change that is taking place in response to the
changes in people over the last one or two generations. Clearly, people have been
rediscovering their relationships to nature and rediscovering their spirituality. This is not
necessarily happening in vast numbers yet, but nevertheless it's expanding, and the fraction of
the population involved tends to be the well-educated fraction - we have some survey data now
that shows this.
These people are insisting on a different kind of work environment. Organizations of all types,
especially corporations, are learning that in order to attract and hold the most creative people,
they have to be a very different kind of organization than we saw, say, two generations ago.
There are some obvious things about this type of organization: it's less hierarchical, there's
more distributed power, more distributed autonomy.
There are also some other more subtle things. People are demanding more and more that the
organizations they are involved with don't just pay them a salary, but on the whole do some
good for society. They're critical of the actions of their own institutions.
I think one of the more significant books recently is by Peter Block, the book Stewardship
(published by Berrett-Koehler, 1993). Block says that a sense of stewardship - the sense of
guiding the whole enterprise - is spreading throughout the business world. This creates a more
chaotic kind of organization, but nature's chaotic, and out of that chaos comes a new kind of
order.
As time goes on, we're discovering that even if all the organizations in the world changed in this
new paradigm direction, you would still have conditions worldwide going downhill. This is
because the system as a whole has certain characteristics that these new-style organizations
don't fit into, just as people are developing some new characteristics that don't fit into the oldstyle organizations.
Sarah: How do these new organizations help bring about the transformation of the whole?
Willis: The best analogy I've ever heard is that of a larva becoming an insect. As the caterpillar
approaches the time of metamorphosis, certain cells within the caterpillar's body begin to
develop - biologists call these imaginal cells. These cells begin the process of building the
various parts of the new organisms of the butterfly. The new parts expand and emerge, and the
tissue in between disintegrates, and in a very smooth and non-disruptive way, the caterpillar
becomes a butterfly.
I think something like that is happening in society with intentional communities, alternative
economies, alternative technology groups and all sorts of movements and sub-movements. The
feminist influence in this is very strong; I don't know how to separate these feminist, ecological,
and spiritual influences, but they represent a whole side of ourselves that we had set aside in
our patriarchal society. Now they are emerging in force and creating all these little imaginal cells
all over society. When the big structure comes down those cells will be there.
It isn't as though there won't be a lot of people hurt. There will be. But the wider the
understanding of this rebirth process and why we have to go through it, the less we are going to
be fearful about the labor pains and the more chance we have of a smooth and non-disruptive
transition.
Sarah: How do you see the business system evolving as we go through this transition? In
particular, what will it take to have a system in which you don't win by shifting your costs on to
others?
Willis: I think we are awakening to an awareness that in a very real sense we are cells in the
body of the social organism, just as our individual cells are within our body. Our individual cells
compete for nutrients, but at the same time they all work together, held together by a kind of
common plan, conceptualization, or image.
Society also is both an organism and a collection of organisms. Each of those organisms also
finds itself simultaneously in competition and at the same time in co-operation to create,
maintain and guide the whole. So I'm part of this small community, but I'm also part of this
bigger organism, and that in turn is part of a bigger one.
That's the meaning of stewardship in a broader sense. When you are aware of being part of a
larger whole, you just take responsibility for the impacts of your actions. If you pursue this
concept of stewardship to the end, it implies a dramatic change in the whole system, including
ownership patterns, the prerogatives of owners, stockholders, pension funds, and so on, and
the ability of these powerful organizations to shape the world to their special advantage, to the
disadvantage of almost all the people in the world.
Sarah: Do we humans have that capacity? We seem to have the capacity to care about our
families and communities as we define them, but do we have the capacity to care enough about
the whole - in this case the planet - to make choices that benefit the whole, even when we have
something to lose by doing so?
Willis: I think we're developing that capacity. Children have to develop their sense of ego, in
part by pushing against the boundaries and against other people. When people have their own
family, it seems perfectly natural that the ego should then take a new place.
But as you get older you realize that you are going to lose your family, you're going to lose your
physical body, you're going to lose the whole works except the only thing that is really important.
Then it's perfectly natural to say "of course I'm the whole," and to realize that we are not
separate from the people on the other side of the Earth, or from future generations, or from the
animals and the trees.
I think the culture as a whole is evolving in a direction that makes it easier for us to grasp that
picture. At one time, it was a dominant belief in western society that if you behaved pretty well
here on this plane you'd go to heaven; that belief system held the society together in certain
ways. Then we changed that belief and essentially said if you can trample on others and
succeed then you'll get the most toys in the end and you'll win the game, and people behaved
accordingly.
Now, the belief system is changing still again to a more holistic view in which inner wisdom
plays a more central role and gets much more attention and respect.
Sarah: I see signs of the cultural evolution that you describe, but I also see lots of signs that the
culture is evolving in the opposite direction.
Willis: You've got several things happening at once, as is typical of any change period in
history. You've got the old order disintegrating, but not recognizing it yet. So one group of
people is desperately trying to hold the whole thing together and patch it up, develop a new
covenant or a new contract.
Then you've got another group that is typically pretty fearful saying, "Let's go back to the old
fundamentals when things really used to work." Of course things can never work that way again,
so that group may at first be strong, but it's bound to get weak in the long term.
And then you've got these imaginative cells growing and growing.
We're just in the middle of this process, so all three of those groups are of sizable proportion
now, and they're all inter-weaving. If you look for signs of the continuing trend toward more
growth, more technology, and all that, of course those signs are there. But if you look for signs
of the total cultural change, you can find those too, although they're much quieter and you have
to look harder.
Sarah: Some people say that we won't really make the shift in a large scale way until we come
up against a wall, perhaps an ecological wall of some kind.
Willis: It seems to me that there are some long-term destructive forces, whether it's damage to
the Earth's life support system or the destruction of the social order – which is leading to more
and more people being marginalized, while a handful of people live high on the hog, and the
middle class gets squeezed. In the long term, either environmental or social disintegration could
cause everything to fall apart.
But I think people have an ability to look ahead and see what's coming, and doing so leads
them to question the legitimacy of things as they are. Then the change itself can actually be
triggered by relatively small things, which if the overall social immune system were in good
health, would be absorbed relatively easily. For example, a healthy system could take care of a
bank failure, but since the immune system is not really functioning well, and the debt structure
has become totally insane, a major bank failure could result in a collapse of the whole money
system.
I think the way it's actually going to happen is like the sort of thing you see in catastrophe
theory: that some little thing triggers something else, which triggers something else. But a big
factor in that collapse is going to be more and more people who look ahead and see that in the
long run, the status quo is not going to work - something's got to change. Many people are
ready for the immediate trigger, whatever that might be.
Sarah: How can people who do look ahead and see that best prepare for this transformation?
Willis: I think people know instinctively how to do that. Once you begin to sense where we are
in history, where we are in evolution, then your creative mind just leads you in the right direction.
The key is to develop a trust in your deepest intuition or higher self or whatever name you give
to it.
Because in our deep psyche we are cells in the whole organism; what we most deeply want is
to be a part of that evolutionary thrust. That leads not so much to having specific goals or
specific causes, but to operating from deep intuition and watching the feedback to see whether
indeed you are in touch with the main wave.
And when you do, you find that really remarkable things happen and the most miraculous
events take place. Other people look at that and explain it as good luck or intelligence, but you
know in your own heart that it happened because somehow or other you learned that this deep
trust is the only way to live.