Have we reached a period of capitalist decadence where for some, Business has become an Art form?
How does this happen?
- When strategic patent acquisitions are a Mathematical joke
- When a $138 million dollar loss making company is acquired for $21 Billion
- When that acquisition equates to $381 million per employee
- When the barrier of entry for digital businesses falls to as near to zero as possible
- When a self-sustaining cycle of Angel->VC->IPO exists in a hermetic market
- When people become part of the artwork
- When the office you put people in becomes the artwork
Is this what happens when you are free to move beyond profit?
1) Subsistance-> 2) Profit-> 3) Beyond Profit = Art
Maybe this is just the logical next step towards decadence, as over time the focus on value for organisations has shifted like so:
1) Value to customers -> 2) Value to business owner -> 3) Value to Shareholders -> 4) Decadence
As the point of focus moves further away from the point of real value creation to a place place of decadent abstraction, so the decisions that are made can become freer and artful.
it enables you to, for example, acquire a loss making organisation with a hockey stick growth curve but no plan for monetising user adoption and no hope of profit.
It enables you to forget about a return on an acquisition (Most of them degrade value anyway, so lets just stop pretending and buy).
I’m not saying this concept applies across the board, just as there are still subsistance farmers (and always will be), but it does appear to me that certain organisations in certain sectors have achieved a level of abstraction (from value creation) and therefore decadence to start to build business as Art.
Maybe this post doesn’t make any sense at all, How can business be art> how can it achieve decadence when every organisation has to go through the same (but maybe accelerated) growth phases?
Maybe its because, actually, depending upon the business model of the organisation, it doesn’t really matter what you do inside the organisation. The vague direction of triumph or plight is already set, like a behemoth supertanker, in a direction dictated by the business model and its market context at a point in time, the pilots of the supertanker are merely trying to steer it by flapping their arms.
In writing this post i’m not saying this is a positive or negative phenomenon, it just is. It also makes me wonder what sort of organisation a Silicon Valley dwelling Salvador Dali would have built?
Heres to the new surrealism, decadent capitalist art!
