Why is it expensive to be evil nowadays? →
Jeff Jarvis might say that the answer has to do with the notion of hyper-connectedness: “In a hyper-connected world, the costs of evil explode”.
Umair Haque goes a few steps further and offers an interesting perspective on why the costs of evil and the benefits of good are amplified in a hyper-connected world. He argues that in a hyper-connected world there are six forces which inherently punish the bad and foster the good. So what are these forces and what are they all about? Here’s how Umair describes them:
Image credits: Octav Druta
- The force of Information - When information flows faster and freely it’s easier to identify who’s good and who’s bad.
- The force of Discipline - Universal and cheap access to information allows for collective action - which means that punishing the evil or rewarding the good is easier.
- The force of Competition - With better collective action comes an enhanced incentive for competitors to provide what incumbents can’t; to do good where there’s evil.
- The force of Disruption - Competition increases the probability of high-level innovation - new business models, strategies, and institutions that reinvent the deep economics of an industry, market, or sector.
- The force of Rule-making - As new disruptive innovations, proliferate, regulators take a more active interest in assessing the social costs and benefits of each, and selecting the most productive ones. Conversely, visionary organizations make new rules in their own ecosystems that alter the incentives for their buyers and suppliers to do more good, and less evil.
- The force of Self-correction - Ultimately, the good should be self-correcting in order to achieve a dynamic equilibrium. When an industry or market’s connected tightly enough, doing good becomes the only game in town - unless, of course, you want to melt down catastrophically, like Wall Street did.
Awesome! How can we all foster the good? A first step would be to strive to create transparency and a free flow of information in our communities. Then, as Umair suggests, we can think of this set of forces as a ladder that people, businesses and communities must climb in today’s economy. There seems to be no way to “shortcut the crap out of this” as Gary Vaynerchuck says - so climb, climb, climb!
Excerpts taken from The Case For Being Disruptively Good by Umair Haque
