But wait a minute. As Bugs Bunny says: “What’s all the hubub, bub?”

First, this seems like old news. We've all heard that the Industrial Era is long dead and it has been established that we are well into the next era…whatever it might be called. Why rehash the origins and shortcomings of an outdated system?

To embrace fully the value and features of the emerging paradigm, we must first recognize the shortcomings of the current one. As it stands, while we acknowledge that the days of a factory-driven economy are over, it is not as clear that we have let go of its underlying principles. Is this new era simply the Industrial system with computers instead of production lines? The evidence would indicate so. A look around shows that the prevailing socioeconomic system still operates on familiar principles. The underlying programming has not yet been upgraded.

And is that so bad? Every American was raised on the inherent wisdom of our economic system. It has worked well for decades – with a better track record than alternatives like Communism, for sure. And humanity has made impressive progress on the foundation of this system: we live longer and more comfortably than ever before, more people have access to education, and each of us has unprecedented opportunity for individual accomplishment.

Yet, despite all the positive attributes and advancements of the Era of Divergence’s value system, it has outgrown itself. The complexity of our reality has outpaced the current ideology’s ability to deal with it. As a result, we seem to be a planet on the verge of a nervous breakdown. For most of us, the growing complexity of business – and of our lives -- is reaching overwhelming levels. Just as one strategy or process is mastered, the playing field shifts. We work harder, faster and longer, but we still can’t catch up -- and there is a growing sense that we can’t keep up this pace much longer.

And despite the growing multitude of leadership books and management theories, it has never been less clear what the new rules are for this suddenly complex reality. Do we focus on the basics… or on driving innovation? Should we empower and motivate employees… or cut the workforce by 20%? Do we chase the market-of-the-moment… or build our core competencies? Do we plow and plunder to ensure the double-digit growth that Wall Street rewards…or do we act in the environmentally responsible manner that our customers say they want (and that our conscience nudges us toward)? The one right answer -- that the Era of Divergence tells us must be there -- seems always out of reach.

To offer a computer analogy, the message flashing on our collective mental monitors is: System Overload!

The System Overloads listed below reveals that we still cling to the mechanistic value system, and each is indication of the need to move on. They represent the writing on the wall for the outgoing worldview and offer valuable clues about the incoming paradigm.

[Note: If you've already recognized the need for major change, then this chapter won't be particularly useful for you. By all means, skip ahead to the next chapter. But if you're not quite convinced that the current system is truly deficient, then this chapter might hold some valuable insight.] 

System Overload #1: Now What, Fred?

In the early 19^th century, Thomas Carlyle called economics the "dismal science," referring to the discipline’s assertion that a society of abundance without conflict is impossible. He might also have been referring to the banes of Mechanistic Economics, the theories of Perfect Competition and the Product Life Cycle.

The goal of economic activity is believed to be equilibrium – and equilibrium is always achieved as “prices are lowered for goods with…excess supply; and as prices are raised for goods with excess demand, so that the amount demanded matches perfectly with the amount supplied.” Perfect competition is to be achieved in production activities through each company’s incremental improvement of existing processes.

This sounds fine, except that this view necessarily carries us in a straight line to commoditization: steady progress toward uniform access to uniform resources to create uniform products, which the consumer chooses based only on lowest price. Along the way, scale is progressively maximized and costs progressively reduced, and in this way lower and lower marginal profit is achieved. Products inevitably spiral downward toward valueless commodity status – valueless to both producer and consumer. Price wars are the only possible outcome. There is no other way.

This is the equivalent of gravity among economic laws. It’s a dead-end strategy… but only over time. Until an industry reaches the point of Perfect Competition – highly unlikely in what historically has been a vastly inefficient market – there is plenty of money to be made. That inefficiency has been the system’s salvation.

And then, along came Frederick Taylor. His principles of Scientific Management have proven incredibly effective, resulting in “more productive capacity for stuff than there is need for stuff,” according to Ernst & Young Cap Gemini. The world's automakers, for example, can make about 30% more vehicles than current demand levels, pushing cars and other goods in fast-forward to commodity status.

This is not a new scenario, it turns out. As Richard Robbins, author of The Global Culture of Capitalism, reminds us:

"By the late 1890s, the early days of the industrial system, so many goods were already being produced that businesspeople and government officials feared overproduction, panic, and the severe economic depression that marked that decade. Out of these fears came what William Leach called "a steady stream of enticements" designed to encourage people to consume and to awaken Americans, as Emily Fogg Mead, the mother of anthropologist Margaret Mead, said, to "the ability to want and choose".... The consumer was necessary to save industrial capitalism from its own efficiency.^"

This steady stream of enticements held the system together for decades. But in recent years, several fundamental things shifted. Global competition, increased access to capital, and production and market efficiencies have reduced barriers to entry. Newer offerings travel through the product life cycle much more quickly than they did in the past. “Mainframe services took 30 years to reach commodity status,” say Chris Disher and Roger Walters at Booz, Allen & Hamilton. “But Internet browsers needed only a few years to enter the market in the early '90s and become firmly entrenched in the mainstream market.”

With this accelerating life cycle, it is getting harder to make a living – even with a steady stream of consumer enticements. As maturity cycles speed up, the Product Life Cycle keeps coming back to haunt us, like Freddie from a Friday the 13^th horror movie.

With this realization, economists are beginning to question whether it is possible to build a thriving economy on an ideology founded on a perpetual death spiral. And (as we will see in a few pages), consumers are beginning to say: Enough! Mechanistic Economics and Scientific Management alone prove to be a dead-end strategy over time.

System Overload #2: Market Myopia

The two core ethics of our current value system are: (1) act in self-interest; and (2) collect more scarce resources than others. On this basis, Wall Street, in all its self-interest and rabid resource collection, has become a vicious master. It wants and rewards only short-term return, often with a nudge and a wink at questionable paths taken to get there.

At the same time, the complex market reality increasingly requires quite the opposite approach -- long-term vision, strategy and trust.  

The fall of corporate icons like Enron, Andersen, Worldcom, and Global Crossing and scandals at Merrill Lynch are high profile evidence of this precarious paradox. The problem at each of these firms was not (only) the excessive greed or duplicity of the top executives involved. Each of them did what he was supposed to according to the rules of the prevailing value system: they acted in self-interest in order to accumulate more scarce resources than others could. Of course, there were the rules that they broke and the ethics policies that they stretched. But in a dog-eat-dog, live-or-die-by-the-quarterly-report world, who’s to judge which rules can be broken and which can’t? After all, as Eli Goldratt, author of The Goal, observes: "Tell me how you'll measure me, and I'll tell you how I'll behave."

The real problem has been that all the players involved in our economic system have not been able to act in their self-interest. Employees, investors (particularly those outside Wall Street), and the communities that house these companies lacked access to all the information about what was really going on inside these companies. What’s more, they lacked the economic power to push for their own interests – particularly their own long-term interests. But as both of these things change – thanks to growing efficiencies in media and fundamental shifts to our economic structure -- we will continue to see a tumultuous shake-up of the financial power structure. And we will see that our concept of self-interest is shifting as we recognize our interdependencies with each other and with the biosphere.

Returning to the introductory chapter’s food pyramid metaphor, the bout of recent scandals demonstrates that satisfying an immediate craving at the expense of long-term nourishment can only last for so long.

System Overload #3: Business is Fine…Except for the Customers

These days, a company’s customers have greater economic power than ever before. They now have far more choice about what they buy and from whom. Customers can choose from products made all over the world, delivered to their door. They have access to information about services around the globe. And thanks to Industrial Era efficiencies, they have the purchasing power, education and time available to be selective. In one study, 86% of consumers (94% in the 25-34 age group) said they expect better service and 56% complain more than they did five years ago; 82% would switch suppliers if not satisfied.

The result? As customers demand ever-evolving value (and competitors and the global market add to the push), increasing urgency is created to find the new and improved. And companies are finding that innovation cannot be achieved with Industrial Era tactics like production scale and efficiency. Production efficiency by its nature is about minimizing and eliminating deviance, change and uncertainty. In contrast, innovation is achieved only by nurturing relationship, change and uncertainty – by increasing variance. This is a directly contradictory approach.

At the same time, despite a steady stream of enticements, customers are rejecting soulless mass production in favor of products and services that carry meaning and relationship. They are demanding individualized products and services, sending the message that Henry Ford can go jump off a bridge – and take his black Model T with him. Companies have no sustainable alternative but to respond to this call for meaning and relationship by incorporating human values from production through to the marketplace.

System Overload #4: “Our Employees Are Our Greatest Assets”

Both innovation and meaningful relationship with customers stem from employees engaged, not as assets or factors of production, but as thinking, feeling people, applying their energy, creativity and attention. Frederick Taylor’s assertion that the system comes first and the people second may no longer hold universally true.

And, as the economic contribution of employees has risen in value, so has their ability to choose where to invest their time, inspiration and connections. They are a true market unto themselves, with their own demands for innovation and relationship. Again, company leaders have no sustainable alternative but to appeal to this market’s demands. And like external customers, it’s not about the money or the scale. It’s about intangible, qualitative factors like passion, meaning and creativity.

Yet, despite broad recognition of this trend, out of 80,000 US employees surveyed by the Gallup organization, only 26% of workers were loyal and productive (engaged); 55% were just putting in their time (not engaged), and 19% were unhappy and spreading their discontent (actively disengaged). That’s three-quarters of the workforce: checked out, but still on the job. This is clearly a tremendous missed opportunity and an expensive example of wasted resources. Add to this the severely disgruntled employees who decide to take action: since 1993, there has been a 2,000% increase in employment litigation, and almost 75% of all business litigation today involves employee disputes.

Across the board, whether people are camped out in counterproductive disenchantment, quitting their jobs, or suing their employers, the number one cause is interpersonal conflict with a manager. In other words, they think that their boss is a jerk. Who are all these unbearable people? Surely, it isn’t you, or me. It seems safe to assume that we each think we’re nice, reasonable people, and that none of us heads in to work each morning to make another’s life miserable. So what causes perfectly nice people to drive away their employees in droves? And what lies behind employee expectations that differ so dramatically from reality?

Like the executives at WorldCom, Enron and Global Crossing, each of us is acting according to the values of an outdated paradigm -- a value system whose signals indicate that people are less important than physical productivity… and one that is blind to the connection between the two.

System Overload #5: Cubicle Nation

Following the principles of Newtonian physics and Scientific Management, jobs are broken down into their smallest components in a system of narrow specialization. Our school system initiates this, and the job market reinforces it.

The problem with this is two-fold.

First, though work segmentation functioned nicely when manufacturers ruled the economy at their bloated leisure, now customers have the economic power to demand relationship, responsiveness and novelty. Disconnected cubicle and factory workers can’t deliver relationship or responsiveness. And employees wearing title- or task-related blinders are simply not equipped to achieve meaningful innovation.  

Second, complexity demands collective decision-making and response. Employees unaware of the organization’s overall objectives cannot contribute effectively to those goals, particularly as they grow increasingly intricate. Employees cannot be trusted to make responsive decisions in the best interests of the company if they don’t know how their actions impact the interests of the company. Lack of trust causes disgruntlement. It’s another vicious cycle that stems directly from the reductionist, mechanistic worldview. 

System Overload #6: The Land of One-Hit Wonders

True to the Protestant ethic of our nation’s origins, the Industrial Era promoted a “work for work’s sake” ethic. This devolved into “Work for the sake of immediate survival of the work,” with near-exclusive focus on short-term and incremental financial growth. Today’s lofty mission statements are often a thin lacquer over the real mission of the day: Just make it to the next quarter, even if it kills us.

Perhaps as a result, the average life span of a company in the S&P 500 has shrunk from roughly 35 years in 1975 to less than 20 years today. Over the next 25 years no more than a third of today's major corporations will survive in an economically important way, assert Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan in their best-selling book Creative Destruction. Using their research on the performance of more than 1,000 corporations in 15 industries during a 36-year period, the authors argue that managing for control and survival, even among the best and most revered corporations, doesn't guarantee long-term performance for shareholders.

Similarly, a 1983 Royal Dutch/Shell survey found that one-third of the firms in the Fortune 500 in 1970 had vanished. “Shell estimated that the average lifetime of the largest industrial enterprises is less than forty years, roughly half the lifetime of a human being. In most companies that fail, there is abundant evidence in advance that the firm is in trouble. …The organization as a whole cannot recognize impending threats, understand the implications of those threats, or come up with alternatives.”

In other words, our economic system – whose core focus and objectives are control and survival – achieves neither goal.

System Overload #7: Our Love/Hate Relationship With Creativity

A 1998 study of Fortune 500 CEOs asked them to cite the most important factor in their company’s success. The overwhelming majority answered: Innovation. But only 5% felt that they did this well.

The disparity is not surprising. Prevailing economic theory excludes innovation and considers it external to the economy. Mechanistic Economics is based on the march toward perfect competition, which is to be achieved by improving current production activities – not by inventing new ones. Everything about a linear, mechanical paradigm is about control and predictability.

Opening up our companies to innovation is exactly counter-intuitive. On the one hand, we demand accurate and linear plans, controlled data, and minimization of risk and uncertainty; on the other, we expect wild-card creativity, exponential growth in unexpected territories, and risk-taking behavior. “It is problematic to assume,” corporate poet David Whyte explains in The Heart Aroused, “that you can ask people to create and also to behave.” Some fundamental assumptions must be rethought.

System Overload #8: The Numbers Do Lie

In a system that lives or dies according to quantitative measurement, traditional market economics still ignores a vast number of costs and revenue sources, leaving the system inefficient without our awareness.

For example, our system of accounting for national economic activity measures and values only production growth, focusing exclusively on Gross National Product (GNP) and its derivative, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and ignoring the associated costs. It ignores or miscalculates the costs of some of our most critical resources, particularly the environment, considering them “market externalities.” "Without prices being set, nature becomes an all-you-can-eat buffet," says Chicago financier Richard Sandor. "And I don't know anyone who doesn't overeat at a buffet." In another example, a certified public accountant and professor at the University of the District of Columbia estimated at $2.6 trillion the cost that corporations imposed on US society in 1994 through defective products, unsafe working conditions and environmental discharges. This was five times total corporate profit and constituted 37% of US GDP. As it stands, these costs are simply absorbed unaccounted.

In addition to ignoring important costs, some of them are actually accounted for as production growth. According to Tom Tietenberg in his book, Environmental And Natural Resource Economics:

An ever greater proportion of each new round of production growth consists of negative economy: compensation and repairs, processing of waste and controlling of complexity, in other words expenditure that is taken to be income. The contemporary example par excellence is in those countries which today suffer from war, guerrillas, and dictatorship, and where the arms industry is earning masses of money and, when one day there is peace, so will the demolition companies, the clear-up gangs, the contractors, the international consultancy agencies, the whole redevelopment business.

Not only does our system ignore important costs, it also ignores important inputs. There is little mention in economic accounting of creativity, trust and knowledge. And yet these factors increasingly drive our companies and our economies.

Our current system of national accounts is also blind to the long term. Scientist and sustainability activist Robert Gilman observes that:

Normal accounting attempts to include long term effects through such things as depreciation and discounted cash flow analysis, but rarely does the time line extend beyond 20 years. Such a system has no way to compare the value of a building that will last hundreds of years with one that will need to be replaced in 20. And where in our accounting do we include the cost of cancers that develop 20 years from now due to today's high levels of air/water/soil pollution?

And in their 1989 book, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment and a Sustainable Future, Herman Daly and John Cobb, Jr., deal a final blow to the supremacy of GDP as a measure of wealth and welfare:

"By processing U.S. statistical data on some twelve so-called welfare indicators, they drew the conclusion that for the last twenty years the link between production growth and the creation of welfare has become progressively weaker; prior to that date, production growth had achieved exactly what Adam Smith foresaw in 1752: the addition of value so as to indeed create the "Wealth of Nations." In the 1970s this link began to be lost, however, and this process is proceeding at such an accelerating pace that we are now confronted with the curious phenomenon of production growth leading to a decline in welfare; stated differently, the limits to growth have been reached without us even noticing it, because we have been interpreting the figures wrongly."

System Overload #9: Two Wrongs Still Don’t Make a Right

We cling devotedly to scope, scale and price reduction as a total solution, even as our value system shifts to embrace speed, flexibility and customization. Our predilection for mergers – despite their consistently dismal record -- is one unfortunate result. And the merger of Hewlett-Packard and Compaq is a classic case. These two companies came together for the stated purpose of increasing scale and decreasing cost – when neither had yet been able to engage their customers satisfactorily. The merger achieved its immediate goal of eliminating departments and assets (and therefore costs), but to many, it gave insufficient consideration to intangibles. HP was famous for its culture of employee engagement. But in the name of this merger, it set about damaging that organizational capital with a vengeance, laying off thousands (for the first time in the company’s history) and acting against the publicly stated wishes of the much-revered founders and their families. Wall Street, in all its focus on incremental results, applauded the undertaking.

When value is only in the physical, we’ll always get caught in the vicious pull of the Product Life Cycle, increasing scale and decreasing cost until we’re left with a valueless commodity. At that point, our only recourse is to try to lump mega-companies together to increase scale and reduce cost further and faster. As a core strategy, it’s a losing scheme based on an outdated value proposition.

System Overload #10: Factory Prep Schools

Our educational system is designed to reinforce the structure and order of the Industrial Era paradigm, even as creativity and integrative thinking are increasingly in demand.

Dr. Roger Sperry, who first discovered the Left Brain/Right Brain division of skills, noted that, “[T]here appear to be two modes of thinking, verbal and nonverbal, represented rather separately in left and right hemispheres, respectively. …[O]ur educational system…tends to neglect the nonverbal form of intellect.” This nonverbal form of intellect is responsible for synthesis and creativity – which were not needed in factories but are increasingly important to our knowledge-based economy.

The renowned National Training Laboratories of Bethel, Maine, ranked a number of learning systems on the basis of how much the learners remembered. The primary method of education is lecture and reading – the two least effective of the teaching methodologies. While these methods prepare students for the simple and rote tasks of factory life, they do not provide adequate training for a complex reality.

As a result, according to one study in the UK, two-thirds of graduate recruits do not have essential interpersonal skills (oral and written communication, team work, listening and problem solving). And within our current educational system, students fail to learn the skills of creativity, reflection, critical reasoning and systems thinking. Harvard University’s Chris Argyris points out that schools train us never to admit that we do not know the answer. We are taught that there is always only one right answer. But life is often much more complex and multi-faceted.

System Overload #11: The ROI of Family

Marriage and parenting are long-term propositions with no tangible market-based output or monetary gain. In a system that values only productivity and short-term measurable return, family relationships will always lose out.

As a result, the US national divorce rate stands at 43%. And we’re spending less time with our children than ever. According to Stanford University economist Victor Fuchs:  

In 1965, American parents on average spent approximately thirty hours a week with their kids. By 1985, parent-child interaction had dropped to just seventeen hours a week. By 1990, parents were, on average, available ten hours less per week to their children than they were in 1980 and forty percent less than they were in 1965.

Now, suicide is the number one cause of death among teenagers. The US is number one in the likelihood of children under the age of fifteen to die from gunfire. And US students have the lowest eighth-grade math scores globally.

This has nothing to do with moral preaching about “family values.” These are serious, self-destructive patterns that threaten the consumer and employee base that businesses rely on. As Pearl S. Buck observed, "If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all."

System Overload #12: The Incredible Shrinking Planet

Ultimately, this is the most important and most pressing system overload. But it’s also the hardest for us to recognize because its effects are at a higher system level.

The Industrial paradigm’s relentless focus on growth and its failure to account for extended system-wide costs is dangerously depleting the resources – including human resources -- needed to power our economy and our society. And this same limited value system keeps us blind to long-term implications, with disastrous results.

According to Ronald Wright in A Short History of Progress, “Since the early 1990s, the world’s population has multiplied by four and its economy – a rough measure of the human load on nature – by more than forty.” He warns that, “if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us – nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea."

In their Warning to Humanity, a group of international scientists asserted that the biosphere is being “irretrievably mutilated.” And a majority of US biologists are convinced that a mass extinction is underway, on the same order as that of the dinosaurs, according to a survey of 400 scientists commissioned by New York's American Museum of Natural History. Furthermore, they believe “that this dramatic loss of species poses a major threat to human existence in the next century.” To put this into perspective, consider the fact that twenty-five thousand species are going extinct every year. Almost a quarter of all mammals face extinction within 30 years, according to a United Nations report. If humans were not present on the planet, the number of species going extinct would be one every five years.

Frighteningly, it appears as if humans might be on that list. Headlines focus on the “Asian brown cloud,” an industry-driven cloud of smog that threatens to kill millions of workers and consumers and to reduce crop productivity. The increasing hole in the ozone layer has been linked to an increasing incidence of cancer. Indeed, cancer and other diseases are on the rise around the globe. Each of these patterns is clearly bad for business – and for life on the planet.

What is more, the interests of the economic engine often override even obvious common sense where the environment and human health are concerned. According to PBS documentary Trading Democracy, the Ethyl Corporation, an American gasoline additive company, successfully sued the Canadian federal government when it banned MMT in gasoline, even though the dangerous additive is illegal in the USA. According to the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Canada was forced to allow the additive and paid $14 million for the short time the ban was in effect. Also under NAFTA provisions, Metalclad, an American company, successfully sued the federal government of Mexico for $17 million when local Mexican governments refused them a permit to expand a toxic waste dump until they had cleaned it up. After winning its case, Metalclad expanded the toxic dump without any cleanup.

The pattern in each of these instances is to subordinate the interests of people and our planetary life support system – the only one we have -- to the interests of profit.

System Overload #13: The Human Spirit Fights Back

We’re in a rat race. As Lily Tomlin points out, the problem is that even if you win, you’re still a rat. The race has fed the market machine, but it has left us spent and looking around for alternatives.

In The Overworked American and The Overspent American, economist Juliet Schor showed that, in 1975, Americans defined the "good life" as "happy marriage, one or more children, interesting job." Twenty years later, the same survey found the definition had changed to "vacation home, swimming pool, second color TV, nice clothes, second car, job that pays above average, and lots of money." Surprisingly, the more we have, the more we feel we need -- as a percentage. Nearly four times as many people making over $75,000 per year feel they need at least 50% more income to meet their needs than those making less than $30,000. A March survey of professionals ("How much do you need to be comfortable?") found less than one-third happy with under $5 million (most needed at least $10 million). "People 50 years ago made less than half of what we make today," according to Dr. Ed Diener, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, "but they were about as happy as we are."

Researchers are starting to identify counterbalancing trends. And the population seems to be realizing that the mantra of “consumption as meaning” has offered no purely objective measure of “enough.” Robert Gilman noted:

Conventional economics (both as a formal theory and in business practice) assumes that human desires for economic goods and services are unlimited, and that we work primarily for external (outer-directed) reasons, e.g. to get paid so that we can consume. Psychologists like Abraham Maslow suggest instead that people operate on the basis of a hierarchy of needs, starting from survival, going up through security, esteem and love, to self-actualization. The consumption needs of each level are limited, and when they are truly met, attention tends to shift to the next level up until one reaches the level of self-actualization which is a creative need, focused on intrinsic rewards, rather than a deficiency need. In this model, as one becomes more skilled in satisfying various levels of needs, one's demand for goods and services may actually decline.

Similarly, the Values and Life Style study by Stanford Research Institute describes the U.S. population as being divided into three major groups: those who are focused on survival needs (about 10%), those who are focused on status and approval needs - the "outerdirected" - (about 60%), and those who are focused on personal growth and experience needs - the "innerdirected" - (about 30%). The percentage in the "innerdirected" group had grown rapidly during the 1970's and showed every indication of continuing to grow. In searching for “something more,” we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not about having more, it’s about being more.

This spells trouble for a system which relies for its survival on higher and higher levels of physical consumption.

As our appetite as consumers is showing signs of decline, our mood as employees is also shifting. A 2002 National Survey Institute survey found that 84% of adult Americans are ready to make a career change (34%), find a new job in their industry (29%), or start a new business (21%). Along these lines, sociologist Daniel Yankelovich has noted a shift in people’s orientation toward work – from an “instrumental” view of work, where work is a means to an end, to a more “sacred” view, in which people seek the intrinsic benefits of work. The baby boomers started to challenge the dominant belief system in the sixties. The Millennium prompted many to think about what more there is to life than soulless work. And ongoing terrorist threats have heightened this awareness.

No wonder: it should be a sign of trouble that the Japanese have a word for death by overwork – karoshi. Researchers have linked job strain -- defined as being in a job with high demands but low control over working conditions -- with higher rates of heart disease and other physical ailments and are exploring the psychological effects of working long hours or being disenchanted with a job. In the USA, for example, expenditure on health care is nearly 50% greater for workers who report high levels of stress at work. Globally, the International Labor Organization has estimated that work stress costs employers more than $200 billion a year, and the World Health Organization has reported that about three-quarters of people who seek psychiatric help have symptoms that relate either to lack of job satisfaction or to the inability to relax.

In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud challenges us to consider, "Why have men created a culture in which they live with such discomfort?" The Industrial Era convinced us that our only purpose was to pass on our genes, that only physical productivity and consumption mattered, and that the human spirit had no valid role. But the human spirit is proving to be a feisty thing. Increasingly a chorus is rising, demanding a different arrangement. And increasingly, those doing the demanding have the power to effect change.

Each of these System Overloads is like a programming glitch, causing the system to shut down or falter. As with our own computers, we can live with bugs and errors now and then, but when it starts to become a regular occurrence, it’s time to upgrade the system. Each of these is an indication that the prevailing worldview no longer serves our full purposes.

What does this mean for you, just a squirrel trying to get a nut? It means that these are some of the reasons it’s gotten harder to get that nut – or that the nut seems so much less satisfying than you thought it would be. And it means that you’ll have to change your perceptions about nuts and nut-gathering if you want to get ahead of the game. Big – and positive -- changes are looming large on the horizon (if not, then we’re facing the unthinkably catastrophic). The goal of this book is to help you understand the patterns within the chaos and to give you the confidence and courage to move toward a better alternative.

What does it mean for your business? Global competition is driving the need for innovation and relationship, which drives the need to move beyond the limitations of our mechanistic paradigm. Our business reality is pushing for flexibility, adaptability, innovation, diversity – but these things can only emerge if we can transcend, but include and evolve, the current worldview.