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CHAPTER TWO

Cambrian Capitalism

Runaway feedback, the peacock's tale, and the evolution of capitalism

One hundred years from now economists will look back and say the father of the profession wasn't Adam Smith—it was Charles Darwin.

—Robert Frank, 2011 Aspen Ideas Festival

In 1992, Chris was facilitating an annual strategy offsite for the senior management team of MicroAge, one of two Fortune 500 companies in Arizona at the time.¹ The discussion turned to a new class of competitor and its possible effect on MicroAge. After ten minutes of increasingly concerned discussion, the VP of sales exploded: “It's a war out there, and these guys are getting ready to attack us! We have to be ready to hit them first, before they can build momentum.” The President, Alan Hald, responded, “Maybe, but could we consider another way to think about it? What if it's not a war of us against them, but more like an ecology, in which they're a new species with a niche distinct from ours, and we're both better off by coexisting?”

Chris was startled. He'd been following the literature of complexity theory (more formally, complex adaptive systems), which often suggested parallels between biology and economics. And he had tested some of the ideas with businesspeople, most of whom reacted with bemused skepticism. Now, for the first time, he was hearing a corporate executive try to sell this concept to his team. (To be honest, though, it didn't get much uptake, except from Hald's equally innovative Chairman, Jeff McKeever. The VP of sales responded with an ostentatious eye roll.)

To discuss these ideas on Twitter, use these hashtags:

#runaway #coevolution #greenfield

Complexity theory went on to enjoy a vogue in the mid-1990s after which much of the punditocracy considered it passé. But in the fifteen years since, the idea of business as biology has only grown stronger, to the point that businesspeople employ the jargon without giving it much thought, as when they say, for example, “That's not in our DNA” about a corporate capability.² Books have been written, the ideas continue to be diffused, and biology-inspired techniques have been developed, applied, and proven fruitful. The eye rolling stopped long ago, and complexity applications don't go by that name any more; they're called things like agent-based models, genetic algorithms, and nonlinear search algorithms, or accepted as a subset of analytics. Practitioners have taken on these ideas, developed new tools, and proved their capabilities. The methods are in ever-broader use, and the power of the parallels between economy and ecosystem has only begun to be exploited.

This is not another book about biology and business, but it does build on what has been learned about systems that evolve, be they ecologies or economies.³ In chapters to come, you will find us invoking a few concepts about feedback, selection, and evolution that are valuable to understand at the outset. It's not that you need a glossary to read this book, but our use of some terms draws on meanings they might not always carry in common parlance.

Chapter 1 already provided a specialized definition of the word “environment,” explaining that the environment in which capitalism is situated is not only geographic, but also demographic, technological, and cultural. This chapter moves from the “where” of capitalism's evolution to the “how”—providing the language to discuss the process by which a system adapts to its environment. If we're going to convince you that capitalism can change its spots, we need to be clear on the process by which that transformation will happen.