Reflections 12th May

In a World of Goliaths, Davids are New Artisans.

Photo by Astrid Schaffner on Unsplash

One of the saddest things I find about our predilection for growth is that we don’t seem to mind where it comes from as long as “earnings” and GDP increase. One of the consequences is that rather than grow new enterprises and initiatives, we swallow up ones that exist and consolidate them into ever bigger entities, forcing “efficiencies” through getting rid of labour and minimising investment other than that which promotes it.

We are prepared to see dramatic reductions in the spending that supports healthcare and other infrastructure, from road and rail to education, as long as that mindless growth number climbs, regardless of the collateral damage it causes and there feels to be a rentier mindset at work across big businesses encouraged by the government.

Consolidation gives us Goliaths in everything from Banking and Finance to Consulting, from Retail to Veterinary Practice, and this article on farming outlines what is happening. We have created “Wendigos,” whose sole aim in life is to consume whatever is available in pursuit of growth that will never be enough. We are all consumables.

Whilst a rant would be temporarily satisfying, there is little point. Bad people are not causing this, but rather those without curiosity who are easily satisfied by metrics and the rewards they bring. They are as much passengers as the rest of us.

My interest is focused on the nature of Goliaths. Whilst it is easy and understandable to feel helpless in their presence, there are parallels to be made between them and their biblical counterpart.

Goliath suffered from a medical condition, Acromelagy, often associated with Gigantism. It left him with a number of challenges. He suffered from restricted sight and double vision, making it difficult for him to see clearly, especially at a distance. He had blurred vision, and his size made him slow-moving and cumbersome. He was dependent on a visual guide and relied on cues rather than judgment. In short, he did not understand what was going on around him.

It is not a huge leap to draw parallels with our larger businesses, which are reliant on data more than a sense of community, guided by CEOs whose interest often seems less in the long-term well-being of their Goliath and more in their short-term fees as guides for shareholders.

David, of course, had two overwhelming advantages. First, he had a technology that meant he could engage Goliath at a distance (not a lot of use being huge if you can’t connect to your target), and secondly, he had a greater sense of cause, community and mission.

Goliath was always going to be a loser.

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Bear with me as I stretch the metaphor to include the nature of the “battlefield” we find ourselves on. Every major change has pivoted on the perceived sources of power. The early agricultural civilisations centred around the generation and control of crop surpluses, the Middle Ages focused on the control of lands and the development of Empires, whilst the Industrial Revolution focused on natural resources and control of communication routes. In my lifetime, technology has been the focus and its ability to control the flow and dissemination of information and, along the way, countries as the locus of power have given way to transnational corporations.

And now, as we face existential challenges, from climate change to ecosystem collapse we find ourselves being guided by half-blind, slow, cumbersome, remote Goliaths. But it’s not all bad news. We have a new technology in AI, and a generation of Davids who are not overawed by the Goliaths.

AI is, I think, the current battlefield.

On one side, we have the Goliaths who see it as a way of extracting even more from what we already do by replacing people when it comes to “grunt work”. Creating another generation of profit machines by powering up “strip mining” business models to extract more rent from current tenants.

On the other hand, we have those for whom AI changes the game of what we might do next together. For those who have a clear idea of what they want to do beyond making money, AI is a powerful ally in providing new prompts and provocations to harness imagination and humanity and create new ways of living and working. The New Davids are New Artisans.

Where Goliaths consume what is known, Artisans create what is not to drive a different form of growth driven by the infinite possibilities that reside in ideas and imagination.

The pursuit of craft is the sling; imagination is the stone.

There are those looking at our economies from new angles. I am a fan of Mariana Mazzucato and Yanis Varoufakies, and now I have been very taken by Daniel Susskind’s recent book “Growth; A Reckoning” in which he takes a long, hard, informed look at our options for creating growth without consuming the planet we live on.

Amongst us here is a tribe of Davids, New Artisans, whose attention we need to capture and connect to give ourselves the best chance of taming the Goliaths by creating new slings and smoother stones.

We don’t have a plan because we don’t yet know, even as intuition points the way. We need a space where we can leave where we’ve been behind before we work out where we’re going, and where we end up going will be determined by our conversations in that space.

That’s where I’m going now for paid subscribers (although I will make it free to all after a month - there’s a balance I want to achieve here between numbers, resources and capacity for Zoom conversations, and like everything else here, I’m working it out as I go)