New World Companies: The Future Of Capitalism

How does a good company generate value in society? How do the leaders of these new world companies reshape and remake our families’ available goods, our friendship networks, and the many smaller firms that support them?

As a management consultant to over a hundred firms in the last thirty years, my team and I have worked with global companies such as Toyota, Suncor, Siemens, and FedEx, to name a few, to help them transform into new world companies – companies ready to take on the challenges of today’s global economy. In doing this, I derived a way to describe how companies mature by seeing the process as a symbolic clock of corporate competitiveness. As this concept evolved, I came to focus not on the clock itself, but on what it represents: time. Furthermore, I’ve broken down the time periods into segments that represent significant stages in the life of a global business. I often refer to these timeframes as “urgencies,” because, as I view it, corporations must accomplish the business goals outlined within each time period if they are to be successful.

Throughout the years, I have revised my description of these timeframes in a company’s life to take into account the emergence of what I call social response capitalism. I became increasingly aware of the financial ramifications of social response capitalism while working with new world companies. I came to see how each company contributes to this most important new business movement in decades, and why this evolution is crucial to the health of any company – whether a large global corporation or a small regional family business.

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About the Author

Bruce Piasecki, PhD, is president and founder of AHC Group, Inc., a management consulting firm specializing in energy, materials, and environmental corporate matters, and is author of New World Companies: The Future of Capitalism. This article is adapted from material in his new book.