Economy is experiencing minor troubles, bringing about few bankruptcies, leading many players to feel lost into emptyness.

But what really happend ?

• Lawful practices of which it was possible to guess they would lead to a major crisis if taken to their paroxysm. “But dont worry, we master the system and know when to stop”.

• Always more. Why being satisfied with 7 when you can get 10 ? Because the 3 you’ll take will make it impossible for you to get 7 next year. “Tomorrow is another day, I have targets for today sir”. “And what if you reach it ?” “I’ll be asked to do more tomorrow”. “Do you find this logical, Perhaps one day it will be impossible to do more”. “That’s the way things hae always been…”. “Of course…and it always ended the same way”.

• Transfering risk. I optilize my ‘local maximum’ without taking care of macr equilbrium. I pass the “hot potatoe” to someone else, I reach my targets and the others just have to do the same. But one day the “hot potatoe” becomes a bom that explodes in someone else’s hands and I realize that my success is conditioned by the other’s, and that when my partners or even my competitors fail it makes me fail too.

• Many warning signs. Nothing was discovered those last weeks and people were pointing at the system’s weaknesses for years…but people in charge decided to wait untill it’s too late. “You’re true, it’s impossible to run a 100m race in zero seconds and a regular and sustainable growth is better than jerking forward and distroying in one day what took years to build. But things are like that and there’s no reason to change, there’s no other model”.

• Doomsters can’t be right. “Because the current system is the only one we know, it’s always been like that and will always be. It’s undestroyable. Do you imagine the major banks collapsing ? Wall street on its knees ? The state being forced to buy it all ? Stop dreaming, it’s impossible. And since it’s impossible, your reasonning is wrong, so there’s no need to change a thing”. “You remember Titanic ?”. “But Titanic was only a movie…”.

Everybody knows what happends. It couldn’t happen….

Does it remind you of something ? Something that is very close to us in our every day job ?

As Umair Aque says, we have to reinvent the way we do business, which will not be without impact on the way we work. New goals, new realities to take into account….

That is not a matter of business model, strategy,processes, it’s about a paradigm shift. As Aque says, we need to put sense back into business. Not only in day to day job but something collective, something that makes people being something more than a productive ressource in a chain. If not history will repeat again and again.

Learning to live in a world of interdependance where both success and failure will be collective and built the organization that fits this reality.

So the very enterprise DNA has to be reinvented. As Hamel wrote in  “The Future of Management“, businesses will have to deeply change but, sinc change is not a part of the corporate DNA, some companies will need a major crisis to change. Hoping they’ll be able to survive..