Network economy

The essence of the network economy is that all resources, humans, means, goods, raw materials, etc are used in minimal, no longer divisible units. For bolts that’s one. For a glass beer one. For humans that’s one person in a minimal time frame. These units will be flexible, dynamic and used world-wide. A human can give an answer really quickly, take thirty seconds and then get paid for it. And the network economy is only, only for the benefit of the individual humans on earth.

The network economy spells the end of organizations like companies, governments and NGOs as we know them today. These companies are the sum of human capital, means and raw materials that deliver conform a strategic planning from a hierarchical organization. The demand of consumers, civilians or donors is only crudely estimated because there’s no individual contact with these people. Market research or gut-feeling we call it. In the network economy, however, there’s continuous real-time contact with all individuals on earth. Not so much from all these traditional organizations keeping contact, quite the opposite. It comes from brands that keep continuous contact with the individual, the so-called coaching brands. As true representatives of the individual they continuously check the needs of people on this earth, function as intermediaries for all suppliers anywhere in the world, with which they control the network economy.

The network economy knows (professional) specialization down to a personal level. Where humans used to have to arrange everything themselves, which in practice meant that the man went hunting and the woman raised the children, we only had a limited set of professions until not so long ago: baker, butcher or farmer. Now we’ve wound up in a world with plenty of specialization, who reads the newspaper sees function titles that only mean something to the people specifically addressed. Do you know what an SAP HR specialist is? There are thousands of these specialists in the world. Every year new specializations are created, just someone who’s immersed themselves in something for a few years, and can be found by anyone, in any language, at any time, anywhere in the world in which the amount of specialists in an area decreases all the time. This process continues the coming decades until there’s only one specialist left on earth.

The network economy takes all redundancies from the economy. Who doesn’t know examples of incredibly wastes of resources? For example crab that’s fished in the North Sea, peeled in Morocco, packed in Poland and then sold in Hamburg, Germany. There are countless of other examples which all deal with the opacity and unequal division of prosperity in the world. The economy that’s being created, however, will be completely transparent (see also the brand coming out) which will challenge people to think about a better world in which humans have a valuable contribution to other people’s lives instead of transporting goods hither and thither for economic reasons at the cost of the environment. That’ll mean that a lot of people will lose their job because they give a contribution with too little value for society. Then they’ll find a new role which is valuable and appreciated.

The network economy means the end of capitalism, the end of democracy as we know it and the end of stock quotations. Each inhabitant of the earth will contribute to society (what we now call ‘work’), each inhabitant will give an implicit or explicit contribution to other people’s lives (to get something in the form of money in return). That’s what the world citizen is concerned with: adding value to the lives of other people. In listed companies, however, people are busy to create more money for the share holders, sometimes and often at the cost of the people it’s really all about, the people whose existence the organization depends on, call it the customers, the members or the citizens. Only companies that aim 100% at the adding more value to the lives of people will survive the developments of the coming years and shown themselves as a true network.

Network economy

Latest observations for Network economy

Latest observations for Network economy (in Dutch)