Preface

TIMES ARE HARD and people are consumed by crises. The challenges posed by political, economic, and environmental problems persist and intensify; there is a decline of genuine leadership in social, political, educational, and religious spheres; unhealthy practices and censorship in business and other institutions continue unabated; and change, a major disruptive force, is omnipresent and accelerating.

Our society, facing momentous challenges in the closing years of the twentieth century, needs visions of the future so attractive, inspiring, and compelling that people will shift from their current mind-set of focusing on immediate crises to one of eagerly anticipating the future—a future where the health and well-being of the earth and its inhabitants is secure.

In this book we create such visions for the world of business. We focus on business for two reasons. First, it is arguably the most powerful institution of our society and the major force affecting world conditions. Second, individual business corporations will survive only if they undergo a major shift to address individual and societal needs and become more democratic in their processes. We present a vision of the current and future role of business in order to foster dialogue in search of positive and proactive responses to the challenges business currently faces.

Over the past five years our respective travel, research, and networking activities have allowed us to meet some of the major players and to become part of some of the global groups operating on the leading edge of business. We have also had many occasions to talk with people in a wide array of companies and positions, inside and outside many major corporations. From these interactions, we have gained a sense of some disturbing trends occurring in business.

We encountered many indicators of a reality gap, a gap that exists between where people are and where they see themselves as being. We also noticed a slowing down in movement from traditional practices toward progressive and enlightened ways of operating. And we observed wide variance in moods and attitudes among businesspeople. Some of them, enthusiastic and committed, are fired with hope and full of a sense of promise for the future. Others are full of cynicism, despair, and fear of reprisal. They stand by passively waiting for the next shoe to drop.

To counter these trends—to catalyze and support the debate on the viability of our future and the appropriate role for business in improving our future prospects, to stimulate creativity toward building a better world, to help regenerate a backsliding movement toward more enlightened businesses and work places, to provide a long-term vision of what might be, and to show how we can achieve that vision—we conceived the idea of defining a new set of goalposts, which we refer to as the “Fourth Wave.” They reflect leading-edge thinking on the needed role for business in the world. Our belief is that this vision of a Fourth Wave will create the tension needed to pull the more progressive companies forward into a new era of business leadership and global well-being.

This book is offered as a critique-cum-vision in the hope that it will spark discussion of the reality gap and offer some inducement to getting the hidden and denied conversations out from under the table, to fostering shared truth-telling. Our book is also offered as a map showing how we can travel from our current circumstances to a more promising future. Though some details may seem unrealistic at present, our vision will, we hope, stimulate people’s own dreams of what can be. When enough people have dreams, amazing things can be accomplished.

Waves of Change

We have adopted and extended Alvin Toffler’s concept of waves of change, introduced in his book The Third Wave (1980), to serve as the framework for our vision of business in the twenty-first century. The First Wave of change, the agricultural revolution, has essentially ended and will not be of concern here. The Second Wave, coincidental with industrialization, has covered much of the earth and continues to spread, while a new, postindustrial Third Wave is gathering force in the modern industrial nations. We see a Fourth Wave following close upon the Third.

The Second Wave is rooted in materialism and the supremacy of man. From this orientation flows a stress on competition, self-preservation, and consumption, which has led to such current problems as pollution, solid-waste disposal, crime, family violence, and international terrorism. The Third Wave manifests growing concern for balance and sustainability. As the Third Wave unfolds, we become more sensitive to the issues of conservation, sanctity of life, and cooperation. By the time of the Fourth Wave, integration of all dimensions of life and responsibility for the whole will have become the central foci of our society. The recognition of the identity of all living systems will give rise to new ways of relating and interacting that nourish both humans and nonhumans.

Each wave has a distinctive worldview, epitomized as:

Second Wave—We are separate and must compete.

Third Wave—We are connected and must cooperate.

Fourth Wave—We are one and choose to cocreate.

We begin our book by identifying trends that reflect fundamental changes in our worldview and underlie the emergence of a Fourth Wave. In the chapters that follow we characterize the central thrust of the Second, Third, and Fourth Waves for seven key areas of business. Our intent is not to be exhaustive, nor to document all that is happening, but to sketch in persuasive—and provocative—fashion the broad outlines of a vision of how today’s realities can be transformed into a new era of business leadership and global well-being.

A Vision of the Future Out of the Future

Our book is based on recognizing the real nature of our current predicament: we do not need “more of the same” but something new. So we have to intentionally separate ourselves from the strictures and limitations of the past and create a vision of the future out of the future. As a result, our book offers a unique, unprecedented vision of what lies ahead for our society, for our corporations, and for us as individuals.

People need a vision of a positive, desirable reality over the edge of the horizon toward which they can grow. Therein lies hope and personal empowerment.

Acknowledgments

This book has its antecedent in a monograph we coauthored in 1990, titled “Moving Toward the Millennium: The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century.” Steven Piersanti, our publisher, and other friends believed that our views and way of expressing them could make a difference and pushed us to step up to the challenge of turning the monograph into a book.

A work that stretches the boundaries of what we define as “real” necessarily draws on the ideas and support of many people. Sometimes this happens through direct interaction and sometimes indirectly through writings and oral histories. To the many people who have shared with us their ideas on what is happening in business and in the world, we are both grateful and indebted. The bibliography lists many of the authors on whose thinking we drew heavily for our ideas on global trends.

We would like to thank our colleagues in the World Business Academy, especially Willis Harman and John Hormann, for providing us with opportunities to collect data and ideas over the last several years.

We are especially grateful to Christine Maynard and Pauline Mehrtens for their support, both tangible and intangible, in the early stages of this project. We are grateful also for their insightful suggestions on better ways to phrase the concepts here, which made this work vastly better than it might otherwise have been.

To our publisher, Steven Piersanti, and our editor, Alis Valencia, must go a big thanks for their unwavering support, extraordinary interest, and personal commitment to this project.

We are also grateful to the people who reviewed the manuscript before publication and especially want to thank Keith Darcy and Meg Wheatley.

To our many friends who gave us encouragement, support, hospitality, and nourishment, a heartfelt “thank you.”

Herman Bryant Maynard, Jr.

Littleton, Colorado

Susan E. Mehrtens

Mineola, New York

February 1993