Capital, Systems, and Objects: The Foundation and Future of Organizations

The value propositionOrganizations face a continuing barrage of new ideas and technologies. In recent years you have likely heard multiple times of digitization, blockchain, sharing economy, and a host of other managerial and technological innovations. These are means and not goals. It is too easy to become enchanted with a means that seems to solve multiple problems, but the long-term concern must be the enduring goals that a means can help achieve. Capital creation is the enduring goal for all organizations. All are concerned with creating a mix of one or more types of capital: economic, human, organizational, natural, social, and symbolic. All need to focus on raising their capital productivity, Cʹ (C prime), to a level greater than their industry competitors.There are five fundamental systems for creating capital: systems of engagement, framing, inquiry, production, and record. An organization, a capital creation system, has to continually modify, effectively manage, and efficiently integrate each of its multiple variations of these systems to enhance its Cʹ. Breakthrough leaps in Cʹ in recent years can be understood in terms of object-oriented organizational design. Uber, for example, is based on the premise that drivers and riders are objects that can receive and respond to digital messages through their smart devices. In a connected world, nearly every person and asset is an object that can be assembled electronically in innovative ways to create new organizations with higher levels of Cʹ.This book gives you a set of integrated frameworks – capital, systems, and objects – that transcend managerial or technology hype by focusing on the long-term fundamentals that sustain organizational success. Read this book if you want to be an effective practitioner of capital creation.