Sustainable Business Models: A Working Concept

It took many years for the older boy and Greybeard to accept the implications of the transition to a new, Primal episteme. It took even longer for them to work out the implications of this change.

Hence as they sat with QC in a small boat crossing the sound from Helsinki in Finland to the island fortress of Suomenlinna, the reviews they gave of their work was actually the result of decades of difficult work. For example, the older boy had prepared graphic illustrations of some of the consequences for business of the transition to a Primal episteme. In the following figure, the older boy represents Modern companies with a bulldozer motif and Primal ones with a sailing dinghy.

Modern and Primal Business Models Illustrated

The ‘‘Bulldozer’’ company image captures the Modern episteme’s forceful, invasive institutional growth. Since such companies have defined their origins in their own terms, they cannot be anything else. Leaders, the ‘‘drivers,’’ of such companies need to learn only how the company works, its ‘‘mechanics.’’ Then they are obliged to develop the company by growing it and moving it forward as the distinct and separate entity that it is. In effect, this kind of management forces an understanding of companies and their roles onto the world. Much power is required so that this forceful act can overcome any social, environmental or ecological resistance as well as constraints on company
growth.

Hence the desired direction in which the ‘‘Bulldozer’’ company heads is determined by the internal functions of the company itself. This is still the standard model in existing Modern business as far as you may judge from the content of books in mainstream management schools, where businesses appear to operate in social and ecological vacuums.

In contrast, the ‘‘Dinghy’’ company is vulnerable and far out at sea; this is a company operating in the Primal episteme. In this image, the fate of the company is uncertain and dependent on factors external to the company (as winds, tides, currents and weather in the illustration). To direct this kind of company, knowledge of its constitution and capabilities is certainly essential; but just as essential are the diverse crafts, skills, knowledge and needs that staff possesses or may acquire for harnessing multi-sourced extrinsic energy and materials together with knowledge and experience of the external systems and forces that contribute to the being and becoming of the company.

The desired direction in which the ‘‘Dinghy’’ company then heads is hence to be determined by collective personal, social, and ecological knowledge, needs, capabilities and potentials in addition to the company’s own. In this way, the reality that ‘‘Dinghy’’ companies create seeks to be as close as possible to what is known of the ways the company intervenes in existence; it is no longer the imposition of a company-made reality onto different worlds.