The Birth of Post-natural Business
An exploration of corporate metaphysics in an age when culture, technology and nature are morphing into one.
Part 2 / 3
The Birth of Post-natural Business
21st century business has a problem. The epic environmental, societal and technological emergencies ahead can’t be dealt with the mainstream sustainability frameworks that desperately aim to put the world back into balance, as was illustrated in the previous post in the series, The Death of Sustainable Business.
It is given by now that we require more advanced business paradigms to create corporate bodies able to live in harmony with the constantly changing landscapes of nature, culture and technology. The shift from mechanistic and manageable business to organic and cultivable corporation won’t be painless. It will require an ultra-modern approach to all corporate operations, including strategy, management, innovation and branding, and critical questioning – or even a postmortem – of current models of corporate social responsibility and sustainability.
In our ongoing exploration to identify the key elements of next generation businesses and brands, we captured a set of auspicious ideas for creating business models fit for this weird epoch we are living in. The resulting concept enterprise goes with a name post-natural corporation and redefines what progressive business means in the emerging post-natural anthropocene, an era defined by hybridizing and cross-breeding memes, genes and algorithms.
So who is this post-natural creature designed for mighty value creation? Importantly, the post-natural corporation stands out from a plain sustainable one in diverse ways. Perhaps most crucially, the post-natural corp is – in addition to being sustainable by its very nature – thoroughly resilient, which means it is able to better deal with the unforeseen future and capable of bouncing back from all kind of emergencies, natural or not.
Post-natural corporation celebrates its ability to deal with disruption, which stems from its adaptable business model, modular sociotechnical structure, diverse revenue streams, redundant human and non-human resources, and a war chest full of social capital. Top-notch resilience allows the post-natural corp to dodge some of the evident 21st century corporate maladies, such as the armies of deadly startups, overwhelmingly drastic technology shifts and the rapidly spiraling resource crunch – that will drone-strike most corporate HQs for years to come.
Additionally, the post-natural corporation goes all the way with biomimicry. Its natural resemblance is not just skin-deep, but the corporation builds its business, organization, brand and offering according to the finest natural fundamentals and principles. The post-natural management thinking will favor nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory as well as the theories of self-organization and complexity as the backbone for the new corporate worldview.
The post-natural corporation excels in seeing the natural patterns that shape the external business environment. It observes how nature organizes itself across economy, society, politics and technology – and gains understanding about the morphing seasonality, hype cycles and disruptive evolution of the markets. The holistic foresight and insights will provide it the ability to create a biomimetic business model with a unique edge that helps it to adapt, survive, grow, flourish and breed in the world where flux is the only constant.
On a more philosophical level, the post-natural corporation is poised for long-lasting and groundbreaking biophilia – the love of living systems – that allows it to develop even deeper meaning for its existence and create the required fresh strategic thought for cultivating the whole new corporate ecosystem.
It seems evident that the new symbiosis between natural, cultural and technological principles, combined with the imperative for sustainable growth, will continue to push 20th century sustainability thinking further to the fringes of the desolate corporate parks and pull post-natural resilience, biomimicry and biophilia at the core of radically innovative business.
We expect that this post-natural corporate endeavor will deeply affect the ways we think about business in the 21st century, causing us to question why companies and brands exist, what they aspire to achieve, and how they aim to live their corporeal lives.
This is the second post in a series about 21st century corporate metaphysics in an age when culture, technology and nature are morphing into one. The resulting multi-part business intelligent dispatch aims to propose both epic questions and speculative answers for the contemporary corporate condition.
You can find the first and third post here:
The original publication, Gardening Manual for Post-natural Corporation, can be read & downloaded at http://postnaturalcorporation.tumblr.com
