There is no contest in a footrace between a well-oiled, just-in-time-schooled car maker, looking to shift as many units as possible in a new market, and a decision-by-committee megacity administration trying to put in place an urban infrastructure fit for the 21st century. Handily, the auto maker also gets to socialise the losses (more gridlocked roads, fuel dependency, air pollution, deterioration of public space etc) and move on.

One of the big challenges I’m exploring at the moment is how do we redefine prosperity for the huge new group of global consumers (for lack of a better definition the new global middle classes) . They now have the means to buy the goods and service they need (great) but live in a public infrastructure constrained environment (bad) with a differentiated experience of citizenship and, more worryingly, are only being offered a high income country version of consumption (v bad).

If you consider the size and scale of demands from the new middle classes (for instance have a look at this GS note on BRIC consumer trends) I’m fairly certain these markets will disintegrate pretty rapidly. So the risk is there for the companies, the question is whether they care about getting back to business as usual or want to establish deeper long-term relationships with lots of new consumers.

The first path is pretty easy but a dead end. Hopefully the rebuilding blocks (in the slides above) point to a simple route to a smarter road ahead.

I’m speaking in September at the Eabis Annual Colloquium in St Petersburg whose theme for this year is Corporate Responsibility and Emerging markets. My topic is Prosperity and Brazil’s New Middle Classes which goes into these themes of service design, co-creation and sustainability in more detail. I’ll post more about that soon

For a bit more on socialising the losses and how we fail to account for environmental goods and services, this video of Pavan Sukhdev, Head of UNEP’s Green Economy Initiative is very good

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZWnMaX_bsY&w=250&h=250]

My stuff about global economic shifts and the impact of a new global middle class on EVERYTHING  has been helped a great deal by this post from Umair Haque which introduced me to thinking from The Power of Pull (great downloads at link) and The Shift Index from the Deloitte Centre for Edge from John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison and Richard Florida’s The Great Reset I’ve also been inspired by listening Paul Seabright, author of The Company of Strangers, on how we are collaborative not competitive by design, The Future of Competition and platforms such as openideo.

The above slides (PDF here) attempt to explain how some big trends should be the foundations for rethinking how to build a business fit for a rebalancing world. They are part of a full deck that has got plenty of examples and more depth about how to map these blocks onto your organisation’s footprint.

Get in touch or DM me if you want to see the whole deck or to talk some more about these ideas.

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