The Most Dangerous Idea In Business Right Now

I’ve been far too negative (or a tinge cynical) with certain business perspectives I’ve held more recently.

Worse, I didn’t even realize it was happening. I used to instinctively believe in abundance… that the pie could always get bigger. Somewhere along the way, I quietly started assuming that every gain for someone else somehow came at someone else’s expense. (I should stop listening to political podcasts). Someone else’s promotion means one fewer opportunity for us. Another country’s success means ours must be in decline. A new technology means fewer jobs. Economic growth means someone is getting left behind.

It feels like we spend far more time talking about how to divide what already exists than how to create something new.

I don’t remember exactly when this happened (it’s been a few years now), but it feels like one of the defining characteristics of our moment (and I don’t think it’s just me). This week’s episode of Thinking With Mitch Joel is a conversation with Chris Bradley (Senior Partner at McKinsey and co-author of A Century of Plenty). The big idea that stuck with me is that one of the greatest barriers to progress isn’t a lack of resources or innovation… it’s the growing belief that the world is a zero-sum game. While editing the episode, I realized that the phrase sounds economic… but it’s really psychological. Worse, I think it’s becoming embedded in the fabric of our society. When we believe there’s only so much success, opportunity or prosperity to go around, we stop building. We start protecting… we become suspicious of progress because we assume someone else must be paying the price for it… or it’s only for a very select few (hello, Trillionaires).

History tells a very different story.

The last century wasn’t defined by humanity getting better at redistributing wealth. It was defined by humanity creating more of it. More food… more energy… longer life expectancy… better healthcare… more education… even more leisure. We have much more access to ideas. None of that happened because we got better at dividing a fixed pie. It happened because we kept figuring out how to bake a bigger one. I’m also not insane…. today’s challenges are bigger and more challenging to solve. From inequality to the cost to the consumer to geo-politics to decline in trust to on and on…

Have we become so focused on scarcity that we’ve lost confidence in abundance itself?

Maybe that’s why every conversation feels so polarized. Politics becomes a fight over limited resources. Business becomes a fight for market share. Careers become a fight for that one position. Even artificial intelligence gets framed almost exclusively around what it might take away instead of what it might help us create.

The technology changes… but the underlying story remains the same.

If I win, you lose. If you win, I lose. It’s a remarkably limiting way to imagine our collective futures. It’s not how I used to think… but something broke my brain. I’m now retraining it back to the way it used to be (a work in progress). I want to help myself remember first… and maybe organizations and leaders along the way… that progress isn’t something reserved for a select few. That innovation isn’t a redistribution exercise. That growth isn’t inherently exclusionary. That tomorrow should never be someone else’s victory at our expense. Maybe the most important job of leaders today is rebuilding that confidence and truth that we can still create more opportunity for all.

Because the moment we stop believing a bigger future is possible… we stop trying to build one.

Before you go… ThinkersOne is a new way for organizations to buy bite-sized and personalized thought leadership video content (live and recorded) from the best Thinkers in the world. If you’re looking to add excitement and big smarts to your meetings, corporate events, company off-sites, “lunch & learns” and beyond, check it out.