The GOOD 100: Umair Haque
- Posted by: Umair Haque
- on October 15, 2009 at 9:00 am
Dear Old People Who Run the World,
My generation would like to break up with you.
Every day, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world—and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.
You wanted big, fat, lazy “business.” We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce.
You turned “politics” into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy—everywhere.
You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people—not just banks.
You wanted shareholder value—built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.
You wanted an invisible hand—it became a digital hand. Today’s markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.
You wanted growth—faster. We want to slow down—so we can become better.
You didn’t care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.
You wanted to biggie-size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life.
You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anticommunities. We want a society built on authentic community.
You wanted more money, credit, and leverage—to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff that matters.
You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: You sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful.
There’s a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I’m going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation “M.”
What does the “M” in “Generation M” stand for? First it’s for a movement. It’s a little bit about age—but mostly about a growing number of people who are acting very differently. They are doing meaningful stuff that matters the most. Those are the second, third, and fourth “M”s.
Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday’s way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government.
Who’s Gen M? Obama, kind of. Larry and Sergey. The Threadless, Etsy, and Flickr guys. Ev, Biz and the Twitter crew. Tehran 2.0. The folks at Kiva, Talking Points Memo, and FindtheFarmer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Jeff Sachs are like the grandpas of Gen M. There are lots more where these innovators came from.
Gen M isn’t just kind of awesome—it’s vitally necessary. If you think the “M”s sound idealistic, think again.
The great crisis isn’t going away, changing, or “morphing.” It’s the same old crisis—and it’s growing.
You’ve failed to recognize it for what it really is. It is, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, in our institutions: the rules by which our economy is organized.
But they’re your institutions, not ours. You made them—and they’re broken.
I was (kind of) kidding about breaking up before. Here’s what it looks like to me: Every generation has a challenge, and this, I think, is ours: to foot the bill for yesterday’s profligacy—and to create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity.
Anyone—young or old—can answer it. Generation M is more about what you do and who you are than when you were born. So the question is this: Do you still belong to the 20th century, or the 21st?
Love,
Umair Haque
Haque is the director of the Havas Media Lab and author of the website Edge Economy, from Harvard Business Publishing. He is a brand advisor and writer with thoughts on how companies can better serve our society. He wrote this manifesto a few months ago, and we couldn’t say it better ourselves.
Illustration by Will Etling
DISCUSSION: 3 Comments
Dear Manifesto Writers,
Look, I agree very much
with what you’re saying, and it’s obvious that it’s coming from the
heart. I agree that a lot of horrible choices have been made by people
in how we deal with one another and what we’re doing to the planet, and
that there are no shortage of problems to solve.
I do wonder, however, if this Manichean, ‘us versus them’ dualism and
mentality that divides groups into ‘young people who get it’ and ‘old
folks who have power’ hurts your argument here. We can label ‘Old
People who Run the World’, but who do we refer to – the IMF? The Boards
of the Fortune 500? The G8? A secret group of ‘Old Folks’ in a smoky
room somewhere? Who are these Old People, and should we really lump
them together, when the problems we face (and that GOOD does address,
thank goodness) are a bit more nuanced, and require more sophisticated
thinking?
How about the Old People from my grandparent’s generation, in World War
II – widely regarded as ‘The Greatest Generation’ for so much of what
they put on hold in order to fight for their principles? Is ‘old’ the
problem, or ‘the people in charge’? Aren’t the real problems issues
like nepotism and discrimination rather than the age of the people ‘in
power’? For all the ‘old people’ in power who want ‘big, fat, lazy
“business”, there are also young people who believe in those things as
well – young people who don’t believe in voting, in activism, or
changing their point of views. What about the stockholders of the
companies where these ‘Old People In Charge’ sit on the board – they
too have power, and have to use it responsibly as well.
The key problem is apathy and inaction – that affects all of us,
regardless of age or political preference. When we assume that
changing the people ‘in charge’ is what has to happen, we aren’t really
solving the problems – often we’re just changing the figure heads.
Maybe the issue is power itself – and there are alternatives worth
examining that embrace better values (see an example of the B
Corporation model). Maybe there are ways to address imbalances in
power without division. I might prefer my local coffee shop, and 9
times out of 10 I’ll go to it, but knowing that Starbucks – for all of
its symbolism – also has adopted some of the values I hold dear (like
fair trade), and its corporate donations support Democrats show that
companies can embrace the more progressive values we have. As we grow
older, I think we have to come to realize things aren’t black and white
- often they’re maddeningly grey.
There are no generations ‘m, x, y or z’ – there are people. There
might be generational shifts in attitude, but there are bigger, more
important tasks than pointing fingers. Artificial constructs that divide us don’t bridge the gaps – they often widen them. I agree we have to make things
better – yes, our financial systems are unsustainable, and we as a
species will continue to ruin this world for future generations unless
we change our behaviour. But part of that behaviour includes how we
relate to others – and ‘us versus them’ is the story that the past was
based on. The idea of dividing people into groups is what made the
20th century such a disaster – it’s also what’s worked historically,
and it’s what needs to change. “Passion, responsibility, authenticity,
and challenging yesterday’s way of everything” belong to each of us
regardless of who we are, and what power we have or choose to
exercise. Let’s start working on using those positive values without
throwing all the babies out with the bathwater, or slinging mud or
dividing rather than solving. In the time it takes for one to divide a
human into ‘the mainstream’ and ‘the other’, we can also find out
what’s common to all of us, and work on that.
Respectfully,
Rachel
Not young, not old – just a human in between
The following happened in my mind/brain today - October 18, 2009. I am of the older generations being credited for what’s wrong. Thanks! UmairThank you Rachel for a well written response. I project action now! hughperriInvolvement Ideas – For over sixty years of my life I have been painfully aware of the inequities between the rights granted and withheld from the females of the human race. While the human race continued to expand during the 20th Century by 282% from 1.6 billion to 6.1 billion, the rights of the women who gave birth to make that increase occur, gained little in the way of ownership rights and freedom to govern their own human bodies. If the male members of the human race said that the women in their family group were to become mothers, the women became mothers. with no right to say “No” in most cultures. In a term similar to “liberalism” which relates to the cultural freedom to do something or the freedom not do do something, I am taking the constructive use of the word “vaginatarianism” to be the designation of the avant guard term designating the organized movement of thinkers and doers to expand as rapidly as possible the implications of what women’s right to control their part in the birthing decisions will have in slowing down the present mega increase of the human population on Mother Earth. My email address is <vaginatarianism@gmail.com> No website has as yet been constructed but will be by month’s end. For instant contact my cell is 978-697-5160 for voice or txt messages. My name is – hughperri ERNISSE and I live near Boston MA <hugh@ernisse.com> for email contact me on my Blackberry. Think about World “povulation.”Hope much good comes from GOOD.hughperri in usaI too am not too old, but young enough to still take action.
Same old argument, just a new generation! This whole argument is nothing new, look back through the history booksAnd you will grow old and the next younger generation will be blaming all the bad in the world on your generation.When my mother grew up young people were taught to respect their elders, now all I see is a total lack of respect for older people who often fought in wars for the freedom you now enjoy and often worked hard to pay for the education of their children so the children could have a more comfortable existence.At 55 I still consider myself young – yet I think back to how my mother had to work, and realise how easy my life has been. She had no automatic washing machine, no microwave, had to light a boiler every morning for hot water, and cook meals using raw ingredients and then wash the dishes by hand. As well as holding down a full time job! A job for which she was paid half the male wage!!Imagine yourself living like that and then thank the older generation for all those little things you take for granted!!!!Respect your elders – after all YOU will be old one day and you will expect the same from young people then. And you have to admit…growing old is much better than the alternative!!!