Total Rethink E-Book

David McCourt

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 407

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Rethink your way to a better life

In business, and in life, everything is changing fast, apart from how we behave. Our ways of thinking and making decisions have changed little since we lived in agricultural and industrial societies, but the problems we now need to solve are entirely different. It requires a revolution in thinking and behavior to meet the challenges that now face us and avoid disaster we need to totally rethink the model.

Part business biography, part business blueprint, Total Rethink explains how this can be done. Successful telecoms entrepreneur David McCourt lays out the reality of the dangerous situation we find ourselves in and suggests solutions which will empower everyone, including business people, politicians, diplomats, and teachers, to repair the damage we have already done, and prepare for the dramatic changes to come.

•    Change the way you think and behave to be a true entrepreneur 

•    Understand why incremental change no longer works 

•    Move at the speed of the times we’re living in to keep up

•     Find trusted, effective guidance you can put to practice today

Written by a sought-after speaker, businessman, and entrepreneur, the advice inside this book will help you learn to think—and live—like a revolutionary.  

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Foreword

Acknowledgments

1 Visualize the Future

2 Start a Bottom-Up Revolution

3 When the Revolutionaries Become the Establishment and Stop Blowing Up the Model

4 Entrepreneurial Thinkers Can Be Found in Every Walk of Life

5 Can You Teach Entrepreneurship or are Creative Entrepreneurs Born that Way?

6 Work on Your Strengths, Forget Your Weaknesses

7 Being Interested in Everything

8 Getting Taken Seriously

9 Achieving the Impossible

10 Tell Your Story to the World

11 Radical Ways of Getting Paid

12 Taking Risks and Grasping Opportunities

13 Connecting Computers to One Another

14 Finding a Mentor

15 Trying to Do Everything at the Same Time

16 If You Are Persistent, Your Plan B May Be Better Than Your Plan A

17 Crowdsourcing Is the Future

18 The Death of the Middlemen

19 Ten-Year-Olds Have Great Ideas, Too

20 Never Be Afraid to Think Big – or to Think Young

21 Future Generations

22 The Power Shift

23 The Power of Immigration

24 The Sheer Joy of Being a Creative Revolutionary

Epilogue

About the Author

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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TOTAL RETHINK

WHY ENTREPRENEURS SHOULD ACT LIKE REVOLUTIONARIES

DAVID MCCOURT

Copyright © 2019 by David McCourt. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: McCourt, David (Entrepreneur), author.

Title: Total rethink : why entrepreneurs should act like revolutionaries / David McCourt.

Description: First Edition. | Hoboken : Wiley, 2019. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019010509 (print) | LCCN 2019011565 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119565345 (ePub) | ISBN 9781119565369 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781119565352 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Entrepreneurship—Technological innovations. | New business enterprises. | Strategic planning. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Entrepreneurship. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Strategic Planning. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / New Business Enterprises.

Classification: LCC HB615 (ebook) | LCC HB615 .M3783 2019 (print) | DDC 658.1/1—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010509

Cover Design: Wiley

Image Credit: © David McCourt

Since the Industrial Revolution, through Jack Welch's tenure as CEO at General Electric, business has been about incremental change. But now business is about blowing up the existing model and looking at everything in a new way. It's time for a total rethink.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

—Buckminster Fuller

“Imagination is the source of all human achievement.”

—Sir Ken Robinson

“I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.”

—Niccolo Machiavelli

“The greatest discovery of all time, is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.”

—Oprah Winfrey

Foreword

“David McCourt is one of those entrepreneurs who has learned to successfully create and to navigate public-private partnerships in order to increase investment in mobile and cable connectivity in areas where it has traditionally been deemed uneconomic.

“In the process he has made himself a very rich entrepreneur, but this is exactly what constructive entrepreneurship is all about – it's about providing a service or product that people want, and/or introducing something new into the market that enhances the social capital of the region.”

—Brian Morgan, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Cardiff Metropolitan University

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge and thank the following: Nick Covino for guiding me through Boston College High School; Father Hagarty, SJ, for teaching me the first of the five greatest lessons I ever learned: that any problem, no matter its size, can be solved if broken down into small actionable steps; Father Chris Johnson for guiding me through Georgetown University; my father, Frank, the finest man I ever had the pleasure and honor to know; my mother, Katherine, the Matriarch, Hero, and Rock of the entire McCourt clan; and the A-Team: Deborah, Dave Jr., and Alexandra, the greatest collection of kindness, love, and support God has ever put in one family.

I like to read a book with a shovel and dig for ideas (i.e. I like to read a book with a pen and make notes in the margin). As some people don't like to mess up their book, we left some blank pages for notes in the back.

1Visualize the Future

“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”

—Albert Einstein

Most of us, whether we are business people or political leaders, doctors or teachers, students or parents, live in the present and try to work toward the future one day at a time, taking tiny cautious steps, improving things incrementally. It's been a survival technique the human race has used throughout our evolution, but it may not be enough to save us from the dangers that lie ahead in the near future, and it may also mean that we, both as individuals and as a society, are going to miss the enormous opportunities that technological progress is making possible.

It is time for us to be bold, to be revolutionary, and to change the way we do things.

Other forces, some of them constructive, some of them destructive, are now moving too fast for us to keep up with if we continue with the old ways of thinking and acting. There needs to be not one revolution, but many, in both the ways that we think and the ways that we do things if we are going to be successful as individuals and if we are going to improve the lives of the majority of the people on this planet. Positive revolutions could also avert the potential conflicts which are brewing between those of us whose lives are getting better every day and those of us who are being left further and further behind by the increasing speed of progress.

It's easy to illustrate how this widening of the gap can come about. If you watch an elderly steam train making its way out of a station in India, you will see that it is heavily laden with people. They are clinging to the outsides and squatting on the roofs, as well as filling every carriage to capacity. It would seem obvious that there is a need for some improvement in the services being offered to the population. Now, India's prime minister has commissioned a Japanese company to build the country's first high-speed railway between Mumbai and Ahmedabad in the west. These trains will have top speeds of 200 miles an hour, far too fast for anyone to hope that they can travel by sitting on the roof, and are indicative of how fast India is developing.

It would obviously be a sign of progress to be able to eventually replace all that elderly rolling stock with such sleek high-speed trains. It would be far more comfortable and efficient for those who can afford to buy tickets and sit inside in air-conditioned comfort, but entirely unattainable to the crowds of poor who throng the stations in the hope of hitching a cheap or free ride. All they will be able to do is stand back and watch as the future shoots past them.

No one would deny that the creation of a high-speed train that travels at hundreds of miles an hour is a wonderful thing, but at the same time it will increase the gap between those who can afford to travel on it and those who can't, improving the lives of one and making far worse the lives of the other. In other words, this leap forward, which would be a great thing for the country's economy and productivity, would inevitably widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots, so the model for traveling across India needs to be rethought and entirely revolutionized in a way that will improve the lives of all those thousands of people clinging to the outsides of the trains, to make their experience closer to that of the people who will be able to afford to buy tickets on the bullet train. I don't have a solution for that particular problem, but it provides a vivid visual metaphor for the fact that every action inevitably has consequences, so we need to be thoughtful with every step we take, conscious of the effects improvements have on those at the bottom as well as those at the top.

Like those Japanese trains, civilization has progressed too far and is traveling too fast to be able to slow down now. If you want to be successful in any field at all, you can't rely on doing a bit better each year. Companies that increase their revenue by a few percentage points, individuals who marginally increase their earnings, inventors who make superficial improvements to their products, will not be the winners of the future. Simply being ambitious for success will not be enough either. We will all have to exercise enormous creativity and imagination in order to see and understand what is happening around us and work out new solutions to the problems that now face us, recognizing both the opportunities and the dangers ahead.

We need to dream big, but we also need to dream smart if we don't want the billions of people left behind on the platforms to rise up and attack the things they know they can never have and the people they know will always prosper at their expense.

If you want to be a game-changer and really make a difference, then you have to visualize the future that you want to live in. You have to imagine yourself already being there and then look back so that you can picture the route by which you are going to get there.

We need to be bold and creative in everything we do. At a personal level, a cautious, conservative approach to risk and innovation may keep your career or business afloat for just long enough to support you and your family during your lifetime, but it will never change the world and it will never blast your personal achievements into any new stratospheres.

Before you can do that, however, you have to convince yourself that your dreams actually are attainable.

In 1985, while I was still in my twenties, I was invited to the White House for dinner with President Ronald Reagan, a former actor who had succeeded in confounding all expectations by becoming the most powerful man in the world. Towards the end of the meal I had to get up to answer a call of nature. There was a marine standing rigidly at attention outside the door.

“Sir,” I said, “can you tell me where the men's room is?” “Down the hall,” he barked, “take a left, on your right, Sir.”

As I walked self-consciously away down the hall, the click of my heels echoing on the black and white marble, I heard the marine speak again, this time in a very different tone.

“Goose?”

Recognizing my nickname from high school I turned back.

“Hey Goose,” he said, “It's Ned! Jimmy Rourke's brother.” Jimmy Rourke had been one of my best friends at school, a great footballer who had gone on to play in the NFL for seven seasons, including the Super Bowl.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” we both said at once. “I joined the marines,” he said.

“I got invited to dinner,” I said.

“No one's going to believe this at home,” he said.

As I stood in the men's room it occurred to me that he was right: no one was going to believe I was at a White House dinner at 26 years of age. So when I got back to the table, I slipped my neighbor's demitasse White House coffee cup, which was one of Lyndon Johnson's place settings (each president and first lady designs a new place setting for official dinners at the White House), into my pants and smuggled it out with me. When I proudly showed it to my father a few days later he was appalled that I would stoop to do such a thing.

“But Dad,” I protested, “no one's going to believe that I was there.”

For the same reason, I asked the president to sign my menu, which I'm guessing is not really what you are supposed to do at those sorts of events.

Things were very different on the night I was invited by Prime Minister John Major to 10 Downing Street, the prime minister's residence in London. This was many years later, when I was in my thirties and I was one of the sponsors of the Cambridge Film Festival. There was an odd selection of guests that night, including the tennis star John McEnroe and his wife of the time, film star Tatum O'Neal (the youngest person ever to win an Oscar for her role in Paper Moon) and the television presenter and businessman Sir David Frost, with a lady who seemed much too young to be his wife. On the way back from the men's room I passed any number of priceless, historical antiques, and there was not a marine in sight. I resisted the temptation to put anything down my pants; after all I was a respectable married businessman by then and my wife was with me.

We had just had our first baby and had left him back at the hotel with a babysitter in order to take advantage of this opportunity to have dinner with the prime minister. As charmed as I was to be a guest in Downing Street, it was clear to me that it was perhaps my wife that the prime minister found most enchanting that evening. I was fine with that, but eventually we made our escape, my wife shedding her shoes as soon as we emerged into Downing Street, and headed back to our waiting child, despite the PM increasingly insisting that we “really must” stay the night.

I recently ran into Sir John Major at the Merrion Hotel in Dublin and reminisced over a cup of tea. He was just as charming as I remembered, even though our paths had not crossed for a quarter of a century.

I appreciate that these are boastful little anecdotes and, as my father pointed out, do not reflect well on my abilities to act in an appropriately statesmanlike manner, but the point I am making is that it is perfectly reasonable for anyone to visualize themselves dining in the White House or dining at Number 10, building a multibillion dollar business empire, or winning an Emmy (for an educational series called Reading Rainbow), but if you want to turn those big dreams into reality then you are going to have to make a difference in the world – and you can only make a difference by changing the way things have been done in the past – by blowing up the model, by creating a revolution.

Visualize the world that you would like to live in and the future that you want for yourself and your family.

Then work out a route for reaching that destination.

Work out what has to change to make your dream a reality and then construct a plan for making that change come about.

2Start a Bottom-Up Revolution

“Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”

—Che Guevara

Everything is changing fast, apart from how we think and behave. Technology and artificial intelligence are taking over many of the functions that we previously imagined would always be the domain of humans, from robots taking over jobs in factories to apps gaining control over our social and business relationships.

In the course of an average day we all interact with machines far more often than we interact with people, but our ways of thinking and making decisions have changed little since we lived in agricultural and industrial societies, even though the problems we now need to solve are entirely different than those faced by our ancestors. If we want to keep up with the changes, it will require a revolution in thinking as big as those that led us to start enclosing and farming the common land during the Agricultural Revolution and to building the factories and power stations of the Industrial Revolution that created the modern consumer world.

We each need to harness the energy which developments in technology have unleashed, for our own individual ends, if we are to benefit from the challenges and opportunities that now face us, rather than allowing them to swamp us.

Both the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution brought enormous benefits to the human race, but they also created great injustices and conflicts of interest, many of which we are still wrestling with centuries later. Many would wonder why, for instance, a man who inherits a coal mine should be so much better rewarded than the miner who risks his life daily as he toils in the dark below ground. Why should land that once belonged to everyone be stripped of trees and parceled up to become the property of one farmer or one person with the wealth to invest, as happened in the Agricultural Revolution? Yet it is indisputable that both these revolutions did far more good for the collective human family than bad.

We have come to terms with these “realities” from history, but we are still troubled by their modern equivalents: why, for instance, should the guy who gets recruited to be the CEO of a major corporation be awarded a salary and bonus package worth tens of millions when the people who have worked every day for years on the shop floor actually creating the corporation's products and services earn only a fraction of that amount in their entire working lives? There is an enormous difference between an entrepreneur who creates a business from scratch and someone who is simply hired to manage it.

Political movements that have tried a myriad of different ways to face these problems have come and gone over the centuries, but globalized progress still marches forward at an ever-accelerating pace and the inequalities and dangers of societal meltdown continue to grow and multiply.

Being a revolutionary is the most exciting thing in the world, but only if the revolution results in genuine and beneficial change for the majority, creating a new way of doing things or a new way of thinking about things. There is no point in destroying the status quo unless you have something radically better with which to replace it. To do so would be merely an act of barbarity, but that is what politicians are doing all the time, taking us backward rather than forward. During democratic elections they make promises they couldn't possibly keep if they were voted into office; once in office they then tear things down simply because they were built by someone else. That model has to change if we are not going to end up tearing ourselves to pieces.

Sometimes a revolution in thinking becomes necessary in order to avert disaster, but people need to have a clear understanding of the issues and solutions and not allow themselves to fall prey to the fraudulent promises of politicians and others who are merely in search of votes and who actually have vested interests in maintaining the status quo, despite their apparently “revolutionary” rhetoric.

One of the most powerful triggers for revolution throughout history has been the gap between the rich and the poor, between the powerful and the unempowered – or at least between those who feel they are poor and believe that others have power over them. In reality we all have the power to take our fate into our own hands if we are willing to risk the consequences and if we can rally enough people together to support us, but most of the time we don't realize it, or we lack the necessary confidence or the energy to actually do it. At least that has been the situation in the past, with revolutions only breaking out sporadically and often ending in failure.

Now things are different because there is a groundswell of change and individual empowerment which is finally putting power into the hands of the masses. Everyone now has the potential to be a revolutionary. A banker can become president of France and a real estate developer can become president of the United States. Previously oppressed populations in the Arab world can arrange huge spontaneous demonstrations of dissatisfaction that topple governments, in some cases almost without bloodshed. The British government can be forced to leave the European Union and the American population can agree to be governed by a collection of elderly billionaires.

These seemingly illogical events demonstrate that there is an appetite for change, sometimes at any cost. They show that many people are dissatisfied with the status quo of their lives, but most of the answers they have come up with have not proved to be the most creative solutions to the problems which are causing that dissatisfaction, and some may even end up worsening the situations which are causing the dissatisfaction in the first place. Increased empowerment means we have just as many opportunities for making the wrong choices as we do for making the right ones.

History is littered with instances of huge populations being ruled over and repressed by small numbers of powerful people. Think of how few British colonials governed the enormous continent of India, how few masters suppressed the plantation slaves in the Southern US states and the Caribbean, and how few guards there were for the millions of death camp prisoners in the Second World War. In many cases the oppressors were able to do that because the oppressed had no way of communicating with one another and no way of coordinating any acts of rebellion, but technology is now providing the means for huge populations to talk to one another, to share ideas, and to enforce change more quickly than ever before. It is now possible for everyone to rise up and be a revolutionary, but still very few of us realize that or bother to take up the opportunities that are becoming available.

The irony is that the people who are likely to be left behind because of the speed of change in the modern world are the ones who would probably be the best equipped to lead us into the future because they are hungrier for change and less risk averse. They have been through hardships which have toughened them up, and they have less to lose by taking big gambles.

History is so full of stories of how refugees have prospered when they arrived in new countries that they have become clichés and racial stereotypes. The Jews are most often singled out for their success in the diaspora, but also the Indians and Pakistanis who start corner shops and keep them open twenty-four hours a day or the Chinese who started laundries and restaurants around the world and went on to build up substantial businesses. My own family came to America from Ireland, escaping from poverty and lack of opportunity in an oppressed and stale economy, and prospered from the change, following the Irish stereotype by going into the construction business. In Boston in those days, most Irishmen became either construction workers or cops. Within a few generations, of course, all these ethnic and racial stereotypes disappear as new generations branch out into different businesses, creating some of the world's biggest corporations.

All these immigrants nearly always arrived in their new countries with nothing, having been through great traumas and upheavals, and they built successful lives for themselves and for their families, often becoming extremely wealthy as a result of their labors. They worked harder and took greater risks than the indigenous populations that they were now living among, who had largely grown too comfortable and too risk-adverse to achieve the same levels of success. These are actually the people best equipped to make the necessary changes for the future.

It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that the great achievements of the future lie in the hands of the have-nots of today, as long as they are willing to rise up and think like revolutionaries and do not allow themselves to be persuaded to settle for incremental improvement and growth, and as long as their efforts are supported by those who have the finance and the political power to back them. For the sake of argument in this book, those have-nots also include the bulk of the younger generations, who in some cases are blocked from progressing with new and creative ideas by the older and more conservative generations, who are the ones controlling the purse strings which keep the capital from flowing to the places where it would be most likely to do the most good.

Whenever the repressed masses have come together and risen up in a well-organized fashion – as they have done from time to time over the centuries – they have often succeeded in overthrowing their perceived “masters,” although always with terrible amounts of bloodshed and chaotic consequences for society (think of the fate of the rulers and aristocrats in both the French and the Russian revolutions, most of whom ended up being executed by the aggrieved masses).

These days, with modern communications, increased levels of education and new ways of consuming the news, it is a great deal easier to start a revolution – and to conclude it successfully, often without any physical bloodshed. This is an entirely healthy and natural process of renewal, evolution, and rebirth. If the older generations are going to be living longer, then they must accept that they need to hand over at least some of the power for creating change to the younger generations sooner than might have been the case in the past. It is, in fact, to their advantage to do so because it will increase prosperity for all of society, not just the young people themselves. Old people are naturally averse to change even though they will be the ones to benefit from it the most.

Radical change no longer has to lead to a civil war as the abolition of slavery did between the Northern and Southern US states, nor to battles on the streets as happened during the Civil Rights and Anti-War campaigns of the sixties. A supposedly “violent” backlash may now be marked by no more than a giant political rally or some aggressively noisy union picket lines; it might even happen entirely online, in the privacy of the revolutionaries' own smartphones.

There is always a danger, however, that if enough people feel sufficiently aggrieved with their situation, and do not feel they are able to make themselves heard any other way, then they will fall back into the traditional ways of readjusting the balance of power and undermining the ordered nature of society. It might be that this will come in the form of a cyberattack rather than a physical battle, but the results could be just as catastrophic. If, however, we think creatively enough we can avert that danger and bring the benefits of revolution to everyone without having to pay the price in blood or in the collapse of a vital element of our modern infrastructure.

Whenever the perceived gap between rich and poor grows too large and those on the wrong side of it become too disenchanted with their lives, the results can be destructive for everyone in the short term, even if they eventually produce ends that some say justify the means. Throughout history the wealth gaps have led to bloody uprisings, civil wars, and even the cold-bloodied execution or assassination of those who appear to possess an unfair proportion of the world's power and riches. In the West during the second half of the twentieth century, however, the gap remained relatively small for a variety of reasons. Blood has largely been spilled as a result of territorial or religious disputes rather than due to inequalities of wealth, and wars have been located mainly in parts of the world that possess large deposits of valuable raw materials, particularly oil.

The answer cannot lie in slowing down progress or bringing down those who are doing well (i.e. the “hated rich” or the “billionaire classes”), although that often seems the easier option because it provides a scapegoat to blame for the problem and provides politicians with good sound bites. Instead it has to lie in bringing up the living standards of those who are in danger of being left behind.

In the twenty-first century, however, the globalized wealth gap is widening dangerously, which puts the already low paid out of work and benefits only a technologically sophisticated elite minority. It will continue to widen at ever-greater speed unless we do something radical and deliberate to slow it down and even, perhaps, to close it by speeding up the improvements for those who we are referring to as the have-nots.

This trend toward a widening gap is most obviously seen in the immense and sudden accumulation of wealth by technology companies in Silicon Valley and the rumblings of discontent around the world at how low the amounts of tax they appear to have to pay on their profits. This handful of corporations, however, has now grown so big and so wealthy that they are collectively worth more than many individual nations. It would be better, I feel, if they could be encouraged to direct their incredible wealth into the creation of new companies and new inventions, and in fairness they often are doing that. These famous giants, however, are only the most visible part of the iceberg. The same gaps and inequalities are opening up all over the world. It is now impossible to slow down the progress and growth of these companies without destroying the whole fabric of society, so it is imperative that we improve the lives of those people who keep the rest of the world economy turning over but do not get to share in the technology bonanza, and many of these trailblazing technocrats are already playing major roles in that process. Today's most successful trailblazers, such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Alibaba, are already starting the process of lifting everyone up.

What I am not saying is that the people who have created these companies should be vilified simply because their stock has become worth a great deal of money. Jeff Bezos is rich because he created Amazon, and the company has improved the lives of a great many of millions of customers; and Elon Musk is rich because he has invented an electric car that is likely to transform the way we all live in the coming decades. In many cases the individuals who created these colossally successful companies lead relatively simple personal lives, more interested in growing their companies than in reaping extravagant personal rewards. Mark Zuckerberg is famous for always wearing the same T-shirts and jeans, despite the fact that Facebook has, on paper, made him one of the richest men on the planet. It is far too easy for politicians to point fingers at these people and accuse them of being the problem, when in fact they are often the ones inventing the solutions. Where the inequality in earnings is less defensible is when executives who have created nothing, and who do not put their own money at risk, are hired to run the big companies and are paid millions of dollars simply for doing their jobs – or in some cases even paid millions of dollars for not doing their jobs.

It is much easier for politicians to blame the rich rather than doing the hard work of creating policies that will revolutionize the lives of those who feel they are being left behind. It is much easier to hurl abuse at the rich than to actually work out how to improve the lives of the poor.

For the sake of simplicity, we can say that there are currently around two and a half billion people on the planet who have more material goods, more opportunities, and more choices than at any time in history, and there are also five billion people on the other side of the wealth gap who are enjoying none of those benefits and whose lives appear to be getting worse in comparison, and sometimes in real terms as well. Many of the five billion have lifestyles which are infinitely better than their grandparents or great grandparents, but they do not feel that to be the case because they can see how wide the gap is between them and those who seem to be reaping the greatest rewards of progress.

As the chasm between the two and a half billion haves and the five billion have-nots grows wider, the potential for a destructive clash between the two sides increases, and it will take some radical and creative rethinking politically, socially, commercially, and financially to reverse the process and avert disaster. The world needs more creative entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jack Ma (Alibaba), not less.

Some would say that in order to close the gap we should limit the amount of money that the haves can control. When so much of the higher end of consumption is conspicuously flaunted by the media, it is bound to create dissatisfaction within the ranks of those who feel they will never be able to share in the good life that they see on their screens and in the shop windows they walk past. The system as it exists, however, has to flaunt its goods in this way in order to sell them. A large part of marketing and advertising is designed to make people feel that they want or need the products on display. Yet if those same people feel that they are never actually going to be able to have the products, it is not unreasonable for them to start to feel aggrieved and to resent the people they see enjoying the fruits of capitalist success without appearing to have done anything creative or taken any risks along the way.

The only viable solution is to radically lift the living standards and future prospects of the five billion have-nots so that they feel they are getting their fair share of the rewards of global progress and rising prosperity.

Some might think the only really feasible way to stop the rich acquiring an unfair share of the world's wealth is through more taxation, but effectively overtaxing the rich is proving impossible because if the rules change in one country the rich and enterprising simply move their money somewhere else or, worse still, stop working altogether. It is also an inadequate answer to the long-term problem because it cannot raise enough revenue to make any significant long-term difference to the lifestyles of the five billion on the other side of the gap. Nor does it solve the underlying problems of why five billion people are getting left behind in the first place and are starting to resent that fact.

That does not just mean that governments should simply hand out more free money; it also means increasing the opportunities and choices in every area of everyone's lives and increasing the amount of control they can exercise over their own destinies and on the world around them.

Feeling that you are being left behind financially is bad enough; feeling that you are helpless to do anything about it is far worse because that robs people of hope. We can all withstand a great deal if we are able to hope and believe that things are going to get better in the future.

During elections you hear politicians making promises of a better life if you just vote for them, but many of these promises would be entirely impossible to deliver on should they succeed in winning high office. Some of the great religions have been using this methodology for centuries, which might explain why they have been promising paradise and life after death for those who agree to tolerate poverty and servitude in this life. If you are told that however bad your life on earth might be you can be sure you will receive your reward in the afterlife, you are much more likely to stop complaining and to put up with the status quo. In extreme cases believers are even willing to go to war and face certain death in order to receive the rewards promised in the hereafter. I personally am quite spiritual and do believe in the afterlife, but that is not my point.

It is the hope of a better life on this side of the grave that drives most of the people who achieve great things. Someone who illegally crosses the Mexican border and is willing to work twelve hours a day in order to send money back to his or her family has to believe that by doing so they are building something better for their current and future generations. The same applies to Syrian refugees fleeing a war zone and young girls leaving the Philippines in order to work as nannies and chambermaids in the West. What they all have in common is hope that things will get easier and better for themselves and for their families.

Those in the West who have had no pay rise in ten years, however, or who have possibly seen the industry they and their ancestors have always worked in decline and disappear, have an entirely different view of the future and of the unfairness of life, even though their standards of living are far higher than most of the immigrants and refugees who are currently traveling the world in a state of hope. It is the people who find it hard to be hopeful whose revolutionary reactions result in the votes for Donald Trump and Brexit, while the immigrants and refugees are more likely to become creative revolutionaries, inventing new products and services and then working hard to make them a reality. It is no coincidence that most of the founding fathers of Hollywood were former refugees from Europe, people who arrived in New York and then trekked all the way to the wide-open spaces of California, filled with optimism about the industry they were going to create and with big dreams that became the stories they then sold back to the world.

The traditional wisdom has been that improvements in the lot of the poor are best done incrementally, day by day, month by month, year by year. It is the same principle as the one followed by established corporations when they are planning to increase their revenue and profits incrementally, a few percentage points each year. Conservative by nature, because they have a lot to protect, established corporations try to generate new profits without endangering their existing sources of income – often by simply cutting costs and shrinking their workforces rather than being bold and trying out new initiatives or creating new businesses. Conservative, cautious, and incremental approaches to closing the wealth gap are inevitably going to be just as counterproductive, especially in a world that is undergoing a power shift.

As Geoffrey West puts it in his excellent book, Scale, published in 2017, “As they grow companies tend to become more and more unidimensional, driven partly by market forces but also by the inevitable ossification of the top-down administrative and bureaucratic needs perceived as necessary for operating a traditional company in the modern era.” He goes on to explain that “change, adaptation, and reinvention become increasingly difficult to effect, especially as the external socioeconomic clock is continually accelerating and conditions change at a faster and faster rate.”

In other words, events are moving too fast now for that sort of unimaginative, risk-averse behavior to be an effective solution any longer. Incremental change may buy you some time, whether you are a politician or a CEO. It may keep you afloat in the short term, but it will not save you from ultimate extinction – and it will never change the world. Time never loses the war.

The gap between the haves and the have-nots, however, is not the only division opening up in society. In many Western countries the idea of political consensus, and of people from different parties working together for the common good, is being eroded to a far greater extent than it has been in any living memory. Clashes mainly seem to come from the far right and the far left, the middle ground having been hollowed out and the media having provoked and stirred up controversy wherever they can, knowing that it is controversy which gets people's attention and consequently increases the value of the advertising space that surrounds the alarmist and confrontational stories being told.

Nowhere is this more noticeable than in the United States in 2017. You only have to look at the record of George Bush Senior, who was president between 1989 and 1993, after serving as a congressman, vice president, and director of the CIA, to see how much things have changed. He was a Republican congressman under both Democratic and Republican presidents, and in both cases, he voted virtually the same percentage of times with the incumbent president, following his own conscience regardless of party. That meant that half the time he was not voting with his party. Now everyone in Congress votes at least 90 percent of the time with their party rather than their conscience and the idea of everyone working together for one America seems to have disappeared over a relatively short period of time.

Pick ideas not sides. Ideas don't win or lose, sides do.

When America was founded – by a revolution – Britain was in the middle of a great deal of political upheaval. It had a heavy burden of national debt and huge pressure on national spending. There was popular unrest everywhere and real religious conflict. During that time Britain lost the American colonies and exactly the same set of circumstances are now occurring within the United States. We see no respectful disagreement between different sides, just name-calling, personal contempt, hatred, labeling, and the public humiliation of people with differing views.

We are seeing an increasing contempt for authority, especially public authority. We are seeing a populism that is blind to the facts on both sides, and we are seeing destruction of personal property on the rise. We see politicians using words to motivate and inspire followers but making no effort to enlighten or teach them the real facts. In order to ensure that it does not experience a similar loss of power and influence in the world as Britain, America needs to face reality, listen to and accept opposing views, and discuss them constructively, and get out of the echo chamber of social media.

The public has grown tired of watching politicians behaving like children, which is possibly another of the reasons why they protested by making Donald Trump, a non-politician, president. Likewise, in France the public decided that Emmanuel Macron, a young ex-banker, should be made president rather than choosing a career politician. We don't, at the time of writing this, know how these decisions will pan out, but it is my suspicion that neither of them is going to be able to solve the core problem, although I hope I am wrong.

The chances of being able to heal these political divides naturally or in the near future are low. The only solution in America is probably to blow up the two-party model and create a third, independent party, which will force the political elite to go back to behaving like adults. So, in politics as in business, only blowing up the model can make the necessary changes happen.