Quotes by Umair Haque

Yes, business really does change. 400 years ago, corporations were formed by royal decree. 300 years ago, many countries were powered by slave labour, or its closest moral equivalent. 200 years ago, debtors didn't go bankrupt, they went to prison. 100 years ago - well, business is largely the same as it was a century ago. And that's exactly the problem. Business hasn't changed, but today's array of tectonic global shocks demands a different, radically better kind of business. Yesterday's corporations visibly cannot meet today's economic challenges.

Innovation is premised on force-feeding people more junk; on fuelling artificial needs for super-size meals, Hummers, and a new pair of sweatshop-produced fast-fashion jeans every weekend.

Sustainability, on the other hand, is premised on helping people finally step off that creaking treadmill of consumption.

What is strategy? It’s simple: strategy is what’s strategic – what is in your long-run best interest, factoring in everyone else’s long-run best interest.

The next industrial revolution begins here. What happens when we think of using new DNA to reorganize structurally inefficient industries? A blueprint for the next industrial revolution emerges. Here’s what it looks like.

Organize the world's hunger.
Organize the world’s energy.
Organize the world’s thirst.
Organize the world's health.
Organize the world's freedom.
Organize the world's finance.
Organize the world's education.

That's not an exhaustive list - it's just a beginning. In fact, let's open source it: please add to it ("organize the world's xyz"), and we'll keep an index here or elsewhere.

What's important is the logic behind the list. Let's make that as razor-sharp as possible.

Organize: to transform DNA, not lower-value technology. The world's: to have a global impact; to be able to scale to global levels. Hunger, health: some measure of economic well-being: to radically change the world for the better.

If you're a startup, and your elevator pitch isn’t shaped by this blueprint; if you're an investor, and your portfolio isn't full of companies like this; if you’re a corporate boardroom, and you're not refocusing and restructuring to meet these new challenges – here’s the bottom line: the next industrial revolution has your name written all over it.

The revolution needs revolutionaries. Today’s investors, boardrooms and entrepreneurs are looking for value in all the wrong places. Facebook's game of musical chairs won't solve big economic problems - and neither will making token investments in greentech.

Where is the next industrial revolution crying out for revolutionaries? Simple: in industries dominated by clear, durable, structural barriers to efficiency and productivity.

There are huge shocks rolling across the global economic landscape. Here are just a few. Food prices are skyrocketing. The financial system is melting down. Energy, of course, is more and more toxic, and costly. We are all, make no mistake, dancing on the precipice of economic cataclysm.

It is the obligation of radical innovators to create new value by solving these problems - or cede capital and resources to those who can.

The invisible hand is crippled. What’s going on here? Wasn’t the invisible hand supposed to raise everyone into prosperity and well-being?

Yes – but it’s not. The world is getting phenomenally richer – but the costs of that wealth seem to be endemic poverty for vast swathes of the world’s population, the poisoning of the water we drink, the pollution of the air we breathe, and the fraying of the social and cultural fabric that binds us together.

We’re richer, but that wealth doesn’t reflect durable, authentic economic value – which is hitting fast diminishing returns. The growth that we’re pursuing is neither sustainable – nor is it, in many ways, real growth at all. Boardrooms from finance to autos to energy to pharma to fashion have learned that the hard way.