I just reread Douglas Rushkoff’s latest excerpt from his book that I had posted earlier about and I was stunned when I realized I had missed the following in my initial read.
So let’s be clear: this is not a business book. Or at least it’s not just a business book. For your career is not your job and your company is not its balance sheet. Your most personal choices are, in fact, your business choices. And your business choices may as well be your civic choices. Whether you realize it or not, your product purchases and brand loyalties express your politics, and your relationship to money says a lot about your understanding of time, of power, and of belief. It’s all one dynamic picture.
That’s why I’m going to ask you to look at commerce, communications, civics, and community as if they are all part of the same system – an ecology, really, of interdependent activities and needs. There is just one thing going on, here. Pretending that each aspect of your existence or your enterprise can be compartmentalized is, itself, a product of the Industrial Age thinking I’ll be asking you to abandon, and the surest path toward forgetting what it is you might have once, originally, hoped to accomplish.
Why am I stunned by this? Because it relates to my discoveries about permaculture. Nothing exists on its own, as everything is connected. Just as the world is an ecosystem, so to is the Web. The sooner that businesses start realizing this, the sooner that they can change and evolve.