The Mesh - Lisa Gansky [24]
reflection, triage, and a two-car garage.
At a recent TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, I saw a Greek friend of mine whose family still lives in Greece. He is now a wealthy venture capitalist living in northern California, and spends almost no time in his home country. His family, he said, thinks he’s a mental case. With all of his wealth, why does he continue to work crazy hours far away from the people who love him? We laughed about it, but our conversation caused me to think: What if we’ve sold ourselves a very large but fundamentally wrong story? When stuff became cheap, and then credit became cheap, we filled our lives with stuff—not the things we really care about. What if we’re on this overcrowded little hamster wheel that won’t get us to a happy place?
As I looked at my own life and listened to people around me, I realized that people were talking less about what they owned, and more about what mattered in their lives—things like their health, friendships, traveling, meeting new people, getting inspired, sharing good food, creating great memories, and having more time to spend with their families. I was also hearing: Hey, I don’t need two cars. Maybe I don’t need all these toys in my house. Maybe I don’t even need this big house. They were beginning to wonder about the intense focus on “acquisition” in our culture over the last fifty years. When I traveled to Chile, Argentina, and several places in Europe—Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Paris, and Brussels—this conversation became more ubiquitous and substantially louder.
why now?
The current economic environment, in which people are reconsidering what they care about, holds rich promise for the Mesh. As in jokes, timing in business is essential. It’s good not to be late, or too early. One might ask, “Why the Mesh, now?” Five disparate vectors make the Mesh particularly viable and rewarding within today’s economic and cultural landscape:
1. The economic crisis has bred distrust of old companies.
2. The crisis has also encouraged people to reconsider what’s valuable and important to them.
3. Climate change is forcing up the cost of doing business, including the making and selling of throwaway goods.
4. The growing population and greater urbanization create densities that favor Mesh businesses.
5. Information networks of all kinds have matured to the point where businesses can provide better and more personalized services exactly when needed.
a big dose of big brand distrust.
In Spanish, batir las claras is an expression that literally means “to beat egg whites into meringue.” The phrase is used to imply that someone is just “puffing something up,” making a lot of something from a little of nothing. The economic crisis exposed a whole host of untrustworthy characters that were “puffing up.” Banks, insurance companies, brokerage houses, investors, and public companies were creating phony value. They deceptively highlighted the assets and hid the liabilities. Lehman Brothers, we now know, hid billions in losses through a deceptive accounting trick that top executives approved.
Citibank, AIG, Merrill Lynch, and Goldman Sachs took tax-payer TARP money and then paid themselves huge bonuses. People were justly infuriated. The executives defended the indefensible by declaring that the bonuses were in their contracts. (I’ve done plenty of contracts. Contracts can always be renegotiated.) Their actions deepened the chasm between individuals and big brands: the greater the chasm, the greater the resentment and distrust.
Older executives often know that their business model and brand are fading and squeeze the last juice from the fruit for themselves. Many of them grabbed what they could on the way out, leaving the rest of us mired in an economic maelstrom. A Harvard study showed that the top five executives at Lehman