A group of expert brand change & transparency valuation activists started this story of pargraphs. Perhaps there are knowledge management or other human change agents among us who would like to add a paragraph. Maybe we can cut and repaste it until every discipline has had its say about what has gone so transparently wrong in the way that global organisations destroy trust and human relationsips through measurements that compound vicious conflicts with all living systems.

Views of the Beyond Brander ( BB will be published by Kogan Page late 2003)

When we think of the Big Accounting firms and global consultants who ride in the same “performance by numbers” boat, the metaphor that comes to mind is one of a new world of human value exchanges put in the monopoly hands of cartographers who almost deliberately sketch lands in wrong areas. What immense control you can have of the business globe when you cause most people to sail off in the wrong direction – away from either a new economy or an improved society.

Brands were one of the most common intangible vehicles navigated into murky waters so that a few vested interests could perpetuate their process models. It is now depressingly evident that many of the powerful ways of performing late 20th century branding, have turned vicious: against customers, employees and pensioner investors. The global forms of these costly brands are also a major cause of conflicts between local cultures around the world.

However, the newly discovered mathematics of transparency mapping[i] means that managers, economists, policy makers and opinion leaders of organisational systems can now design and steward brands which respect living system dynamics. Win-win is a natural human construct which means that when you make different promises to two or more groups of people, you are doing so knowing how to keep all of those promises because they are mutually reinforcing. Today we can - and must - conceive promotions and deploy media that go well beyond mere image-making lifestyles to represent Total Brand Corporate Responsibility[ii] models of leadership which purposefully focus on reality-making. Will Beyond Branders be in time to reverse the decay of trust between local cultures around the world? Can we promote win-win relationship exchanges between people in ways that connect human inspiration and network greater value? I am reminded everyday of the urgency of this by my father’s chilling 1984 prediction written from his editorial desk at The Economist: by 2005 the gap in incomes and expectations between rich and poor nations was recognised as man’s most dangerous problem. Other system experts have called this mankind’s final examination.

Technology’s worldwide computer-based powers of intelligence and communications already exist. We have no more chances of reversing this engine of value multipliers than the luddites had of drying up steam. If we deploy the brand as a transparent catalyst for change in a living system of trusted inter-relationships, we can design win-wins that unite all the global intelligence of computing and the local intelligence of human sensing. Society and business can win-win. The richer world can gain from promoting the poor world’s interests until desperate global divides are history.

We are embarked on a journey whose impacts on human meaning and learning would have sounded like extreme science fiction less than a generation ago. We must change our communications agents “the brands” and our time-machines “the organisational systems” inside-out. If we fail, those one-way communications controllers that count the production of things as more important than multiplying the trust flows between people will lead us to be branded as the most destructive generation in the history of this place and space we call earth.