In 1976, Peter Drucker wrote a book ambitiously entitled The Unseen Revolution: How Pension Fund Socialism Came to America. It was one of his least successful books, and he later retitled it more modestly The Pension Fund Revolution. This was sort of plausible in that when he wrote it 25 per cent of US company equity was owned by pension funds (by 1990 it was 40 per cent), but wholly wrong that it betokened a revolution. It should have been called ‘pension fund capitalism’, to reflect the fact that the funds were instantly captured by the fund-management industry – trustees, fund managers, shareholder proxy advisory services and even hedge funds, which incomprehensibly pension funds are permitted to invest in and even worse lend shares to for voting purposes – to become, ironically, an integral part of the short-termist shareholder-value ecosystem that has distorted our economies, impoverished the 99 per cent and fostered the populism that now threatens our entire democracy.

But 50 years on, could something like Drucker’s pension fund revolution be on the cards today? 

A couple of years ago, a second slim volume appeared under another alluring title: Citizen Capitalism: How a Universal Fund Can Provide Influence and Income to All. One of its three authors was the late, much lamented Lynn Stout, Cornell law professor and writer of the definitive and self-explanatory The Shareholder Value Myth (I wrote about it here).

Their proposal was in concept a simple one: ‘to respond to the crisis of declining American civic engagement, unity, and financial security’ by setting up a universal fund, voluntary and open to all citizens, that would assemble a portfolio of stocks, at the beginning chiefly from corporate and individual donations, and distribute the resulting dividends and other proceeds as income to members. The fund wouldn’t sell or trade its shares, and nor would citizen-shareholders, whose holdings would revert to the fund on their death. 

Crucially, however, individuals would have the right to vote the shares held in the portfolio. Part of the point of the fund would be to build stable, long-term holdings for companies, at the same time providing incentives for individuals to vote their shares accordingly. This, they argue, would be a step towards liberating corporations from ‘the tyranny of shareholder value’, the better to serve the broader social interest. By making the voice of ordinary shareholders heard in the boardroom, citizen capitalism, they hoped, would empower ‘a new class of long-term, diverse shareholders who can change the direction of corporate America, making corporations more citizens’ servants – and less citizens’ masters’. 

While modestly well received when it appeared, the book promptly disappeared from view at the end of 2019, blown away in the gale of panic unleashed by Covid. That might have been that. But as we have discovered, one of the most surprising qualities of Covid is its magical ability to turn things that were previously unthinkable into not only thinkable but eminently and urgently doable ones.

One such suddenly doable project is ‘levelling up’, or ‘refloating the middle classes’, as it would be in the US. While last year’s furloughs and grants of various kinds effectively functioned as emergency bungs to bail out some of the most disadvantaged in the system, these don’t remotely touch the longer-term income and other inequalities that the pandemic has brutally outed – and will need fixing in fairly short order if democratic capitalism is to have a future.

Right on cue, enter in the last few months the notion of ‘Universal Basic Capital’ – a national endowment that, picking up on citizen capitalism, would channel equity contributions from philanthropists and companies into a fund, roughly modelled on a sovereign wealth fund or Alaska’s Permanent Fund, for the benefit of individual citizens. 

For proponents, UBC has several advantages over the more current idea of Universal Basic Income, being both more practical and in the long term more far-reaching – an unusually favourable combination. It’s more practical, politically and otherwise, both because the concept is already familiar from mutual and soveign funds, and, more importantly, it doesn’t require extra taxes or compete with other causes for existing funds. Moreover, as proponents as different as hedge-fund meister Ray Dalio and left-wing economist Joe Stiglitz can agree, if the fund were allotted equity stakes in companies bailed out during the pandemic, the public would rightly share in the upside potential of recovery in return for bearing the downside risk during the crisis. On the same grounds, how about it taking a small stake in start ups, too? Didn’t Nobel economist Herbert Simon estimate that 80 per cent ‘of the income we enjoy comes not from the efforts of living individuals or existing corporations, but from this shared inheritance’?

Universal capital could also be much more far-reaching than UBI in its effects, at least over time. This is because it goes with the grain of capitalism rather than fighting it. Thus it is not re-distributive (altering the distribution of wealth already created), as with UBI, but pre-distributive (permanently altering the basis of wealth creation in the first place). As it accumulates over time, the fund becomes a force for individual levelling up, which, at least in the active citizen capital model, would be reinforced as long-termist ownership and share voting begin to correct the dysfunctions of today’s corporate governance.

Finally, in so doing the fund would reorient the corporation away from its misguided and destructive obsession with the present and honour its most extraordinary feature, its ability – when properly managed – to function not only as a wealth creator in the here and now, but also ‘as a vehicle for the present generation to altruistically pass forward resources through time to benefit those who will live in the future’.

The cost would be small, the effects large, though gradual, and they ought to appeal to both right and left. As Dalio notes: ‘[The fund idea is] an odd duck that is neither capitalist nor socialist. And the fact that you can’t so easily label it is one of its more appealing aspects’. It should be on the agenda of any progressive party that has an interest in fairness and working to correct the short-termist bias of today’s corporate governance. Unfortunately, given the UK’s non-existent record of institutional innovation since the founding of the Open University in 1969, and the Labour Party’s crisis of timidity, it is unlikely to happen here. So the best we can hope is that it is taken up by President Biden’s policy wonks, or gains traction in the shape of the voluntary model of Stout et al, thus giving us something we can copy without having to look too brave about it.

It’s tough to lose the final of the Euros. It’s even tougher to lose it on penalties – a cruel and unusual punishment made more so by the fact that partly responsible was a tragic error by a coach who knows all about taking penalties.

But enough of the hysteria. Just as there was far too much expectation squatting like a stone on the England squad from the start, so the vastly overdone despair at falling at the final hurdle is in danger of erasing the magnitude of the achievement.

It’ll be no consolation for the team’s last three young penalty takers for the time being – see Marcus Rashford’s agonised letter of apology for his shootout miss. But it is hardly a disgrace to lose out to Italy, along with Spain one of the two best sides in the tournament. Remember that England came through the month unbeaten in open play and held the Azzurri to a draw over 120 minutes in the final.

After the disappointment, let’s take pleasure in what we have: a talented, genuine and eager squad that did us proud by getting to a final for the first time for half a century, led by a decent, honest manager whose ‘Dear England’ letter at the start of the tournament was more eloquent about patriotism and being English than any politician in any party for as long as one can remember.

And whose conduct has a lot to say about good management. Since 2016 Southgate has quietly remodelled the national team in the modern European idiom, something that proved beyond all his predecessors – Sam Allardyce, Roy Hodgson, Steve McLaren, Fabio Capello, Sven-Göran Eriksson, Kevin Keegan, Glenn Hoddle, Terry Venables, even though all of them tried – all the way back to Graham Taylor, the last exponent of blood-and-thunder English football exceptionalism in the 1990s.

In this, of course, he has been much aided by the foreign managers and players who have been attracted to the English game. To put things into perspective, the last time a club managed by an Englishman won the Premier League, the richest and by some measures most competitive league in the world (although the Germans, Italians and Spanish might have something to say about the latter), was 30 years ago. Leeds under Howard Wilkinson in 1991-92, since you asked.

Since then, foreign money and the personnel that followed it have brought the elite English clubs, many of them kicking and screaming at first, into the modern football world. Arsène Wenger was the pioneer with Arsenal’s ‘invincibles’, and from the millennium on only the Scot Alex Ferguson interrupts what is otherwise a continental managerial monopoly on winning in England. It has culminated gloriously over the last four years in the era of Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp who at Manchester City and Liverpool have engineered a near-perfect synthesis of English and continental features, their teams at best allying heads-up technique and football intelligence, long lacking here, with speed and energy.

Southgate has observed and learned from these improvements, not to mention picked young players schooled in the new methods. One implication, of course, is that England’s Euros win over Germany, far from being a blow for Brexit, as one idiotic Tory tweeted, was precisely the reverse: a reflection of Southgate’s eager participation in the fizzing trade in ideas and people between the European footballing nations, each learning from the others, that over the last two decades has raised the bar across the continent and made Europe currently the most progressive footballing region.

As the FT’s astute Simon Kuper observed, Southgate has binned football nativism. ‘To him, football isn’t war, or art. It is a system’, Kuper writes, and the coach has constructed a team to compete with other systemically inclined European teams on an equal basis. His players are young, hard working and resolutely diverse, and Southgate has brought the best out of them as enlightened managers do in any workplace: by treating them as adults and giving them confidence to express themselves both in their work and outside it.

Their football, although still a work in progress, speaks for itself. But unexpectedly, it’s outside football that the players have been handing out the sharpest lessons. And my, haven’t they done it well. The unselfconscious, natural way they have taken the knee; the direct calling out of Priti Patel’s hypocrisy; the straightforward acknowledgement and apology for their mistakes; all these have rattled and wrong-footed Johnson’s government at every turn – the equivalent of a football nutmeg – and made ministers’ belated scramble on to the bandwagon of the team’s success look both risible and desperate, as Marcus Rashford did earlier over school meals. As Marina Hyde asked rhetorically in The Guardian, while footballers barely out of their teens find it necessary to own up publicly for missing a penalty, when has the government ever acknowledged responsibility for its much more serious mistakes over the last two years, let alone said sorry for them?

Yet while Southgate has decisively modernised its football team, and through his endearing and diverse young team given us a glimpse of an England as we would like us to be, the scenes at Wembley both before and after the final are a sobering reminder of an older one that lingers on in half life: the England of the long ball, battlers and in-your-face aggression on the football pitch, magnified into xenophobia and violence off it.

Taming our tribal traits once and for all won’t happen overnight, or even at all, without political and management of a consistently high order, one devoted to calming passions rather than arousing them, unifying round a shared purpose rather than dividing, and cultivating diversity rather than stoking confected culture wars. Although rare, that kind of modest, thoughtful leadership does exist. Just a pity for our wider politics that it’s in the English football camp, rather than in Downing Street or Westminster.

In pursuit of the chimera of cost-free growth, every government seizes on the idea of pruning regulation, aka ‘slashing red tape’. Boris Johnson’s is no exception. First it took an axe to the planning rules, vowing the biggest shakeup for more than a generation. Now the latest Taskforce on Innovation, Growth and Regulatory Reform (TIGRR) has reported, promising, what else, ‘a bold new regulatory framework’ to take advantage of the ‘one-off opportunity’ of Brexit to free up enterprise from red tape (not to mention afford Johnson an unmissable chance to congratulate its authors for ‘putting a TIGRR in the tank’ of British business).

So far so normal. The big irony is that the intuition is right: of course there is too much regulation, and the worst of it is both intrusive and ineffective, while making life miserable for the regulated (think teachers, social workers, GPs) – the worst of all possible worlds. The cost of regulation is unknowable, but it certainly outweighs any social or economic value it creates by a wide margin. But the latest report shows no more understanding why than its predecessors. Like all of them, this one acknowledges that regulation can and should be positive: ‘Good regulation, set up in the right way, can be a vital part of the infrastructure to support growth’. But there is no indication that its authors know what ‘good regulation’ is. There is much talk of ‘digital opportunities’, ‘smart’ and ‘agile’ regulation, and things like ‘sandboxes’ to play with it in, but no hint of the crucial part it plays in a larger system or how it should do it. 

Regulation has become a monstrous industry that feeds on itself. Like targets, bad regulation begets more regulation and more red tape. John Kay wrote in his eponymous 2012 review, ‘We have dysfunctional structures that give rise to behaviour that we don’t want. We respond to these structures by identifying the undesirable behaviour, and telling people to stop. We find the same problem emerges, in a slightly different guise. So we construct new rules. And so on’. True to form, the current report sees no irony in proposing that increased discretion for regulators to change the rules should be offset by ‘a strengthened system of Select Committee scrutiny, supported by more effective, and more effectively used, economic impact assessments and metrics’ – in other words, another layer of regulation – aided by a Better Regulation Committee and a new Brexit opportunities tsar ‘to review and reshape rules and regulations to boost growth and drive forward innovation’ in the Cabinet Office.

Regulation should indeed favour innovation. In fact, it kills it dead in its tracks. To see why, listen to John Seddon’s podcast on ‘Buurtzorg: a brilliant care service that failed to work in the UK’ (and his other one on a recent ‘blueprint for social work’). Buurtzorg, as everyone knows by now, is a brilliant care organisation that from small beginnings has become an outstanding success in the Netherlands, its home territory. Based on small self-organising teams and minimal bureaucracy, Buurtzorg provides high-quality, personalised care at 40 per cent lower cost. In a country that has spent more than a decade dithering what to do about a social care crisis that deepens by the month, you might think this would be a model to replicate. Yet despite initial high hopes, efforts to do so in England have made minimal headway. Both countries started from the same position: a care crisis and a similar approach to public-sector management. So why the difference? 

The short answer is regulation. In the Netherlands, as Seddon notes, Buurtzorg founder Jos de Blok crucially didn’t have to start from here. Everyone knew that the previous system was broken. So when de Blok set up a small care outfit on a very different basis, he was allowed and even encouraged to experiment. To cut a long story short, Buurtzorg is now so successful with both patients and care workers, who still queue up to form new teams with one of the Netherlands’ most favoured employers, that under the tolerant eye of the regulator and politicians it is beginning to reshape the wider Dutch health service from the inside. 

Contrast that with the English response, which is to double down on existing methods, insisting that the only way to improve is to ‘try harder’. So the regulator still makes organisations report on all the unnecessary things – protocols, standards, activity levels – that de Blok knew he had to jettison in order to design a more responsive system. In effect, the Netherlands has moved on from the reductive, industrialised New Public Management paradigm that has strangled public services in the last 40 years, while thanks to the regulator England remains imprisoned inside it.

A quarter of a century ago Michael Porter and Claas van der Linde wrote a piece on regulation in HBR called ‘Green and Competitive: Ending the Stalemate’. It showed that it was wrong to think of environmental regulation as a static zero-sum game entailing higher costs (if the regulator wins) or lower quality (if companies prevail). Both win if properly designed standards trigger innovations that lower the total cost of a product and improve its value. This of course was the first lesson of the quality movement: doing it right first time costs less, not more. Innovation-friendly regulation focuses on outcomes, not processes or technologies — how to get there is up to companies. Above all, the aim is to learn and improve, a process in which regulator and regulated are partners, not adversaries, as they are usually cast in the UK. 

In The Whitehall Effect, Seddon outlines a simple way of transforming regulation and inspection from instruments of control and compliance to a force for innovation and improvement. In a redesigned system, parliament would set the purpose of the service, seen in customer or citizen terms, to which service organisations would be required to work. Neither politicians nor regulator have any business specifying methods or or processes – their job is to hold managers accountable, not to manage themselves. How to deliver the service is the job of management, using the measures and method of its choice – putting responsibility for innovation sqauarely where it belongs, at the point of contact with the customer. Regulation likewise should be close to the customer. Instead of looking for errors, checklist in hand, inspectors, says Seddon, ‘will pose just one question:”What are the measures and methods being used to achieve the purpose of the service?” and then check their validity’. Instead of policing, inspectors become a welcome source of support. It’s too late to remove TIGRR from the tank, alas – but this, he says, ‘is what intelligent regulation looks like’.

We knew the sort of things – part score-settling, part confession, part acute insight and part plain bonkers – that Dominic Cummings would come out with for the Parliamentary committee in May. He confirmed much of what we guessed about Boris Johnson’s ramshackle government and how it approached the pandemic. Together with what we have learned for ourselves over the last plague year it allows us to predict with some confidence the verdict of the official enquiry into the handling of the crisis, whenever it finally comes.

Of course, the report won’t say directly that we went into the biggest crisis since WWII with an administration of opportunistic and shifty second-raters, led by the biggest chancer of the lot – although it will surely make the point indirectly with hard words about PPE procurement, the ‘unimaginable’ £37bn spent on track and trace, the hopeless messaging surrounding the lockdowns and social distancing, and the ‘ring of steel’ supposedly thrown around care homes, among other things. It will also acknowledge that what happened last year was unprecedented, at least since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, and that if no government has got all its crisis measures right it is no surprise – one of the most sobering lessons of the Covid episode is that evolution in the shape of a tiny blind virus without a brain is a lot cleverer than we are.

Yet any report should also point out that Covid wouldn’t have been able to make itself so comfortably at home in our richest societies without inherited weaknesses that even a more competent and less feckless team would have struggled with.The most glaring is the neglected and run-down organs of state which both individually and jointly have comprehensively failed the challenge thrown at them. For this blame successive governments that having enthusiastically accepted the neo-liberal axiom that the market is the answer to everything if only the government would get out of the way, have over the last two decades casually outsourced capabilities, responsibilities and increasingly decision-making to the private sector and even more worryingly private sector IT.

As Cummings confirmed, what was left to face the crisis was a collection of inturned agency silos that were riven with rivalries, distrust and turf-wars, had no shared goals and were chronically unwilling to share information. Take your pick of hapless UK institutions to supply the aptest symbol of the UK government in 2021 – the risibly renamed Great British Railways, currently the worst run, highest cost, and least passenger friendly in Europe; the once-revered Post Office, which put more faith in its terrible computer system than in its staff and after a decade of defending its scandalous treatment of innocent postmasters is now having to pay reparations worth billions; or, nearer to home, the mother of Parliaments and home of British democracy which has been left untended and unmaintained for so long that billions are having to be spent to prevent it subsiding into the Thames. I could go on.

Then add to the state’s self-mutilation a decade of austerity that Covid has revealed as one of the most monstrous false economies of all time. Not so much thrifty housekeeping, more criminal failure to invest in the state’s decaying institutional infrastructure. The report might list an NHS subject to constant reorganisations that that can barely cope at the best of times; a threadbare unjoined-up care sector that is an insult to civilised society; contemptuously slashed essential local-authority services; unfit-for-purpose regulation (Grenfell Tower stands as another symbol of the UK’s complacent and negligent government); and the consistent blind eye turned to burgeoning economic, health and housing inequalities. 

As we have been learning, over the last year the cost of these policy choices has come flapping home for payment. It has been paid in the horrific tally of lives lost to Covid. The first job of any government is to protect its citizens. Instead, fearing above all the collapse of the perennially tottering health service, and without any other thought-out policy to hand, the government persuaded us to protect the NHS, and it, by, in effect, sacrificing the most deprived of society – the poor, the unhealthy, the inadequately housed and above all the elderly in care homes, all of whom suffer disproportionately from it – to the disease. And as a stopgap solution, grotesque as it seems to say so, it has worked. 

But there’s a kicker. ‘Saving the NHS’ in last year’s terms is not only not a long-term solution; it is a Pyrrhic victory that we can’t affort to repeat. Reparations for the decades of neglect and austerity are urgently due. And there can be no question of non-payment. In an increasingly interconnected world, the occurrence of more non-linear, extreme events in the future is almost guaranteed. If the gaping holes in the social infrastructure and state competencies are left unfilled, society will remain as vulnerable to these future unexpected unknowns as it was to Covid in December 2020. In the meantime, the pockets of deprivation in our midst will remain breeding grounds for new variants of the coronavirus, just as will happen in poorer countries until they are vaccinated too. The report might but probably won’t call it the revenge of those who saved the NHS.

In 100 days, President Joe Biden has not only blotted out the political nightmare of the last four years and restored due process to US government. Remarkably, he has rewritten the economic orthodoxy of the last 40 years from top to bottom.

Deficits? Who cares? Not the IMF, which looks benignly on Biden’s three-legged plan to spend an astonishing $5.5tn, equivalent to some 35% of annual US output, on economic stimulus, including direct payments to families, rebuilding US infrastructure, and on supporting families, especially poorer ones. Biden’s intention to raise taxes on the rich and on corporations to help pay for it likewise fails to raise institutional hackles (although Republicans predictably declare themselves shocked, shocked): tax cuts are now judged to aid trickle-up rather than down, and inequalities – strongly fanned by the covid pandemic – both within and between countries, hold growth back rather than abet it.

n effect, Biden has cancelled the old Washington consensus and replaced it with a de facto new one – an activist state, progressive taxation, green infrastructure spending, support for trade unions, a global minimum corporate tax rate that has been resisted for years, and a winding back of globalisation, particularly in relation to China, to boost supply-chain resilience. Industrial and even employment policy hover in the wings. 

Of course, this is not to say that President Biden will automatically get all his initiatives through a finely-balanced Congress; mid-term elections, just two years away, could set the counter back to zero. Yet it is already clear that a reform-bent president has shrewdly leveraged the circumstances to change the terms of the debate. He has made clear that the current situation renders half measures worthless, and some hitherto unusual remedies both obvious and, dare one say it, oven-ready. 

Covid has played into this. On the one hand, a successful vaccination campaign that had already begun has redounded in Biden’s favour. The pandemic makes much needed health spending a no-brainer. It also encourages experimentation: as Larry Elliott noted in The Guardian, furlough schemes to subsidise the wages of those unable to work ‘are not the same as a basic income, but they are similar enough to get people used to the idea’.

Yet even if, as we fervently hope, Biden’s reforms are adopted and take strong root, there is one glaring hole in the programme through which unless stopped half the potential benefits will leak away. It’s the last economic taboo, so completely internalised and embedded in the national psyche that it’s never up for political discussion. It is of course the need to challenge the status of the corporation and the way it is managed.

Think about it. The corporation is the intermediary through which the lofty abstract economic ambitions – levelling up, building back better, full employment, decarbonisation – are translated into what actually happens to real people in real places on the ground. It’s the engine room of the economy. And management is the operating system that governs what it does and how it does it.

The trouble is that our managerial software hasn’t been upgraded for four decades. It is now so far out of kilter with the wider economic and social interest that the engine is producing as many if not more problems than solutions – including some of those that current reforms seek to address. One issue is that most companies now only create good full-time jobs (what most people want more than anything else in the world, according to Gallup) as a last resort. Another is declining innovation rates as companies plough investment into short-term efficiencies and share buy-backs rather than R&D. 

A third, and perhaps the most spectacular, is inequalities of all kinds, but particularly income and wealth: as Thomas Piketty put it in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, ‘In all the English-speaking countries, the primary reason for for increased income inequality in recent decades is the rise of the supermanager in both the financial and nonfinancial sectors.’ In the US, supermanagerial bonuses have soared by 1000 per cent over the last three decades, compared with a 116 per cent hoick in the minimum wage.

So the corporate OS urgently needs to be rewritten. But for all the well-meaning initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic – the Purposeful Company initiative in the UK, the US Business Roundtable’s declaration in favour of more inclusive business aims, BlackRock’s call for social purpose – it’s hard to imagine it will come about through self-regulation. As Tariq Fancy, formerly BlackRock’s head of sustainable investing, notes, fund managers and finance professionals are trained and incentivised to chase yield and profits, and most companies ‘are still profit-seeking machines, built from the ground up as a collection of legal and financial incentives to make a healthy profit’. Expecting a market to self-correct its distortions in these conditions is fantasy. Governments haven’t hesitated to legislate changed social and economic behaviour by their citizens to deal with the Covid crisis; they alone can alter corporate and management behaviours by changing the incentives and legal provisions that caused them. 

Yes, but… can they? Tackling the management challenge is a bigger and more contentious test than fashioning a spending programme, yet in the long term even more important. Try a thought experiment. Imagine a Biden, or any other, administration attempting to redraw the corporate rulebook, knowing that in question would be the business model, and outsize profits, of giants including Silicon Valley titans with a collective worth of some $8tn, more than the GDP of many countries, with lobbying and legal firepower to match. Is it even possible? Have we left it too late? Just asking.

Covid-19 is giving us a grim crash course in evolutionary biology. Every day we anxiously check the state of the existential race – are people being inoculated fast enough to suppress the disease before a ‘fitter’ Covid variant emerges to take up the baton for an even tougher stage?

But wait. As in a horror movie, just as the frantic vaccination programme seems to give grounds for a glimmer of optimism on one front, it dawns that we are at the same time struggling with an equally toxic mutant on another front, man-made this time, that has erupted in the last few months and may be even harder to douse than the coronavirus.

In a blistering essay in the New York Times, Shoshana Zuboff, author of last year’s monumental The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, makes a direct link between the storming of the Capitol in Washington on 6 January and the data extraction and manipulation business model of Big Tech, specifically the social media companies.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter are to blame for the riot, she declares: ‘The intolerable truth of our current condition is that America and most other liberal democracies have, so far, ceded the ownership and operation of all things digital to the political economics of private surveillance capital, which now vies with democracy over the fundamental rights and principles that will define our social order in this century’.

We have a choice between surveillance capitalism or democracy, she believes. We can’t have both.

Over the top? Judge for yourself. Zuboff’s charge is that we are in the third stage of what she calls an ‘epistemic coup’ that began 20 years ago with the discovery by Google of the value of the personal data that internet users unwittingly gave up in surfing the web, followed by its permissionless annexation of that data for its own use.

That was the first stage of the coup. It quickly led to a second phase of growing epistemic inequality as companies amassed incomparably more data about us than we imagine or than we have about them and their algorithms. The perilous third stage is epistemic chaos, ‘caused by the profit-driven amplification, dissemination and microtargeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation.’

That’s where she thinks we are now, and looking around – at Trump and Trumpism, at Brexit, at mushrooming conspiracy theories and social unrest – it’s hard to argue she’s wrong.

And this of course is the nightmare scenario, where the twin viruses of Covid and surveillance capitalism intersect and reinforce each other. The surveillance model of capitalism is so toxic because it has no interest in the truth or otherwise of the content it carries; its currency is engagement – and as all the research confirms, wild stories, fake news and conspiracy theories, previously majoring on Trump, now on Covid,  get more clicks, and therefore personal data to store, analyse, and sell on, than boring reality.

Which is why social media firms only censor or ban purveyors of such theories as a last resort, and why they will fight to retain the protected status granted them by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, their great enabler, which absolves them of responsibility for the content they carry, to the bitter end. It is their major asset.

It also explains why other companies, with a few exceptions, do little to contest the power of Big Tech. As Rana Foroohar succinctly puts it in Don’t Be Evil: The Case Against Big Tech, ‘they are the ones buying what the Valley is selling’. What’s more, they are also collecting and trading data on their own account.

Surveillance is catching. Every company with a website does it (including the newspapers that we read online) – and that is before the full advent of the Internet of Things, which will multiply the opportunities for data capture exponentially.

In effect, hidden below the visible economy where companies buy and sell products and services there is a swelling invisible one consisting of the extraction and manipulation of personal information. It is claimed to be the fastest-growing industry in the world, its value (although no one knows for sure) estimated at around $200bn in the US alone.

In politics as in commerce, the hacking of humans has real-world effects. Crudely, these are what’s being bought and sold. One of the most serious is the growing difficulty of splicing splintered truth back together. Simple truth no longer carries weight. It is no accident that those who believe the ‘alternative facts’ of political conspiracy are also more likely to believe that Covid is a hoax or caused by 5G masts or part of a plot for a world government of the elite. Adherents of QAnon not only storm the Capitol in support of Trump – they are more likely to refuse face coverings, social distancing and vaccination.

Worryingly, this viral superstrain is not confined to the US. Anti-vax sentiment is particularly strong in France, where the gilets jaunes and other extremist groups, no strangers to violence, have emerged as its natural carriers. In the UK, health chiefs warn of facing two pandemics: one spread by a virus, the other by unregulated social media companies. ‘We have to fight both with equal vigour,’ says the head of NHS England.

The starkness of the civil dilemma this poses is summed up by a reluctant quarantiner in Hong Kong who ruefully notes that the powers that enable Hong Kong to tackle the virus so effectively – the power to lock her up in in a quarantine hotel room for three weeks with an electronic tag and the threat of legal sanctions – are the self-same ones that are also being used being to stamp out political uprising.

Bringing Covid under control therefore has a double urgency: not only to prevent the outbreak of more virulent disease variants but also to head off what can only be called a looming mental-health pandemic, whose effects are unpredictable. They could be as dire as those of the physical infection.

Stamping out the surveillance bug will be harder, requiring whole-system change. Yet ironically Facebook itself just may have brought the belated regulation of social media a small step closer.

Its decision to black out news feeds in Australia (including government and local information sites) in response to that country’s proposal to make platforms pay publishers for content was quickly rescinded. But in a fierce backlash it was widely branded not just as petulant and hubristic, but also counterproductive.

And not just by its sworn enemies. Interviewed on the BBC’s Today programme (at 2:48:40 in) on 23 February, a former Facebook high-flyer expressed fears that strikingly echoed Zuboff’s. While Facebook did good things, and Zuck was ‘a good person’, he was just too powerful, said Steve Sheeler, CEO of Facebook Australia and New Zealand until 2017.

‘In Australia, I can vote for or against the government at the next election, but I can’t vote for or against Mark Zuckerberg – his own shareholders don’t control him. That’s the problem we’re up against here: sovereign nations are coming up against Facebook, yet they’re not on the same playing field in terms of power.

‘A few years ago I thought breaking up Facebook or Big Tech was a fool’s errand, and ridiculous, because their powers weren’t anything like what the critics were saying. But in the past couple of years I’ve come round to the view that the scale, size and influence of these platforms, particularly on our minds and brains and all the things that we do as consumers and citizens, are so powerful that leaving them in the hands of a very few closely controlled companies like Facebook is a recipe for disaster’.

Facebook and the social media had played a major part in events ranging from controversy around the 2016 US presidential election through the Cambridge Analytica scandal to the recent riots in Washington, he pointed out. ‘It’s not going to get better if we allow the industry to regulate itself,’ he concluded. ‘We need to hear the government’s voice in here’.

Brexit is the UK’s Trump. It’s a symptom, but a malign one that makes the original condition worse. The original disease, revealed in hyperrealistic detail by Covid, is inequality in all its forms (income, health, wealth, housing, productivity, demography). The UK today, summed up the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) last year,  ‘is one of the most geographically unequal countries in the developed world’. Starkly, London and its surrounds are the only UK region  to make a positive contribution to the Treasury. Yet while London far outranks every other city in terms of productivity, income and wealth, the capital is also riven with the same jagged inequalities, due largely to sky-high housing costs and gig-economy wages. Wealthy, high-productivity London is itself massively unequal. The pattern is fractal.

All this means that the glib remedy of ‘levelling up’, first advanced in the last election and many times repeated since, raises as many questions as the presenting problem. Theresa May as premier got as far as talking about an ‘economy that benefits everyone’ – levelling up by another name – but her fragile government was too embroiled in Brexit even to define what that meant. With Brexit done, sort of, and a reliable majority, Boris Johnson is one step on, but faces a similar issue: where to start. One issue is definitional: is levelling up about places or individuals? The prescriptions are different for each.

Regional, or to use modern jargon, place-based policy in the UK has been tried since at least the 1970s, with very little result. The private sector can’t be coerced to locate to the small towns, coastal areas or run-down cities that need it most, and there’s a limit to the number of civil servants or agency staff that can be decanted there. Brexit complicates the issue for small entrepreneurial companies. Deindustrialisation is as easy (just leave it to the market) as reindustrialisation is hard – if the citizens of the old East Germany, having received massive transfers as well as all kinds of other aid from a competent and concerned national government, are still poorer than their counterparts in the west, ask yourself what hope there is for our left-behind in Stoke, Barnsley or any other brick in the once ‘Red Wall’.

If on the other hand the target is individuals, solutions are in principle more obvious. But they are paradoxically less likely to be chosen, for political reasons: they would involve reversing the austerity policies that have reduced services such as health, education, local government, and welfare to near-anorexia in the decade since the GFC and radically increase public spending.

The other evident way of addressing individual need would be to make a start on correcting the drastically out-of-whack balance between capital and labour. Labour’s share of national income has been shrinking for decades on both sides of the Atlantic, and the process has speeded up since 2000. President Biden is already setting an example here, with promises to up the US minimum wage and roll back some of the inroads into workers’ rights made under Trump and before. Needless to say, this is hardly likely to go down well with far-right Tories who seem to believe, with Trumpian lack of justification, that the British labour market is vastly overregulated and that employers are champing to be liberated from red tape, neither of which is true.

But ruling out such options would leave the government with a still bigger difficulty. After at least three decades when neo-liberal dogma ruled out any economic solution other than deregulation or, in the presence of ‘market failure’, the outsourcing of provision to the private sector, UK governments have hollowed themselves out. The continuing war on the civil service is perversely Pyrrhic, undermining not only continuity but their broad capacity for independent action. As one observer described it, they have progressively ‘infantilised themselves’. Each successive regime is less capable of thinking or acting for itself and ever more dependent on Big Consultancy to supply the answers.

The dangers of this capture are evident in both the long and short term. Look no further than the repeated missteps and U-turns in handling the pandemic. The obsession with scale, centralisation and the private sector, as in the only partly effective testing and test and trace operations, comes straight out of Big Consultancy’s management 1.0 playbook, whose obsolescence is only partly disguised by a few digital trimmings. Further back, the New Public Management policies of marketisation, competition and performance management audit that have demoralised and de-professionalised public sector workers, killing initiative and trust, came from the same stable. Through ignorance, a policy aimed at shaking up public-sector management has done that but also made it less capable than befor. 

In his book The Great Transformation, describing the rise of the market economy, the great economic historian Karl Polanyi (incidentally a good friend of Peter Drucker, who helped support him during the writing of the book) argued that left to self-regulate, the free market would cut itself loose from society with profoundly destructive results, endangering capitalism itself. It needed what he called a ‘double movement’, in which a variety of countervailing legal, regulatory and institutional responses – trade unions, health and safety regulations, social security, among many others – combine to curb excesses, retether markets to society and oblige it, however imperfectly, to work for the public good.

For Polanyi, looking back from the 1940s at the turbulent inter-war years, this was the only way capitalism could work – and the events of the last two equally volatile decades do nothing to suggest he was wrong. It’s early days, but it look as if Biden shares this view. If the diagnosis is indeed correct, any UK attempt at a ‘great rebalancing’ that tries to skirt this central reality, whatever its avowed focus, will be a sham.

Like Hemingway’s bankruptcy, the collapse of the conventional management model has come in two ways – ‘gradually, then suddenly.’

In obvious decay since the financial crash of  2008, although the rot had set in long before that, management as we know it has finally been finished off by covid.

It’s as if a switch has been turned. As Gary Hamel reflected at this year’s Global Peter Drucker Forum at the end of October, everything we thought we knew about management has been derived from observation of organisations that came into being in the first Industrial Revolution. It was perfected against the bureaucratic template of the early 20th century and locked into place since the 1970s by the toxic doctrine of shareholder value.

The pseudo-scientific pretensions of this technocratic, numbers-driven and inhuman model have been stripped bare by a pandemic that has systematically inverted the values it embodied. Human cooperation has been more use than competition – and should have been pursued much more at international level. Centralisation and scale have been no match for a nimble disease which strikes one person at the time (witness the failure and waste in our huge outsourced testing and test-and-trace centres); and above all, it has reasserted in the most basic of terms the centrality of people.

One of the flaws of the exclusive focus on shareholders is that it disables companies’ auto-immune systems, blinding them to their own long-term interest. Covid reminds companies that they need people to be employed and paid not just to solve problems and make stuff, but also to buy it. Absent people with jobs, governments have to invent surrogates in enormous stimulus and recovery programmes, as now. Welcome back, employment policy.

At the same time, the pandemic underlines how dangerously out of kilter we have allowed our value system to become. As Mark Carney is exploring in his current Reith lectures, the market as currently constituted overvalues the present at the expense of the future, and undervalues essential work like care, transport and other basic service to the benefit of a host of inessential ones. Hence our bullshit economies, built on work that is often not worth doing. This too is due for a reset.

But it’s at the company level that divergence between old and new is most spectacular. The recent online Drucker Forum got off to an electrifying start (I mean that) by showcasing a number of companies that unlike struggling competitors are sailing unscathed through covid not only while ignoring conventional management practices, but because they ignore them.

Among the five presenting firms – Nucor (US), Buurtzorg (Netherlands), Michelin (France), Handelsbanken (Sweden) GE Appliances (Sino-US) – only Buurtzorg, the Dutch nurse-run healthcare operator, is a start-up, the rest being solid corporate citizens of many years standing. They prove that it is perfectly possible to ‘transform’ – to use a catastrophically traduced word – if, but only if, managers throw off the blindfold of the old and devote as much attention to management innovation as they do to product and technology development, attempting to make their companies as inventive and creative as their employees are.

Currently, that’s a big ask. At a time when we need to harness every scrap of human ingenuity – and when three new vaccines stand as shining testimony to what can be achieved when that happens – it should be a global emergency that 80 per cent of workers think their opinions are disregarded at work; 70 per cent of jobs require little or no ingenuity; and just 18 per cent of workers are engaged at work – present physically but absent (at best) mentally. Baldly, companies in their present form squander much more human capacity than they use, or than we can afford.

As amply shown by the Forum five, it doesn’t have to be like that. Buurtzorg and Handelsbanken, the Swedish bank, are already rightly well known. Buurtzorg, now 15,000 nurses strong, continues to attract a further 100 recruits a month, and as it expands is starting to transform the Dutch healthcare model from the inside. Handelsbanken’s decentralised, relationship-based banking model ensures that it can respond instantly to its customers’ changing circumstances – one reason it has outperformed its Swedish rivals for the 49th year in succession.

As for the others, disparate as they are in culture, history and nationality, they are united in an unshakable belief that success is driven by people. This is absolutely nothing to do with being ‘nice’. It’s the conviction that ‘27,000 minds are more powerful than any single one,’ in the words of former Nucor CEO John Ferriola. Ferriola talks of a ‘chain of trust’ in which top management’s job is to build teams rather than products, and then provide the environment in which they can focus single-mindedly on the effectiveness that makes Nucor ‘the safest, highest quality, lowest cost, most productive and most profitable steel and steel products company in the world’.

‘Never underestimate the casual genius in every human being’, says Florent Menegaux, CEO of 130-year-old Michelin, the French tire-maker – while admitting that most of the time corporate bullshit stifles them from using it. Starting from small experiments, Michelin is now riding an upsurge of frontline improvement welling up from below. Menegaux now sees his mission as taking the stress out of operational pressures – including on middle managers – and feeding energy back. The manager takes care of the team; the team takes care of everything else, as one slogan neatly puts it.

At GE Appliances the divergence from management’s mainstream is even more dramatic. When the traditionally run white-goods maker was sold to China’s Haier in 2016 the culture shock was colossal. It didn’t realise it, but the company ‘was slowly dying’, in the words of CEO Kevin Nolan, strangled by its 100-year past. Now broken up into ever smaller micro-enterprises, a re-energised GEA is thriving like never before. ‘We need more ceos!’ says Nolan. ‘It sounds counterintuitive, but you have to get more ceos within your company. You have to let people control their future and their decision-making to unlock their creativity.’

The reason why these companies have done so well during the pandemic is blindingly clear. Simply put, their decentralised structure and carefully fostered cult of trustworthiness means that their people don’t have to wait for orders from above – they know what to do and do it. At Handelsbanken, local knowledge and branch responsibility for all lending translates into a fraction of the bad loans of rivals during the crisis. GEA’s ambition of ‘zero-distance’ formalises its recognition that closing the gap between the enterprise and its true boss, the customer, is a key metric of success. Nolan notes that without central direction GEA’s micro-enterprises were solving issues daily ‘at the speed of the market’; under covid they see the future as brighter than at any time in the company’s history.

To achieve zero distance with the customer, omission – eliminating what gets in the way – becomes as important as commission. What gets in the way is management. Buurtzorg has a slide entitled ‘what we don’t do’ that lists ‘management meetings, policy notes, strategic documents, HR strategies, year plans, and other useless things’. The latter include budgets and intermediate goals like targets, two things that Handelsbanken also eschews. Threats and opportunities don’t come in 12-month packages, so why should decisions?

As the technology of human accomplishment, ‘management sets the outer limits on what we can do as a species. It is humankind’s most important technology’, Hamel noted at the Drucker Forum, channelling Drucker himself. After a long pause, companies like those described (among many others) are beginning to test those limits, as they do so redefining management’s fundamental laws along human rather than economic metrics.

Unlike sheer physical size, trust and decentralisation appear to scale without diminishing returns. Effective relationships trump efficient transactions. Companies succeed by working with the grain of the ecosystems they operate in, not against them. Zero (response time, distance from the customer, management itself) is often the best score. IT in the background, not the foreground. Having spent the last 40 years trying to eliminate all traces of the human, companies are belatedly beginning to realise that it’s when they betray the human that things start to go wrong. With that established, perhaps management at last has a chance to live up to the gurus’ claims for it.

Never waste a good crisis. That glib slogan is less to be heard this time round. Not surprising, perhaps, given what happened after the financial crash a decade ago – which after the dust had settled, consisted of a return to business as usual, only with added austerity. That didn’t turn out so well for anyone who wasn’t part of the global 1 per cent, and the delayed reaction brought us Brexit, Trump and the election of Boris Johnson. 

So will today’s pandemic crisis be more productive? Nine months on from the first Coronavirus fatality, the signs aren’t good. After an initial burst of good behaviour (research collaboration among pharma groups, repurposing of manufacturing plants to turn out medical supplies, a few bosses forgoing raises) firms are in danger of reverting to bad old habits instead of taking the opportunity to institute better new ones. 

Take working from home. You might think that this was a rare win-win. Employers and workers both get to cut costs. Workers like it. In a recent survey of 10,000 European and Middle Eastern workers, 87 per cent said they wanted a choice over their place of work. Corporates, meanwhile, have discovered to their relief and surprise that under WFH not only does office workers’ productivity not suffer – in many cases it goes up. Unilever and Google found that at home their office workers were putting in more time than before, not less.

The unspoken corollary of that, of course, is that the office environment in general, and management in particular, add no value to employees’ work; rather the reverse. This isn’t new. The late Peter Drucker used to complain that too much management consisted of preventing people from doing their work, and advised every company to subject all their work processes to a zero-budgeting exercise every few years to strip out the friction-generating clutter and grit. 

Alas, rather than take the lesson to heart, managers have swiftly reverted to their default setting of control. Witness soaring demand for, and burgeoning start-ups in the field of, what are euphemistically termed ‘collaboration tools’: software which as well as collaboration also facilitates remote monitoring of computer keystrokes, websites visited, pauses taken and even infrared hotspots pinpointing staff providing the ‘pivotal point that people go to for information and answers’ (and by the same token presumably those who don’t). Bizarrely, apps are also springing up that mimic the background noise of a busy office, or even the ‘gentle chatter’ of a Danish coffee house. 

As Rana Foroohar points out in her latest book, anything that can be used for surveillance, sooner rather than later will be. That’s because behind the drive to control lies another obsession: reducing cost. Understandable as that is in today’s hard times, it is leading to behaviour that spectacularly misses the point. A la Drucker, the crisis would be the perfect moment to go back to ground zero and redesign the work to meet current and projected demand in the light of the new conditions, including WFM, social distancing and other consequences of covid.

But no. Spurred on by the big consultants, companies instead are splurging on ‘digital transformation’. That has led to a dramatic decline in customer service as the punters are peremptorily herded online whether they like it or not, often with no recourse to human contact. Pleading the crisis, companies resort to rationing – ‘due to covid, we are experiencing exceptional call volumes: expect wait times of more than one hour’ – directing callers to FAQs online, or simply deleting any other means of contact. In one prominent NHS operation, sad to relate, where the phone is permanently off the hook and a broken email link never repaired, there seems no means of changing an urgent appointment. The cost in terms of frustration, anxiety and wasted time for citizens and customers is off the scale, while the build-up of failure demand is invisible to managers who are probably congratulating themselves on having cut their (comparatively irrelevant) transaction costs. If anyone was wondering where productivity goes in these ‘transformations’, look no further: it lies in a grave marked ‘digital services’.

The other favourite corporate cost-cutting initiative is to chop full-time staff in favour of agency or ‘contingent’ workers. Around 5m people in the UK were in mostly low-paid, precarious employment even the pandemic hit, and that total will have surged over the last few months. As the FT’s Sarah O’Connor recently noted, the accepted risk-reward ratio in finance – the higher the risk the higher the reward – is reversed in today’s labour market: a truth rubbed in by the news that the boards of a number of US companies have begun quietly to adjust bonus formulae to compensate CEOs for ‘covid-related’ loss of earnings. Good luck finding revisions in the opposite direction to adjust for undeserved strokes of good fortune.

All of these things involve choices. Not all companies are choosing to recalibrate CEO pay. Companies that signed the US Round Table’s historic 2019 retreat from shareholder primacy seem to be behaving better towards their employees in the pandemic than others. In the UK, Aviva and Standard Life Aberdeen have signed up to a ‘living hours’ agreement that guarantees shift patterns (and payment) for workers four weeks ahead. Companies like these, and others that have chosen to maintain or improve levels of customer support (food retailers, including small ones, John Lewis, Waterstones), may gain in the long term when things have returned to something nearer the previous normal.

But these are exceptions. And the real test of an organisation’s purpose is not being nice to stakeholders. It is bending all its energy and ingenuity to challenge the seemingly inevitable and find new ways of fulfilling what it exists to do. Consider this. When all the world’s theatres and cultural festivals were shutting down – the New York Met won’t reopen until at least autumn 2021 – after fierce debates, the Salzburg Music Festival, the largest of its kind, resolved to defy the odds and go ahead with its 100-year anniversary event in June. This involved going back to scratch: in double quick time developing a new programme, preparing a distancing and safety strategy that has become a model for others, reimbursing 180,000 previously sold tickets and selling 76,000 new ones, quite apart from the normal artistic work. ‘We were deeply conscious of our dual responsibility as both a source of meaning and employer,’ says Salzburg president Helga Rabl-Standler. The result of Salzburg’s courage: ‘a sold-out festival, a giant step forward in terms of digitization, and a thousand good ideas on how to offer our greatest asset, regular customers from 80 countries around the world, faster and even better service.’

Well: just encore.