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Daily Reading: A 12 Step Program for Value Destruction

Posted by Umair Haque on July 22, 2008 7:35 AM

1) Underinvest in innovation (note the relatively small scale involved).
2) Overinvest in consolidation.
3) Make profit an illusion.
4)Defend obsolete business models.
5) Be willing to sell everything out - everything.
6) Never count tomorrow's costs.
7) Build industries around the cult of the deal.
8) Turn corporate governance into the costliest activity in the economy.
9) Forget that the point of business is to change the world for the better.
10) Expropriate wealth from taxpayers to subsidize market failure.
11) Expropriate rights from people to embed failure into the very structure of the market.
12) Pump more liquidity into decaying DNA.

Bonus reading: how next-gen markets might just save the world.

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About this Author

Umair HaqueUmair Haque is Director of the Havas Media Lab, a new kind of strategic advisor that helps investors, entrepreneurs, and firms experiment with, craft, and drive radical management, business model, and strategic innovation.

Prior to Havas, Umair founded Bubblegeneration, an agenda-setting advisory boutique that helped shape the strategies of investors, entrepreneurs, and blue chip companies across media and consumer industries. Bubblegeneration’s work has been recognized by publications like Wired, The Red Herring, Business 2.0, and BusinessWeek, and in Chris Anderson’s Long Tail, to which Umair was a contributor.