When found­ing a com­pa­ny, you typ­i­cal­ly start-up with a few peo­ple with each of them tak­ing care of every­thing that has to be done. If the com­pa­ny is suc­cess­ful and grows, more employ­ees come in and the struc­ture of the com­pa­ny changes. It might even­tu­al­ly be devel­oped to a real orga­ni­za­tion list­ed at a stock mar­ket. This is the con­flict­ing story of Human Pop­u­la­tion Corp.

With orga­ni­za­tion­al growth comes the need for struc­tur­al change: respon­si­bil­i­ties have to be assigned prop­er­ly, hier­ar­chies are cre­at­ed in order to allow for con­cert­ed man­age­ment and a prop­er con­trol­ling of the com­pa­ny. In many cases, the founders will side­step or leave the com­pa­ny and will be replaced by exter­nal man­agers expe­ri­enced in run­ning large organizations. 

“Human Pop­u­la­tion Corp.” (HPC), the com­pa­ny found­ed by the first set­tlers, already has a very long tra­di­tion of approx­i­mate­ly 30,000 years. Its cor­po­rate his­to­ry can be described as a mixed suc­cess: , HPC is known for huge­ly pow­er­ful inven­tions, prod­ucts, and ser­vices, such as elec­tric­i­ty, all sorts of indus­tri­al machines leisure and busi­ness trav­el, tech­nolo­gies, med­i­cine, edu­ca­tion­al pro­grams, and more. These inven­tions have cre­at­ed mas­sive wealth for HPC over time – quite inter­est­ing­ly — most of it over the course of the last 150 years. HPC’s man­age­ment can afford to live a life of abun­dance and secu­ri­ty, being equipped with every­thing they need. While this sounds like a great story, HPC’s annu­al finan­cial state­ments reveal the company’s dark side: out of its more than 7.5 bil­lion employ­ees, HPC can’t pay rough­ly 11% of them enough salaries to only sur­vive — around 800 mil­lion peo­ple are starv­ing. Fur­ther­more, HPC can­not guar­an­tee the secu­ri­ty of its employ­ees: there is a con­stant level of vio­lent con­flicts in many of HPC’s depart­ments that can’t be solved with­out employ­ees killing them­selves or being killed by HPC’s armed forces. 

From time to time, these con­flicts affect the com­plete com­pa­ny and lead to the clos­ing of depart­ments, a replace­ment of man­agers, and an over­all reduc­tion in employ­ment. As long as there are enough prof­itable and secure HPC depart­ments that guar­an­tee the com­pa­ny a net prof­it, these prob­lems are regard­ed as man­age­able. How­ev­er, the HPC risk analy­sis depart­ment has been send­ing memos to the board show­ing con­cern about the expo­nen­tial­ly increased dimen­sions of these prob­lems in recent years. Analy­ses in these memos uncov­er not only the above-mentioned prob­lems with employ­ees, but HPC’s prod­uct and ser­vice offer­ing itself is hav­ing a dra­mat­ic impact on the envi­ron­ment. In many of HPC’s loca­tions, envi­ron­men­tal, secu­ri­ty and eco­nom­ic prob­lems have been aggra­vat­ing — result­ing in migra­tion of employ­ees, new lev­els of vio­lence, and sig­nif­i­cant health prob­lems includ­ing glob­al pan­demics and bioter­ror attacks. 

The HPC Man­age­ment Challenge

HPC’s man­age­ment board, which itself has com­prised thou­sands of dif­fer­ent mem­bers due to the long tra­di­tion of the firm, rou­tine­ly meets in specif­i­cal­ly cre­at­ed orga­ni­za­tion­al groups, named after the­mat­ic pri­or­i­ties, such as World Health Organ­i­sa­tion WHO, UNESCO — the Unit­ed Nations Edu­ca­tion­al, Sci­en­tif­ic, and Cul­tur­al Orga­ni­za­tion., World Eco­nom­ic Forum WEF, or MSC — the Munich Secu­ri­ty Con­fer­ence. Some­times, these meet­ings are given more obscure, intrans­par­ent names, such as G8, or Bilder­berg con­fer­ence. At these gath­er­ings, HPC lead­ers try to agree upon the company’s strat­e­gy and dis­cuss how to min­i­mize the above-mentioned prob­lems. From time to time, HPC lead­ers leave with the good feel­ing of hav­ing agreed on a new, suc­cess­ful strat­e­gy. How­ev­er, it rou­tine­ly turns out that agree­ments are short-lived if com­plied with at all. 

Recon­nect! 

The HPC story shows that it is com­plete­ly unre­al­is­tic to assume the plan­et earth’s glob­al chal­lenges could be solved by HPC man­age­ment. The peo­ple in charge call them­selves top man­agers, or lead­ers, but they aren’t capa­ble of second- or higher-order think­ing. They sim­ply can’t asses the effects of their actions. In other words: we can­not and we must not do busi­ness as usual. Time is run­ning out. In 2020, Homo Sapi­ens must re-invent him­self to sur­vive. After the Cog­ni­tive Rev­o­lu­tion, which has result­ed in today’s good as well as bad out­comes, we need the Mind­ful Rev­o­lu­tion — mankind needs to take the next evo­lu­tion­ary step to ensure its own survival. 

The bad news: We need to take this step imme­di­ate­ly — oth­er­wise it will be too late. The good news: We can take this step our­selves, with­out the sup­port of oth­ers. Addi­tion­al­ly to our achieved intel­lec­tu­al level of being the most high­ly devel­oped mam­mal, we need to con­nect our mas­ter­mind brains with our guts, we must syn­chro­nize our bod­ies and our minds. This syn­chro­niza­tion will even­tu­al­ly broad­en our minds and enable us to under­stand more of our ecosystem’s complexity.

The Story of HPC is an excerpt of The Mind­ful Revolution

Human population corporation the mindful revolution world management