Occasionally we at Crowdcentric like take a break from our everyday blocking-and-tackling to think big.
The other day we were discussing our philosophy and mission. I shared an interesting piece from Robert Greene called The Descent of Power: Thoughts on The Great Transformation and How to Master It. The team found it so interesting we decided we’d share it with you too.
Robert Greene, if you don’t know, is a bestselling author of books like The 48 Laws of Power and The 33 Strategies of War. He’s one of my favorite thinkers, partly because he looks at reality without passion or prejudice and distills unvarnished lessons from it. Those lessons may be inspiring or harsh (or both), but they are always insightful. Rather than camp in the skeptical “history repeats itself” or breathless “this time is different!” groups, Greene draws on a vast knowledge of human history to distinguish both the permanent similarities and the permanent shifts between us and our predecessors.
Some themes he discusses:
- Decentralization of power from the few to the many is an irreversible trend set in motion thousands of years ago, and the Internet has turbo-charged it
- The amazing similarity between the revolutionary strategies of Napoleon and Google
- How bubbles tend to signal periods of great transition
Our favorite quote:
“What is really changing in the world is not technology, or the globalization of capital, but the relationships between people—relationships that were once hierarchical and based on the force of authority. This has been radically flattened. What matters most now are the connections between people, the interdependencies and networks that can be formed and the unimpeded flow of information. Any kind of obstruction to that flow will be seen as something from the past, someone or some group trying to halt the course of an historic fatality.”
You can read the whole piece here: The Descent of Power.
Tags: Connection, Google, Napoleon, Organizational Structure, Power, Robert Greene