The young, the startups and the new understanding of business are causing turmoil in the world of the established big corporates. A new book, written by betahaus Hanburg co-founder Lena Schiller Clausen and the ex-corporate guy Christoph Giesa now sums up the recent developments in the business world and analyses how not only new businesses but new ideas are changing the economy. inventures.eu was present at the book presentation at sektor5 last Friday and listened closely.
Co-author Giesa is a business graduate and was a typical corporate stiff, as he puts it, whereas Lena Schiller Clausen is a wanderer who studied politics, moved around a lot and founded a company in Germany early on. Both now wrote the book New Business Order, in which they give an insight into the old economy and point out why the members, i.e. the enterprises, are changing the world, apparently very sustainably. Bottom line upfront: Because they do things differently and are successful with them.
The bottom line
The concrete question around which their book revolves is: Why is the old business order not working anymore? The unsatisfying answer both authors gave the audience to the question above was: “As the world has become more complex, so did the answers to these questions.”
The book tries to explain several issues to readers with different backgrounds: economic or financial terms are explained to the non-entrepreneurs alike using numerous well-known examples from the present. “If someone had told the CEO of Volkswagen five years ago that millions of Germans would be using car sharing and it would be a big business, no one would have taken him seriously,” argued both Christoph and Lena. Other examples presented by the two of them are the completely changing markets for music, newspapers, new forms of corporate financing such as crowdfunding or –investing, or the mail-order business.
Sharing as a new ideology
The bottom line after all is that more and more, the ideology that consumers do not necessarily have to own products but must merely be able to get a hold of them is one of the breakthroughs of the new business order, as examples in the sharing economy suggest and practical examples like car2go back up: “Why own it? This question has become ideology already,” said the two authors, referring again to the book with its several examples from practically all over the world.
Lastly, they bring examples for well going SMEs in Germany in the last part of the book and use these cases to show how the new business order is really about all the well-known key words such as crowdfunding, bootstrapping, word-of-mouth advertising or avoiding banks when trying to start up. By telling these stories, “we try to explain in the New Business Order how the old world is being disrupted by this change,” they concluded, giving the enthusiastic listener a reason to take a look at what seems to be an interesting compendium of examples, backgrounds and implications of a changing economy.
