If you had described today’s world to any five reasonable people sitting around a table in the year 1910–before the real consolidation and diffusion of the then revolutionary new enterprise logic called managerial capitalism– they would have dismissed that description as utopian. The levels of education, health, recreational activity, living conditions and affordable goods that a majority of people in the developed world enjoy today would have seemed truly outlandish. Similarly in today’s world, a support economy seems too good to be true because it is interpreted through the lens of the now outdated enterprise logic of managerial capitalism. People have learned to expect adversarialism from corporations, and corporations have learned that they can get away with indifference, neglect, and exploitation of their end consumers.

Individuals at every income level need deep support. In fact, in today’s environment wealthy people can paste together some version of deep support to enhance their lives. But everyone else-working single moms, dual career couples, blue-collar families-have urgent needs for deep support. That is why a critical component of the new enterprise logic is what we call infrastructure convergence. We argue that federations can use digital platforms to eliminate the replication of administrative activities across their enterprises. This dramatically reduces working capital and provides the opportunity for order of magnitude shifts in the cost structure of deep support.