Business is conducted from the inside out. Business processes are organized from the point of view of the individual consumer and aligned with the individual’s interests. Forget about what niche you’re in, or even what industry. The new enterprise asks, “Who will want us to support them, and what do they need?” Then figure out whom you need to collaborate with to make it happen. Wholly new “support networks” will cluster around individuals, families and virtual communities with the sole purpose of supporting their aims.

Today there is a growing chasm between consumers’ needs and the business organizations they depend upon. Too often people must confront a wall of cluelessness and indifference—a commercial world still fitted out for the old mass order. This chasm can be seen each time someone spends the evening checking her phone bill for bogus charges, finds his routine insurance claim rejected or spends hours on the phone trying to fix a malfunctioning new computer. The chasm is expressed in these brutal facts. Only 4 percent of U.S. adults say they trust their HMO; 7 percent, their health insurer; 11 percent, their life insurer; 12 percent, their telco. And the numbers don’t get much better. Seventy-four percent say corporate America’s reputation is “not good” or “terrible,” and 83 percent say that big companies have too much power, according to recent polls.

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in today’s world, a support economy seems too good to be true because it is interpreted through the lens of the now outdated enterprise logic of managerial capitalism.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.