Understanding how Customer Value shape shifts - a key to glimpsing the future not only of Business but of human life itself.

Part 1 of a series that aims to help illumine the past to better glimpse the future.

Jul 11, 2025

We are about to enter, correction, we are about to make a world in which, for the very first time in human history, we - homo sapiens, that is - will not be the brightest kids on the block. That’s what we’re told, anyway: human intelligence is about to be overtaken in many if not most areas of activity by Artificial Intelligence.

So, if this is true, it truly is a new dawn. But what will be our likely reaction? “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”1 or “I don’t like Mondays, I wanna shoot the whole day down”2 ?

The fact is, of course, none of us knows.

No change there, then. Our stabs at the future have always been guesses. The point is, they can be either bad guesses or reasonably good guesses, and one guide towards the positive end of that spectrum is an understanding and reassessment of the past.

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence -
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.3

Let’s explore.

(Image at the top is by Shutterstock)

Obviously, I do not know what it was like when and where you first woke up in this world but, for me, although we were as poor as church mice, the overall mood felt tolerably positive.

It was England just after the end of World War Two and one of the first things I learned was that the people around me had had enough of fighting and destruction. They wanted Peace, Cooperation and Opportunity.

That’s not to say that there were no conflicts. Far from it. Throughout my childhood and into adulthood there were full-on wars. Korea, Suez, Vietnam, and more, and from 1945 to 1990 the long-drawn-out Cold War that necessitated fleets of American B-52s and British V-bombers to provide 24/7 nuclear deterrence out on the front line between the West and the Soviet Union. But despite this, the general mood, as I experienced it, felt reasonably benign and hopeful.

On the world stage, the United Nations was created, the Jewish people were given a tiny sliver of land back in their traditional homeland, and a bunch of Western European countries formed a ‘Common Market’ (“Let’s compete with goods and services rather than keep knocking seven bells out of one another”). And, oh, at the start of 1971, an entity called the World Economic Forum came into being, proclaiming as its mission …

We bring together government, businesses and civil society to improve the state of the world.

(The emphasis on ‘world’ is as per the online source.)

So, it seems reasonable to say that, despite the numerous conflicts, ‘Peace, Cooperation and Opportunity’ was a general mantra of the times.

However, at the end of the 1980s and start of the ‘90s there was a dramatic shift. It wasn’t that things reverted to the violent status quo ante but rather that hubris took centre stage. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me to have had to do with two main factors, each of which was of absolutely enormous import:

FACTOR ONE: THE VICTORY OF WESTERN LIBERAL DEMOCRACY.
In 1989 the Berlin Wall, a symbol of the antipathy between the West and the Soviet Union, came down or, rather, was torn down. That same year, historian Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay titled The End of History in which he wrote:

In watching the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history. … The twentieth century saw the developed world descend into a paroxysm of ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war. … What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

Subsequently, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.

“What joy! Fukuyama was right, wasn’t he? The West’s free-market economic model can now rule the world, can’t it?” “Imagine - Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government forever!” “Hey guys, we’re in the most wonderful time! We can save the world and make loadsa money in the process! Perfect!”

FACTOR TWO: THE BIRTH OF CULTURAL MARXISM.
As a number of influential commentators (perhaps most notably, James Lindsey) have subsequently pointed out, Marxism had not been defeated, had not given up, had not folded. Rather, as Lindsay and others have stated, the academics and others who remained fans of Comrade Karl’s thinking ceased their attack on the capitalist economic function system, but only in order to to switch their energies to a broad-spectrum hammering at the cultural foundations of the West.

That’s where all the hoo-hah about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (D.E.I) comes from, and the idea that racism is a systemic feature of all Western societies. According to this thesis it isn’t a question of whether racism is present, the promoters of this philosophy insist that it always is, but what form it happens to be taking in any locale.

Not least, this attack challenged the idea that meritocracy is a good basis for the continued prospering of society and turned everything into a battle between oppressed and oppressors, victims and victimized.

The world of ‘woke’ was born, and everything redefined in therapeutic terms.

“We’re all victims now … oh, except for those white, heterosexual males, obvs!”

THE UPSHOT:
Back in 1990, Factor Two, the social issue, had not yet popped its head over the public parapet. It was marinating away from public gaze in the halls of academia.

By contrast, Factor One - the Western victory, was openly rarin’ to go, but how best might it go forward in Business terms? Management consultancies, that’s how.

Since 1926, when James O. McKinsey launched his “accounting and management firm” in Chicago, things had come a long way, to the point where, by the time the Berlin Wall came down in ‘89, management consultancies were more generally recognized as universal problem solvers and money makers for their clients

There were others, too. Andersen Consulting, for example, created in 1989 as a division of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm. Later, in 2001, it broke away to operate entirely independently as Accenture.

McKinsey, Accenture and other firms were becoming powerhouses recognized for their skills at helping businesses to modernize.

But what did that mean?

To answer that question it’s necessary to think about what businesses do, how they make their money. And to do that, it’s necessary to work out what their customers buy from them. I don’t mean the specific products or services, but rather the value basis that operates. Ultimately, Business & Commerce is all about Customer Value.

From the Industrial Revolution all the way through two centuries to the 1980s the dominant Customer Value mode relating to all manner of products and services was one based on the intrinsic worth of whatever was on offer.

Which is to say, it was all about the product itself which was, so to speak, the ‘value container’. Will this motor car reliably get from A to B? Will the lawnmower cut the grass? Will the mousetrap trap mice? Will the detergent clean clothes?

Admittedly around 1990 we were on the cusp of a change from this dynamic but the dominant mode was still the one that had been born in the Industrial Revolution whereby customers bought products and suppliers’ success was dependent upon selling the production of those products. It was particularly successful because social improvement had proved to be a natural follow-on.

As English historian G.M. Young wrote in 1936:

Gas-lighting of the streets was hardly an improvement so much as a revolution in public security, cheap cotton goods in personal cleanliness, paraffin lamps in domestic comfort. Finance, the manipulation of wealth and credit as things by themselves, three or four degrees removed from the visible crop or ore, was an adjunct. Production was the thing itself.

The net result of this was that it all came down to volume - quantity of sales. Which, in turn, meant that there were two ways, and two ways only, for a supplier to achieve greater longevity, success and profit:

Sell more units of product.
Reduce the cost per unit of production.

If both of these outcomes could be achieved simultaneously, hey, that’s when the gravy train got turbocharged.

The More Than $64,000 Question (sorry, showing my age there) is … how best might these dual outcomes be achieved?

Well, a stark, staring, obvious way to do it was to reduce the cost of unit production by sourcing cheaper labour.

In pre-digital times, there was a far more direct correlation than now between product quality and cost of manufacture. Put crudely, up-market and luxury goods commanded high prices and high margins because they involved more expensive materials and more, and more skilled, labour.

The advent of digital technology changed all this - it, so to speak, solved the quality issue - but, still, back at the end of the twentieth century and start of the twenty-first century labour was a major cost element. And it’s probably true to say that, by and large, the most influential decision makers in enterprises were the most advanced in years, still with their thought processes in the past.

So, cheaper labour really did hold out the promise of greater sales and profitability, quickly. And where was cheaper labour to be found?

Overseas.

Hmm. There you have it - this powered the huge outsourcing tsunami of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Actions taken at that time de-industrialized the West, put millions of Westerners out of work, and hollowed out vast areas of Western countries in the process.

But, the argument went, it was all part of a greater purpose; effectively, the creation, for the first time in our history, of a global society. It was ‘the end of history’ and that meant that liberal democracy could openly display its proven superiority to the world.

It was a no-brainer, wasn’t it? Everyone would happily join in, wouldn’t they?

Aargh! by David Pinder

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