Obama's Victory: A Consumer-Citizen Revolt

[Commentary] Barack Obama was elected not only because many Americans feel betrayed and abandoned by their government but because those feelings finally converged with their sense of betrayal at the hands of Corporate America. Their experiences as consumers and as citizens joined to create a wave of revolt against the status quo—as occurred in the American Revolution. Be wary of those who counsel business as usual. This post-election period is a turning point for the business community. It demands an attitude of sober reappraisal and a disposition toward fundamental reinvention. If you don't do it, someone else will. Tens of thousands gathered in Grant Park on the evening of Nov. 4 to hear President-elect Barack Obama. The faces turned toward him were animated—not by surprise, but by recognition. Their needs, yearnings, and injuries had been ignored for so long. Finally there was one man speaking their shared experience of betrayal and their shared hope for renewal. The path to reinventing American business was written on the faces of those gathered there that night. They know exactly what must be done. So can we invent a business model in which advocacy, support, authenticity, trust, relationship, and profit are linked? Can I write that sentence without invoking fear, disbelief, cynicism, or peals of laughter? The ugly practices that killed trust seem intractable to most people, whether they are the ones trapped inside the money machine or on the receiving end of its operations. But after this election, the answer to these questions has irreversibly changed. The answer today would have to be not only "yes we can" but also "yes we must."

(Shoshana Zuboff is the author of The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism. She was the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.)