Thanks for the input and pleae forgive the late reply. I think your cult-example was very illustrative. Yes, that is the way a brand works, by working on the ‘deep’ affective levels of being , rather than the top layers of consciousness and reflextion. And the paralells between new age cultic techniques and so called ‘New Management’ are of course great and go back historically to, at least te 60s. ( Maslow was, if I’m not mistaken, linked to the early integral thinking movement). As I think I metioned before, I’d really like to work on the New Age/New Management connection.

Philips Design’s Reon Brand, Senior Director Foresight, Trends & People Research, met de volgende gevleugelde woorden 😉 “For example, we are seeing the emergence of a shift in how future economic value will be created. In the networked society of today people are increasingly empowered to create their own value and exchange that with their networked peers and even companies participating in the value network. The value propositions of tomorrow need to empower people to create their own experiences.”

For the complete article, see

http://www.design.philips.com/about/design/newvaluebyonedesign/section-13991/index.html

Your comments about enclosures as a strategy and the salience of NLP and other personality trainings, triggered some memories and some personal analysis I once made. In my younger years of ‘spiritual searching’, I hovered around the Rajneesh community for a while. There was something very puzzling about the ways this new type of cult was operating: there was little overt coercion, it was all about seduction; the members were mostly from the elite (their sons and daughters); and the genius of Rajneesh (Osho) was that his communities became laboraties for a whole series of personal change technologies. What was happening there was not so much meditation and experiences of the transpersonal realms, but mostly a ‘liberation from the bottom up’. In other words, it was all about ‘regression in the service of the ego’, liberating the physical, instinctual and emotional levels. The mental level was mostly disdained and heavily manipulated in cultic ways, but Rajneesh himself pretty much operated on a transperspectival level, which put him above criticism. He could one day say that all his followers had to leave California because it would fall into the sea (a neat trick to populate his new Rajneeshpuram city in Oregon), and the next year when it didn’t happen, ironically ask his followers why they believed him.

The effect on most of us was to liberate ourselves from our Christian guilt and repression, but because the critical mental faculties were suppressed, to open us to seduction.

Now if you think of it, isn’t that how brands operate? And were the kind of flexible, passion-seeking people, not precisely the kind of people that today’s corporation are looking for? And isn’t seduction how they operate? Rajneesh was in effect creating the New Human for the New Era.

In another somewhat provocative aside, I once said half-jokingly that the new ruling class is no longer the anal-obsessive Organization Man, but the hysteric. The model of the stock exchange, the hyper-emotional activity based on constant change, has become, through the finanzialization of the economy, and the hyper-flexibility induced by hyper-competition, the norm for the new breed of managers.