The next year, British economist David Simpson claimed that macroeconomics had outlived its usefulness in The End of Macro-Economics (1994). Then, science writer John Horgan ticked off legions of scientists with his provocative book The End of Science (1997). That same year, Nobel Laureate chemist Ilya Prigogine told us in The End of Uncertainty (1997) of an imminent broad-reaching shift in scientific worldview that would make much of what stands as scientific truth today scientific myth tomorrow.

So many endings must mean so many new beginnings. Around the start of the 1990s, virtually no major field of human endeavor was spared from predictions of its ending—not literally, but certainly in terms of past conceptualizations of its nature. The world of business is no exception. It is experiencing far-reaching changes in our understanding of its fundamental purposes and how companies should operate. Indeed, looking at the magnitude of change in the business world, it is not overreaching to suggest that an historic social transformation of capitalism is underway.

Twenty or so years ago, just as the Internet was going mainstream, few could have credibly predicted the scale of this transformation. In this book, we provide some measure of that scale by profiling companies that have broadened their purpose beyond the creation of shareholder wealth to act as agents for the larger good. We view these companies not as outliers but as the vanguard of a new business mainstream.

We call this era of epochal change the "Age of Transcendence.” The dictionary defines transcendence as a "state of excelling or surpassing or going beyond usual limits.”2 We’re not the first to speak of a transcendent shift in the zeitgeist of contemporary society; Columbia University humanities professor Andrew Delbanco says, "The most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence.”3 This craving for transcendence could be playing a strong role in the erosion of the dominance of scientifically grounded certainty, which has characterized worldviews in western societies since the dawn of modern science. Subjective perspectives based on how people feel have gained greater acceptance in recent times.

Others have taken note of the rising subjectivity of worldviews. One is French philosopher Pierre Levy, who has devoted his professional life to studying the cultural and cognitive impacts of digital technologies. He believes that the shift toward subjectivity may prove to be one of the most important considerations in business in this century.4 Levy also believes that Ayn Rand–style objectivism, firmly embraced by Milton Friedman and his proteges, is passing into history as feelings and intuition have risen in stature in the common mind. Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book on intuition, Blink, is a testament to that, as is James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds.

The dramatic upsurge of interest in spirituality in the U.S. that has helped spawn stadium-sized "mega churches” is another indication that something big is happening in the bedrock of culture. Numerous consumer surveys report that people are looking less to "things” and more to experiences to achieve satisfaction with their lives.5 For many, the experiences they most covet transcend a world that is materialistically defined by science, and for that matter most of traditional business enterprise.

People who lead companies are not insulated from the influences of culture. After all, they drink from the same cultural waters as the customers they serve and the employees they lead. The executives we write about as exemplars in this book reflect in their managerial philosophies the changes in culture we’ve been talking about. They are champions of a new, humanistic vision of capitalism’s role in society. It is a vision that transcends the narrower perspectives of most companies in the past, rising to embrace the common welfare in its concerns. Former Timberland CEO Jeffrey Swartz (whose company has been acquired by VF Corp.) unabashedly said that his company’s primary mission was "Make the world a better place.” But Swartz and the other executives we hold up as role models in this book are not starry-eyed do-gooders. They are resolute and highly successful business professionals who augment their human-centered company vision with sound management skills and an unswerving commitment to do good by all who are touched by their companies.

We call their companies "firms of endearment” because they strive through their words and deeds to endear themselves to all their primary stakeholders—customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders—by aligning the interests of all in such a way that no stakeholder group gains at the expense of other stakeholder groups; rather, they all prosper together. These executives are driven as much by what they believe to be right (subjectively grounded morality) as by what others might more objectively claim to be right.

Ponder for a moment what the results of a Conference Board survey say about the moral outlook in executive suites across the country. Seven hundred executives were asked why their companies engaged in social or citizenship initiatives. Only 12 percent mentioned business strategy. Three percent mentioned customer attraction and retention, and one percent cited public expectations.

The remaining 84 percent said they were driven by motivations such as improving society, company traditions, and their personal values.6 We don’t think members of this 84 percent all sat down and calculated in rational fashion the direct payoff of carrying out their duties according to high moral standards. More likely, we believe, most simply feel in their gut what they should be doing. This is how movements and revolutions unfold: as much from the heart as from the mind. What we write about in this book is a powerful movement if not altogether a revolution.

We are poised precariously at what physicists call a bifurcation point—an interregnum of normalcy between the poles of death and birth (or rebirth), when an old order faces its end and a new order struggles to emerge from its fetal state. At such times, the future becomes more uncertain than usual because events within the time and space boundaries of a bifurcation point have infinite possible outcomes. This is why Valentine declared, "The future is disorder” but challenges us to join efforts to bring forth a new order with the yeasty lure: "It’s the best possible time to be alive when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”

Humankind is entering a realm where no one has gone before. Its landscape is as unfamiliar to us as the world that we’ve known until now would be to a time traveler from the eighteenth century. Let’s travel back in time to better appreciate the evolutionary nature of culture through brief reflections on the antecedent two cultural ages in U.S. history from which the Age of Transcendence is emerging.

The Age of Empowerment

We call the first cultural era in America the "Age of Empowerment.” The signing of the Declaration of Independence and publication of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776 marked its beginning. That these two epochal events in human history occurred in the same year is an extraordinary historic coincidence. The former event was about a free society, the latter about free markets. Joined at the hip, democracy and capitalism marched into the future to bring forth a whole new world, one that would elevate the lot of the common man to heights never experienced or imagined before in human history.

For the first time in history, ordinary people were empowered by codified law to shape their own destinies. People born without social distinction could raise themselves from abject poverty to the highest public and private offices. A free market economy aided their efforts. Liberal education and laws that rewarded industry supported America’s determination to become a great nation. As decades went on, millions of families rose out of subsistence existence. The aristocratic culture of Europe may have generated great philosophic thinking in the Age of Enlightenment, but common folk in America generated great material accomplishment in the Age of Empowerment. By the end of the Age of Empowerment, which we mark around 1880, America was connected coast-to-coast by telegraph lines, railroads, a single currency, and a national banking system that the Lincoln presidency had established. Another great accomplishment of the Lincoln administration was the establishment of the land grant college program that increasingly brought the benefits of higher education to the masses. The nation was primed for its next great cultural era.

The Age of Knowledge

The intellectual and economic liberation of the masses paved the way for the Age of Knowledge. Within a half-dozen years of 1880, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, the first practical incandescent light bulb, and the first central electrical power system.

During the Age of Knowledge, the U.S. transitioned rapidly from an agrarian to an industrial society. Science exploded into daily life. The time from laboratory prototype to the marketplace came to be often measured in months instead of decades. Great scientific breakthroughs spawned great industries. And great industries created the modern consumer economy. Economic gains across society raised living standards to previously unimaginable heights. Childbirth and childhood deaths became rarities. Life expectancy in the U.S. shot up from 47 years at birth in 1900 to 76 years at birth by 1990.

Business management took a seeming leap forward in the early years of the twentieth century when Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced scientific discipline to the practice of management in Scientific Management (1911). Alfred P. Sloan invented the modern corporation after becoming president of General Motors in 1923. In 1921 John Watson, head of Johns Hopkins’ psychology department and founder of the behaviorist school of psychology, joined the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency to establish the first consumer research center in the nation. Science now undergirded the full spectrum of business—from product design and organizational management, to consumer research and marketing.

Ever since Ransom E. Olds established the first assembly line (no, it wasn’t Henry Ford; he just mechanized Olds’ assembly line), the operating focus of business has been on constant improvements in productivity—getting more and more from less and less. For a long time, this served society well. Quality of life steadily rose while the cost of living steadily fell. The material wellbeing of ordinary people reached astonishing levels. Materialism became the bedrock of business, society, and culture.

In time, however, preoccupation with productivity and cost cutting to improve bottom lines began to take a toll on communities, workers, their families, and the environment. Scores of communities fell into economic disrepair as companies abandoned them for venues promising lower operating costs. Legions of families endured abject suffering as their breadwinners struggled to find new jobs. Life was sucked out of villages, towns, and center cities across the nation. Sprawling slums filled with the carcasses of abandoned factories became unwelcoming neighborhoods. Apologists justified business decisions that wreaked havoc on individuals and their families and neighborhoods by invoking the Darwinian "survival of the fittest” theme. The pro-business argument was simple: To reap the benefits of capitalism, society must tolerate the pain it sometimes causes people on the lower rungs of society.

But growing numbers are now wondering, "How much more pain do we have to live with?” Ordinary citizens increasingly view commerce as lacking a human heart. They feel that most companies see them as just numbers to be controlled, manipulated, and exploited.

They know that to many companies they have little flesh-and-blood realness—that they have the same abstract quality as people on the ground have for pilots dropping bombs from 40,000 feet. But the times they are a-changing, as Bob Dylan sang in the 1960s.

New Republic senior editor Gregg Easterbrook has observed,

"A transition from material want to meaning want is in progress on an historically unprecedented scale—involving hundreds of millions of people—and may eventually be recognized as the principle cultural development of our age."

Welcome to the Age of Transcendence, the highest pinnacle that humanity has yet ascended to.

The Age of Transcendence

The point of tracing America’s cultural evolution since its founding is to focus attention on the idea that free societies continuously progress through processes of cultural evolution, the equivalent of a person’s evolutionary progress in what psychologists call “personality development.” Societies, like people, are driven to strive for being more today than they were yesterday, and more tomorrow than they are today. Indeed, Steve McIntosh suggests that this is the very purpose of evolution:

The evolutionary story of our origins has tremendous cultural power that transcends the boundaries of science; it shapes the view of who we are and why we are here. Yet many of the scientific luminaries responsible for educating the public about evolution tell us that it is an essentially random or accidental process with no larger meaning. However, as the scientific facts of evolution have increasingly come to light, these very facts demonstrate that the process of evolution is unmistakably progressive.

As we come to see how evolution progresses, this reveals evolution’s purpose—to grow toward ever-widening realizations of beauty, truth, and goodness.

While scientific discovery and technological development have been the primary catalysts in the evolution of culture, recent demographic changes have played quite a large role in reshaping culture. Aging populations are altering the course of humankind. But this is not the first time demography has reset the directions of humankind.

Recent findings by anthropologists indicate a sudden increase in longevity 30,000 years ago that changed human culture dramatically. The longevity gains created a population explosion among grandparents. For the first time in human history, relatively large numbers of postmenopausal women were available to support their daughters and granddaughters and to begin refining domestic life. More grandfathers were available to instruct young males in “the old ways,” thus strengthening generational continuity.

Many anthropologists regard the “grandparent phenomenon” as a major turning point in the cultural evolution of humankind. Among other benefits, the sharp increase in the grandparent population led to a moderation of the aggressive behavior of youth. This reduced tribal warfare, freeing tribal attention and energy to move toward higher states of cultural development.

Something similar could be happening today—that is, the rapid growth of an aging population is altering the zeitgeist of society, driving humankind toward higher states of cultural development. We can cite 1989 as the formal start of this new course because starting that year, most adults in the U.S. were 40 or older for the first time in history (the median age of adults now exceeds 45 across the American population and is more than 50 for Caucasians). Like an echo of the moderating influences brought about by an explosion in the grandparent population 30,000 years ago, the aging of the population in the vast majority of nations in the world today raises the prospects for a “kinder and gentler society”—to use Peggy Noonan’s words in a campaign speech she wrote for George H. W. Bush in 1988.

But another development occurring around the time the new “mature adult” majority came into being has also played a major role in catalyzing quantum changes in the bedrock of culture. Also in 1989, British software engineer Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Within a few short years, the Internet went from being an arcane communications tool used mostly by an elite few to a mainstream artifact used by tens of millions. The World Wide Web shifted the balance of information power to the masses. It dramatically changed how people interact with each other, democratized information flow, and forced companies to operate with far greater transparency. The Age of Transcendence bears similarities to what author Daniel Pink calls the “Conceptual Age” in his book A Whole New Mind. Pink defines the Conceptual Age as an “economy and a society built on the inventive, empathetic, big-picture capabilities of what’s rising.

He describes the Conceptual Age as the successor to the Information Age. We define our term for the same era a bit differently. The Age of Transcendence signifies a cultural watershed in which the physical (materialistic) influences that dominated culture in the twentieth century ebb while metaphysical (experiential) influences become stronger. This is helping to drive a shift in the foundations of culture from an objective base to a subjective base: people are increasingly relying on their own counsel to decide their course of action. This trait is typically present among people in midlife and older who are generally less subject to the “herd” behavior that is so prevalent among youth. That shift acknowledges a long suppressed idea in a world largely guided by the Newtonian certainty that Ilya Prigogine says is scattering to the winds: Ultimately, everything is personal.

Pink wrote enthusiastically about society moving from the more rational perspectives commonly associated with the left brain to the more emotional, intuitive perspectives usually associated with the right brain. He argued that companies in the U.S. need to move more toward right brain values to work an advantage over companies abroad who want to build relationships with American consumers. As he sees it, this means that U.S. companies must connect with what he calls the six senses of the Conceptual Age in product design, marketing, and customer relations. These six senses are design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. They all have deep roots in the brain’s right hemisphere.

However, the issue of change in the foundations of culture is not as simple as a matter of left brain versus right brain. We see the marketplace generally favoring companies that integrate both right and left brain perspectives to yield what Austrian neurologist Wolf Singer calls “unitive thinking,” which is a distinct third kind of thinking in Singer’s mind that he claims is the ultimate source of creativity.

In the wake of Rene Descartes’ formulation of the scientific method, the Western mind came to be dominated by “either/or” constructs that are largely moderated in the analytical left brain. That side of the brain tends to rank things hierarchically in categories. It routinely excludes from serious consideration what doesn’t fall into a clearly defined category. To put this in a business context, in exclusionary left brain thinking, stakeholders are relegated to categories. Connections between stakeholders in differing categories are incidental and accidental. The picture is quite different among firms of endearment (FoEs). Their leaders think in unitive fashion, approaching their tasks with holistic vision in which all players in the game of commerce are interconnected and significant.

Welcome, again, to the Age of Transcendence. Settle down, get comfortable, and read on. There are many new rules to learn, because almost everything you thought you knew could be wrong. We are going to be in this age for quite a while—probably for the rest of your life, and longer.