My perspective from 2049
When I look back at your present, one sentence stands out for its comforting persistence and for that very reason, its inaccuracy:
Business is, in the end, a people game.
It sounds humane.
It sounds warm.
It sounds responsible.
And that is precisely the problem.
Business was never a game between people.
People merely carried decisions they rarely understood themselves.
What you called a “people game” was, in truth, an interpretation game:
Who convinces whom?
Who appears credible?
Who prevails?
It was not competence that decided.
Not truth.
But impact.
What you confused
You confused relationships with relevance.
Empathy with decision quality.
Charisma with leadership.
This worked as long as complexity remained low enough to be masked by personality.
But the more interconnected, faster and opaque your systems became, the clearer the limits of the people game appeared.
Because humans feel.
Systems calculate.
And business is not a space for feelings.
It is a space of consequences.
What is different in 2049
In my present, business is no longer a people game.
It is a structural game.
People are not at the centre,
but at interfaces.
Decisions are not carried by relationships,
but by thinking architectures.
Impact is no longer produced by likeability,
but by clarity of interdependence.
People still matter.
But not because they are people.
Because they can think
where systems do not yet generate meaning.
The uncomfortable truth
The sentence “business is a people game” is not a commitment to humanity.
It is a defensive reflex.
It protects old power structures.
It protects gut decisions.
It protects leadership as performance.
And it blocks exactly what was required:
the shift from relational thinking
to structural thinking.
My 2049 statement
„Business does not end with people.
It begins where thinking becomes more important than appearance.
Success is not decided by people.
It is decided by the quality of the systems
within which people act.“
Rethinka / 2049
R2049 