Being unique, Apple in one sense is unrepresentative. But in another its very success starkly poses some of the most urgent, representative questions about 21st century capitalism – not the usual questions about how it does it, but why.

In some respects, Apple is a role model. It understands better what it means to be a company than almost any other. It has twigged that the best way to compete is to remove itself from direct competition through innovation. Markets eventually compete away the high price of novelty – although slowly in Apple’s case – but by that time it has been able to use the proceeds to innovate some more – first in computers, then in music, followed by phones, tablets and, not least, retail.

That is possible because Apple reaps full benefit from doing more things righter for consumers than any of its rivals. Apple’s real genius is embodied not in products but in the ‘institutional ecosystem’ that links products to their marketplace: first the integrated hardware and software, then iTunes and the App Store. iTunes is built on the power of ‘pull’ – it makes it absurdly easy for you to get exactly what you want, no more, no less, as opposed to what a record producer wants you to have. Nothing mediates between demand and instant supply. The App Store goes a step further, giving iPhone and iPad users the opportunity to go beyond customisation to create additional value themselves – as with burgeoning medical or social-entrepreneurial applications, for example.

Crowdsourcing apps means that Apple doesn’t even need to know what a device is for. The iPad is a mega-hit that has no killer app – but, hey, that’s OK, the customer can decide. Outsourcing innovation like this keeps Apple effortlessly differentiated (thus justifying those everyday high prices) while the customer does the work – and by the way, Apple, will take 30 per cent of your App Store returns as its cut for providing the platform. Financial genius: but because of the potential for user value creation Apple can claim to generate at least some of what Umair Haque terms ‘thick’ or authentic value, as opposed to the thin, extractive financial kind.

Not that Apple is light on the financial kind. And this is where questions surface that don’t arise for less profitable firms. Where does this stupendous profit come from? What is it for? As one blogger asked, is Apple too profitable?

In fact, unique as it is, the business model that emerged from the seminar evokes unease as well as admiration. Apple’s stakeholder relations are weirdly asymmetrical: while the tight customer relationship is legendary, the financial engine is overdeveloped at the expense of a social conscience that is stunted to the point of autism. How else could it have been caught so unawares by the labour abuses uncovered at assembler Foxconn’s Chinese plants? Apple’s reaction – to demand improvements without changing its own draconian terms – gives Foxconn little option but to replicate its customer’s behaviour in even more extreme form, outsourcing and beating up its own subcontractors. The sufferers are employees, many of whom, says activist and researcher Jenny Chan, are semi willing student interns. While in Apple’s relationships with customers both sides gain – thick value – in those with its Chinese suppliers there is only one winner. As Aditya Chakrabortty noted in The Guardian, Apple’s business model offers no benefits to US workers, who badly need jobs and incomes – but little more to its Foxconn subcontractors.

These issues come into sharp focus as, with margins rising as Foxconn’s fall, and $110bn (more than enough to satisfy even Steve Jobs’ notorious conservatism) sitting in the bank, Apple asks itself a momentous question. What is it to do with all that money?

The standard ‘thin value’ answer is to ‘disgorge’ it to shareholders. The thick value alternative – and Apple’s pivotal opportunity – is to use it to benefit the environment on which it ultimately depends by creating stable, well-paid US jobs and investing in supporting technologies and institutions. With labour accounting for just 4 per cent of an iPhone 4’s production costs, it could well afford to. And until 30 years ago, when the ideologically based shareholder value movement falsely decreed that shareholders alone bore risk and were therefore entitled to all the reward, that’s what it would have done. Instead, in the 1980s such inclusive ‘retain and reinvest’ models (keynote speaker Prof William Lazonick’s term) gave way to the sharply shareholder-focused ‘downsize and distribute’ as managers responded to their equity-based incentives. Employment, career and pensions have all been sacrificed on the altar of shareholder returns, not to mention (as Foxconn workers will testify) pay and conditions. Thus have business models like Apple’s been used to benefit directly the 1 per cent at the expense of the rest of us.

As Lazonick’s research shows, as dividends and share buybacks have absorbed ever larger proportions of US company earnings, less and less has been left for R&D. So not surprisingly innovation is another casualty. Will that be Apple’s story? Stock options currently worth $730m give CEO Tim Cook every incentive to continue on the ‘downsize/distribute’ track, and the recent announcement of renewed dividend payments and authorisation of share buybacks point ominously in the same direction. Perhaps naively, I still harbour hope that the company’s sensitivity to its customers (not shareholders) gives us a pressure point to push on. As Chan notes, ‘Products embody social relations’ – and those embodied in iPhones and iPads are simply unworthy of the company customers want Apple to be. This, rather than a drying-up of creativity after the passing of Steve Jobs, may be the real danger to Apple’s future: as Chakrabortty puts it, for all the sleekness of its products, Apple’s business model is not just unattractive – over the long term, it may be unsustainable too.

When I left, my successor promptly reversed the decision – and energised by her new job she became a star, ending up on a national where, exquisitely, she later commissioned me to write a couple of pieces for the business section.

That experience taught me a lot about the power of context and expectation, later backed up by impeccable academic research: although some human capacities are fixed (most people will never play football as well as Cesc Fabregas or invent the theory or relativity), many others aren’t. Generally speaking, if you expect people to do something well, they will do better than if you expect them to do badly – and that includes physical as well as mental attributes. Other evidence shows that only a tiny proportion of performance (Deming put it at 5 per cent) is dependent on the person alone, compared with 95 per cent on the system they are working in – and over which mostly they have no control, except to behave badly. To some degree, therefore, quality, or the lack of it, is in the eye of the beholder.

So I was mildly shocked to read a recent piece in the FT on managing mediocrity that perpetuates so many hoary old myths about talent management that it’s hard to know where to begin.

Let’s try. In fact the article is a classic case of looking at the world through management eyes, in which the worker figures only as an object. It’s as if management played no part in employees’ performance. Yet the best predictor of employee engagement and satisfaction at work, and thus of discretionary effort, is the quality of the immediate manager. And here the evidence collected by Julian Birkinshaw and colleagues at London Business School is incontrovertible. In the view from below, more people who actually do the work have bad managers than have good ones.

Survey after survey confirms the management gap. Thus, some years ago, the CIPD noted that if Britain at work was a marriage, it was ‘a marriage under stress, characterised by poor communications and low levels of trust’.

Only a minority of workers felt senior managers and directors treated them with respect, and two-thirds didn’t trust them. Around one-quarter of employees rarely or never looked forward to going to work, and almost half either wanted to leave or were in the process of doing so.

Gallup then put the cost to the UK economy of active disengagement at £40bn, as employees expressed their disenchantment by going off sick, not trying, or going somewhere else. The culprit: poor management. ‘Workers say they don’t know what is expected of them, their managers don’t care about them as people, their jobs aren’t a good fit for their talents, and their views count for little’, Gallup reported. Disaffection actually grew with tenure, so ‘human assets that should increase in value with training and development instead depreciate as managers and companies fail to maximise this investment.’

Treating talent as a fixed quantity, categorising workers as A, B or C players and hiring (and firing) accordingly is yet one more crude example of the fallacy of composition that so besets management: believing that the performance of the whole is the sum of those of the individual parts. A better analogy is football. Most work, like football, is a team game. In teams the context is all: so a well-integrated team of B players can outplay a disjointed group of stars, a C player can be elevated into an essential element in an A team, and a star can be brought to earth by a transfer into an unsympathetic context. Just ask Chelsea’s Fernando Torres. Academic research among stock analysts confirms this: stars often underperform in a new setting because the role of the non-stars in establishing the enabling environment has been underestimated. A team is a complex and sensitive organisation.

This explains why the idea of bottom-slicing or forced ranking, as casually proposed in the FT article, is in most cases so misguided. Forced ranking has been a fact of life at GE, and also at Microsoft. But there is no evidence of a causal link with their success, and stacks to say that more often than not it does more harm than good. It takes no account of the team and the impossibility of optimising its performance by optimising the individual parts. Forced ranking introduces fear and competition, and while in economic theory these optimise individual performance, they sub-optimise the team. Fear makes people stupid, and if it motivates at all, it is the behaviours that undermine teamwork, such as hiding, cheating and hoarding precious information and other resources.

One of the few economists brave enough to stand out against the crowd is Umair Haque, director of Havas Media Lab, eloquent and outspoken blogger at Harvard Business Review and author of 2010’s ‘The New Capitalist Manifesto’. Paradoxically, so strong is the economic orthodoxy – with its potential not just for ridicule but for simply freezing out dissident voices – that it takes more courage to confront it as a ‘professional’ than as an amateur ranter. ‘Manifesto’, with its distinction between ‘thick’ or authentic and the ‘thin’ value of conventional business economics, was a bold step off the beaten track (into the wilderness, the orthodox would sniff). ‘Betterness: Economics for Humans’ (Kindle Single or pdf from hbr.org) takes things a step further, sketching out a framework for thinking about the organisations of the future.

Haque’s underlying contention is that in 2008’s financial crisis, and its aftermath, we are witnessing not just the popping of a bubble, but the final meltdown of the obsolete social and economic institutions, including economics and management, that carried us through the 20th century. Our institutions have become ‘extractive’: they take increasingly more value out of the world around them than they put in. In these circumstances, he says, there can’t and won’t be a recovery in the normal sense, because the problem isn’t a recession. It is the end of an era and a paradigm, the Great Splintering of a whole social contract.

In many of his blogs, Haque heaps fire and brimstone on the corruption, trivialisation and McSerfdom that are the by-product of today’s reductive materialistic paradigm. Since Milton Friedman, theorists have posited that the job of economics, and of management as its faithful amenuensis, is to curb the pathologies of human nature. Haque is well aware that establishing a new paradigm it is not a simple matter of demonstrating the inadequacy of the existing one: at least the outline of a new and better model must be visible. Here therefore he concentrates on the challenging job of constructing a positive framework, one moreover that relates to individuals as well as corporations. This is by no means the final word, as he is the first to admit. But as the first on the long route to building a new and very different corporate order it has special value. So instead of companies narrowly built (notably unsuccessfully, as it happens) to prevent anyone else – workers, customers, suppliers and society as a whole – from eating the shareholders’ lunch, he proposes an architecture which would allow them to be judged not on financial profit but on how far they the world a better, more fulfilled place than when they found it.

The key is in the book’s subtitle – ‘economics for humans’. The overarching idea is ‘eudaimonia’, the Aristotelian concept of ‘human flourishing’ or wellbeing, a far wider idea of enrichment than material wealth. Wealth plays a part but as an enabler, not an end in itself (bringing to mind Dave Packard’s reminder from a different age that ‘profit is not the proper end and aim of management – it is what makes all the proper ends and aims possible’). Translated into economic terms eudaimonia would embrace measures of social, human and creative capital as well as the financial kind.

On the path to ‘a better path to prosperity’, Haque invokes three other difficult-to-quantify Greek terms as guides: poiesis, arête, and kairos, corresponding roughly to generational advantage, organisational advantage, and exploiting turning points – as now – to change the terms of the game. The starting point is that business as usual is not only not the answer: it is the problem. ‘Organisations that can’t contribute to the Common Wealth are increasingly useless to people, communities, society, the natural world and future generations. Though they may grow GDP or create shareholder value, increasingly they cannot spark the conditions for a meaningfully good life. Those that can, in contrast, are useful, and they are rarer than a downpour in the Sahara. And it is to those organisation that power, advantage, trust and returns are already inexorably flowing’.

No organisations have done more than start out along that route. But some companies offer a glimpse of part of the equation. For example, think of Apple, which has got to be the biggest company in the world by doing exactly what companies should: generating value through relationships (once an Apple buyer always an Apple buyer), through ceaseless innovation (rather than protecting what it’s got and extracting rents), and also, crucially, by turning devices like the iPhone and iPad over to buyers via the app store to create their own value in their own lives – iStethoscope, anyone? Apple is hard to compete against precisely because doing more of the same harder, faster, cheaper than rivals, the tradition recipe for competition, is simply irrelevant against this kind of mastery. As Haque observes in the chapter on arête, ‘the habits of betterness’, betterness involves going beyond competitive advantage: ‘The goal isn’t mastering and defeating rivals, but living up to your own potential’. An organisation’s most important adversary is itself.

Ownership, topically, is part of the story. Until the 1990s, Goldman Sachs, founded in 1869, was, if not liked, universally admired for its acumen, its connections and the intellect of its people. Like McKinsey in consultancy, it was the stamp on the CV that every budding investment bankers wanted to have.

Until 1999, when it went public, Goldman Sachs had been a partnership. Now, like any other ownership form, partnerships have advantages and disadvantages. The ‘disadvantages’ are conservatism and limited access to capital (oh, wait…). The advantage, as Evening Standard city editor Tony Hilton told a Foundation forum recently, is that in a partnership, with unlimited liability, there is strong peer pressure to maintain ethical and other standards. As Adam Smith put it more than two centuries ago in a dig at joint-stock companies, ‘The directors of such companies…, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own…. Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less in the management of the affairs of such a company.’ True to form, ‘anxious vigilance’, whether about money, clients or reputation, was conspicuously less after Goldman went public. The extent of the ‘negligence and profusion’, meanwhile, came into full view in another Smith’s celebrated retirement op-ed in The New York Times.

A similar erosion of standards can be seen in other professions that have travelled the same path. Contrast the law and accountancy. Legal firms, largely still partnerships, have mostly retained their professional ethos and reputation. The big accountants, on the other hand, abandoned the partnership form in the 1970s, since when, says Hilton bluntly, they ‘have become charlatans. It’s a classic story: ‘what’s the profit and what would you like it to be’, and no one believes accountants are of any value at all any more. Those who do might ask why they all gave the banks a clean bill of health in 2007 and none of them spotted the crash – or they all did but looked the other way.’

The other thing that happened in 1999 was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act which had separated commercial from investment banking. In the giant new entities that were created, it was increasingly the securities and trading side that made the money and who naturally came to dominate a culture that instead of relationships and serving real-world customers with boring things like investment and raising capital was now all about transactions and deals. The extreme case was the sub-prime mortgage debacle (and its subsequent mirror image, the so-called robo-closures crisis), where there was no direct interaction with customers at all. That culture generated huge pecuniary interests for individuals to do whatever it took to make short-term returns for shareholders whose interests were served by volatility and above all towering leverage.

What’s more, and crucially, the banks’ dominant customers were now, just like them, part of the same superextractive culture. This explains two otherwise puzzling aspects of the story: why Goldman Sachs had so few qualms about the strategy of selling toxic assets to customers and then shorting them in the first place, and why those who bought them have been so muted in their criticism. Customers have conspicuously not deserted in droves, and in the fracas over Greg Smith’s New York Times article, executives of other banks have sympathised with rather than excoriated Goldman. This is not surprising, because none of them were surprised: as a wealth of material about Lehman and other failures makes clear, they were all at it, trying to milk customers and suppliers for everything they had. It wasn’t that Goldman sold them dodgy products – they were doing that too – what riled them (and even caused some sneaking admiration) was that it was smarter at it than they were. Interestingly, this is already in the hands of some commentators becoming a defence of the status quo: as a colleague points out, Goldman Sachs’ PR advisers will be rubbing their hands at articles in the FT and elsewhere saying, in effect, wise up, that’s business, what’s the fuss? Anecdotes tell of applications for jobs at the bank going up rather than down in the wake of the article.

The fuss is of course, that what happened at Goldman Sachs also happened at Lehman Brothers and all the other investment banks; and the cumulative result was the catastrophe of 2008, with whose aftermath we are still struggling today. The process and its inevitable outcome are laid out in masterly fashion by Andrew Haldane, the Bank of England’s director for financial stability, in an important article in The London Review of Books. In the 19th century, he writes, ‘managers monitored shareholders who monitored managers; in the 21st, managers egged on shareholders who egged on managers’ – and, he might have added, accountants subject to exactly the same vicious incentives did nothing to raise the alarm or do anything else to prevent the disaster happening.

Take the privatisation of large chunks of the police service uncovered last week in The Guardian. In brief, a £1.5bn contract for Surrey and West Midlands is up for grabs by the private sector, covering such upfront functions as ‘investigating crimes, detaining suspects, developing cases, responding to and investigating incidents, supporting victims and witnesses, managing high-risk individuals, patrolling neighbourhoods, managing intelligence, managing engagement with the public …’

Privatisation in this context means outsourcing to cut costs. As Sir Ian Blair, previously Met commissioner, obligingly wrote, also in The Guardian, the aim is to allow police forces to ‘modernise their budgets in the way any other institution would do, namely by reducing unit costs’. But approaching the issue through unit costs and outsourcing is as worrying as any of the political considerations. It is based, says Vanguard Consulting’s Richard Davis, on two false premises: first, that unit costs tell you anything useful about the real cost of policing; and second, that privatisation and competition saves money. On the contrary. You might just as well hand over sacks of the police budget to burglars.

To outsource services, tasks have to be simplified and standardised so that they can be carried out by cheaper, less skilled labour, often following instructions from a computer script. This may reduce unit costs (cost per phone call, arrest, court attendance, whatever). But that’s a red herring. The costs that count are end to end, from the first call-out to the disposal of the case in the courts. The act of simplifying and standardising severs the relationship between the police and the individual and turns the interaction into a commodified transaction (often literally: ‘press 1 for this, 2 for the other’). If you reduce people to a few broad categories, you can’t respond accurately to the variety of demand. There’ll be mistakes and miscategorisations as people try to fit themselves into the artificial boxes. So they’ll call again – and again – until, many interactions later, the demand is met, or frequently ‘closed’, at which point the dreary cycle starts all over again. More call centres will be built and agents hired to deal with the additional demand. In this way, more interactions leverage costs up enormously more than lower unit costs bring them down.

Privatisation via outsourcing spectacularly misses the point. What matters is not ownership but method. Not only does the private sector not have a monopoly of good method – it has a vested interest in selling the bad. And just as outsourcing/privatisation to lower costs of transactions often misses the point for firms, so it does also for the economy. Bob Bischof, chief economic adviser to German Industry UK, notes that for a number of reasons, not least the desire to retain jobs, German firms have on the whole not succumbed to the outsourcing frenzy. Instead of simplifying and standardising, German companies have learned to manage complexity – which in turn has enabled the country to maintain a highly sophisticated, integrated manufacturing sector and in consequence retain a balanced economy and avoid the damaging inequality which so disfigures the UK and US. By contrast, progressive outsourcing has left a hollowed-out UK shorn of almost any enterprise that requires complex joined-up thought: a flim-flam economy based on the City, the ‘creative’ industries, advertising and consultancy – in a word, bullshit. As Davis notes: ‘In 10 years time, what will real policemen be doing? What will there be left for them to do?’

The second heroic point-missing of the week is a report by the National Audit Office on the shared-services programme across government departments initiated by the Gershon efficiency review in 2004. The NAO findings are stark. It’s an anit-cost-saving programme. Five centres have cost £1.4bn to build and operate so far instead of £0.9bn – an overrun of more than 50 per cent. Only one centre has broken even, and planned savings of £159m have not materialised. The centres are not value for money, the NAO says – moreover, ‘the benefits of shared service centres are not clearly demonstrated’.

Well, I never. In fact, there is no evidence anywhere that shared services deliver real savings, and plenty that they don’t, and for exactly the reason outlined above: the promise of shared services is that they reduce the cost of transactions – yet any gains from lower unit costs are dwarfed by the costs of fragmenting workflows, making it more difficult for people to get the service they need, and thereby multiplying failure demand.

The coalition came to power on the promise of doing things differently. But as these examples show, in practice it’s the opposite, with much more – Universal Credit, for example – on the way. How many more trillions need to be wasted before ministers accept what the evidence and common sense is spelling out for them? There are no economies of scale in services, only economies of flow: joining the pieces up, not splitting them apart, to solve people’s problems in the minimum amount of time. Shared services, and most current variants on the outsourcing theme, don’t work not because people are doing them badly – as the NAO scolds in its recommendations – but because they’re the wrong thing to do. It’s a perfect Einstein moment, on a truly national scale.