Exocapitalism Part 1 - Lift is the theory, not the latest app

The most useful strategy book I have read this year is a small one: Exocapitalism, by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo. Their idea is Lift. Capital keeps trying to separate itself from the weight of fixed assets, labour and production while holding on to the layer where value is captured.

McKenzie Wark's review- https://lnkd.in/gSuWtEMi - adds the necessary sting: the weight does not disappear. It moves, usually out of sight of the firm still setting the terms.

Once you see it, Uber stops looking like a beginning. Franchising separated brand and system from local operation. Global supply chains separated design from manufacturing. Hotel management agreements separated the building from distribution and customer demand. Semiconductor foundries separated chip architecture from fabrication. Every wave of technology made the next separation cheaper to coordinate, and the platforms simply made the pattern visible to everyone.

Agentic AI is the next wave. If agents can find suppliers, compare terms, monitor performance and coordinate hand-offs continuously, a firm can pull apart activities that previously had to sit together. That is not a new creation story. It is the same logic, running faster and at finer grain.

Which makes the strategic question sharper, not softer. The question was never whether a company owns physical assets or employs everyone who touches the product. It is which layer the company keeps, which obligations it moves elsewhere, and whether the economics still hold once you count the hidden costs of coordination, verification and failure.

My extension of the argument is that the next contest is over orchestration itself. As execution distributes, power accrues to whoever identifies the participants, sets the standards, routes the work and settles the transactions. The firm gets lighter. The coordinator gets stronger. Boards still measuring strength by what the company owns are reading the wrong line of the balance sheet.

I plan to unpack this thinking in a series of posts to follow. Please jump in and share your thoughts.

#Exocapitalism #CorporateStrategy #AusBiz