Enablement Capitalism, Part 5: From Extraction To Enablement

In Part 1 of this series on Enablement Capitalism, I proposed a shift in capitalism’s operating logic: from selling outputs to increasing what customers can accomplish.
In Part 2, I described why this shift is emerging now: a new constraint regime shaped by complexity, aspiration, AI-scaled capability, and organizational innovation.
In Part 3, I offered a diagnostic—the Enablement Index—to show whether a firm is built for customer progress.
In Part 4, I described the operating model: moving from producer space into customer space, and building the enablement loop:

Sense → Scaffold → Embed → Measure → Learn → Expand.

Now it’s time to zoom out.

Enablement capitalism is not just a business trend or a technology story. It is a moral and institutional upgrade—an improvement in capitalism’s “purpose function.” It changes what capitalism is for, and who it should serve.

And because it changes the logic of value creation, it may also change our politics—especially the role of government.

1) Capitalism’s upgrade: from efficiency and extraction to customer achievement

Managerial capitalism delivered enormous material progress. It also installed a particular worldview: the firm is a production machine, the customer is an endpoint, and success is measured by efficiency in production and extraction in exchange.

In that worldview, customers were rarely granted a place of real superiority. They were “demand,” “segments,” “targets,” “funnels,” “retention cohorts.” Customer value was something to be captured.

This is the deep reason so many firms struggle with enablement. Enablement requires a mindset reversal.

In the value creation era, the customer is not an endpoint. The customer is the site of value creation.

Value is not embedded in products. It is realized by customers as lived experience and tangible progress—when they achieve something that matters to them.

Enablement capitalism makes that explicit and operational:

• The enterprise does not “deliver value” as a thing, or an identifiable quantity.

• The enterprise assembles resources and capabilities to enable customer achievement.

• The economic relationship deepens when customers become more capable—and are able to do more, to achieve more, repeatedly.

This shift is not sentimentality. It’s not about caring. It’s a structural change in what the market selects for.

Under managerial capitalism, firms could win by outproducing, outmarketing, outdistributing—by being more efficient at pushing outputs into markets.

Under enablement capitalism, firms increasingly win by removing customer bottlenecks, barriers and difficulties encountered in customer space. Firms become capability amplifiers. Customers return not because they are locked in or “retained”, but because they are growing.

That is the upgrade: from an economy oriented around extraction to an economy oriented around customer progress.

2) What enablement does to the firm: the end of managerial distance

Managerial capitalism created distance. It organized around internal functions, hierarchies, planning cycles, and control systems. It treated customers as “outside.”

Enablement collapses that distance.

To enable customers, firms must operate in customer space:

• understand customer workflows and constraints

• supply scaffolding (templates, workflows, guidance, integrations, agents, embedded expertise)

• learn from progress signals (time-to-first-win, time-to-competence, market share gains,repeatable outcome rates)

• decentralize judgment so the organization can adapt at the interface with reality

This is why enablement capitalism aligns naturally with the post-managerial era. You don’t “manage” customers into success. You build systems that help customers succeed—and you build organizations that can learn fast enough to keep doing it.

3) The deep promise: prosperity through capability expansion

If you want a one-line definition of what’s new here, it’s this:

Enablement capitalism is an economy organized around capability expansion.

That sounds abstract until you feel it:

• A writer becomes a publisher and builds a direct relationship with readers.

• A small team gains leverage and produces at the level of a large department.

• A constrained organization gains operational capability under complexity.

• Individuals learn faster, build faster, decide better, iterate more freely.

This is why AI matters. AI is not merely automation. It is scalable scaffolding: an amplifier of human capability. It can turn aspiration into structured action, and structured action into outcomes. It makes enablement cheaper, faster, and more widely available.

When capability becomes more available, ambition expands. When ambition expands, enablement becomes more valuable. This is the compounding flywheel at the center of the value creation era.

4) The political implication: from regulatory state to enabling state

Now the second theme—the one that may surprise people—is that enablement is not only a business model. It is a governance model.

Most modern governments primarily see themselves as regulators: limiting harm, adjudicating disputes, enforcing rules, preventing failure. Some of that is necessary. But when regulation becomes the dominant stance, it turns society into what Dan Wang has called a lawyerly society—a system optimized for constraint, procedure, risk-avoidance, and permissioning.

Enablement suggests an alternative: an enabling stance.

The question shifts from:

• “How do we control?”
  to

• “How do we enable citizens to accomplish what they are trying to accomplish—safely, fairly, and at scale?”

This is not a call for deregulation-as-ideology. It is a call for a different orientation: government as scaffolding rather than government as obstacle.

Think of the contrast as two postures:

Regulatory posture (default today)

• Prevent error

• Reduce risk

• Increase compliance

• Slow systems down so they can be audited

Enabling posture (the engineering society)

• Remove bottlenecks

• Build infrastructure

• Standardize interfaces

• Increase capability and throughput while maintaining guardrails

The enabling stance is what engineers do at their best: they don’t primarily adjudicate. They build pathways. They create structures that allow outcomes to happen reliably.

This is the promise of what Dan Wang calls an “engineering society”: not a society run by engineers as a class, but a society shaped by engineering virtues—problem solving, infrastructure building, system improvement, practical iteration, measurable progress.

In enablement capitalism terms, government can learn to operate in citizen space the way enablement firms operate in customer space:

• sense where people stall

• build scaffolding and infrastructure

• measure progress signals

• iterate and improve

Government becomes less a courtroom and more a workshop.

5) Two guardrails: enablement must not become control or dependency

Every new logic has failure modes, and enablement capitalism has two serious ones.

Failure mode #1: Enablement becomes surveillance

If “operating in customer space” becomes monitoring, nudging, and manipulating, then enablement collapses into control. Customers won’t feel more capable; they’ll feel managed.

Failure mode #2: Enablement becomes dependency

If scaffolding is designed to trap rather than empower—if the customer becomes less capable without the platform—then what looks like enablement becomes extraction in a new disguise.

This is why enablement requires governance by principles: transparency, consent, customer sovereignty, and a commitment to increased capability rather than increased dependence.

The value creation era must be built on trust, or it will be rejected.

6) The simple test of the new era

As we close this series, I’ll offer one simple test of whether you’re seeing enablement capitalism clearly.

Ask of any enterprise—or institution:

Do they leave people more capable than they found them?

Not “more engaged.” Not “more retained.” Not “more monetized.”

More capable. More able to achieve. More able to build. More able to progress.

That is the shift from managerial capitalism’s efficiency-and-extraction logic to the value creation era’s enablement logic.

And if enough enterprises—and enough public institutions—adopt that stance, the next phase of capitalism may be not only more innovative and more productive, but more human: an economy of achievement rather than an economy of capture.

A final note

Parts 3 and 4 (for paid subscribers) provide the practical tools: the Enablement Index and the operating model for customer space. I’ll continue to develop those in future paid essays, along with real case applications and metrics that help organizations measure progress without sliding into bureaucracy.

For everyone: thank you for reading this series. If enablement capitalism is the name of the emerging era, the real work is to build it—carefully, ethically, and in a way that makes people stronger.

The principles of value creation are at the core of Enablement Capitalism. Our online course is here: https://thevaluecreators.mykajabi.com/value-creators

The Post-Managerial Era Of Capitalism (Cambridge University Press)

Venture Mode, the manifesto for Enablement Capitalism (and how to teach it), is available for pre-order on Amazon.