I want you to consider this question: what if the frontiers of economic attainment, the distant shores of human exchange, haven’t even been explored, much less mapped and conquered? I don’t have that map for you, but I hope this essay can serve as something like a compass, a tool you can use to help us redraw our maps.
The paradigm we casually call business is just one approach to human exchange. It was built in an industrial era, and for it. Its fundamental assumptions—shareholder value creation, mass production, hierarchical management, disposable goods made for consumers—are today less profitable, useful, worthy, and beneficial than ever. Betterness, in contrast, isn’t just a slightly better way to “do business”; it’s the art of bettering prosperity so it arcs through the stratosphere of an authentically good life, bettering human potential so it unfurls into accomplishment and, at its outer limits, transforms human possibility radically for the better.
Here, then, is my invitation. If you’re delighted with the status quo, splendidly contented with the present, firmly convinced that the way we live, work, and play is the best and last way we can, put this volume back on the digital shelf. On the other hand, maybe you’re beginning to believe that progress’s program hasn’t just crashed, but that it might need an upgrade, that plenitude’s glitching code might need not merely to be painstakingly debugged, but rewritten, and that yesterday’s institutions aren’t just mildly hiccupping, but malfunctioning. Maybe you believe that, at its best, humankind is capable of reaching not merely for the mall and the big-box store, impelled by the bonus and the corner office, but for the stars and beyond, propelled by the luminous promise of lives meaningfully better lived and the unconquered challenge of scaling the highest peaks of human potential.
Often, the most stubbornly dangerous adversaries that a firmly entrenched dogma can encounter aren’t opponents, but renegades: obedient practitioners who become rule-breaking outlaws. Like most of us, you’ve probably been—and are getting a little weary of being—the former. But I’d bet that like most of us, deep down, you’re beginning to suspect that the plight of the present might just demand that each of us, in our own tiny way, rebel and become the latter. So let’s roll up our sleeves and reimagine prosperity for the twenty-first century.
Let’s start by taking a closer look at what exactly has gone wrong with business.
Chapter 2-The Capitalist’s Paradox
Ask yourself why, despite billions spent on “change,” “transformation,” “training,” and “engagement,” does the work most organizations offer most people seem so unfulfilling? Why is it that the unhappiest part of the day has been found to be . . . the daily commute to work, closely followed by being at work when so much of our short lives are spent at work?
Why are most vision statements maddeningly unvisionary? Why is it that if in most boardrooms, you uttered words like “wisdom,” “truth,” “love,” “beauty,” or “justice”—the timeless expressions of the highest human potential—you’d probably end up in handcuffs, a straitjacket, or both? Why is it that the globe’s trillions of person-hours of human effort are dedicated to . . . designer diapers, disposable clothes, and pet Prozac?
Why is business chronically and often unashamedly at odds with what’s good for people, society, and the natural world? Why is the generally accepted definition of prosperity the growth of industrial output, not the emotional, social, intellectual, physical, or ethical growth of humans?
If businesses exist to benefit shareholders first and foremost, but if the top 20 percent own over 80 percent of all stocks, can “shareholder value” be a recipe for a broadly shared prosperity?
If selling shinier, rapidly commoditizing, me-too stuff to the rich requires pumping up superfluous demand and dreaming up imaginary benefits, while billions across the world have little water, food, sanitation, or health care, can a “profit motive” really ignite global wealth?
These aren’t idle speculations. They’re fault lines: between the boardroom and the living room, the shareholder and the citizen, the job and the calling—between what human exchange has been, and what it should be and can be.
What do you see when you look at the future of prosperity, not just a few years hence, but a few decades from now? What’s different about the companies of tomorrow? What is traded tomorrow that isn’t traded today? What are the functions commerce serves that would surprise today’s CEOs? How does the contract among people, communities, society, and markets differ? What are the unexplored—and previously unimagined—possibilities for human exchange?
Maybe there are better kinds of companies, which can return more than just profit through better approaches to production and consumption, that can yield more meaningful, durable benefits by trading and exchanging hardier, more enduring, more fruitful kinds of capital. Maybe there’s not merely a link missing from, but a yawning gulf between, the commonly understood point of the industrial growth of output and the human growth of people.
Why ask these questions? Because when we talk about a paradigm, we’re talking about a set of fundamental concepts, assumptions, and beliefs hardwired deep into our daily rituals, our shared expectations, and even our vernacular—a mental software for human exchange. Hence, like most paradigms, it’s as familiar as the air we’re breathing, and just as invisible.
When we think of a healthy economy, most of us probably think of output: GDP. GDP measures industrial output, denominated in income. It’s the linchpin of a paradigm built in and for the industrial age, premised on the foundational question, “How can we achieve more, bigger, faster, cheaper output—now?” And the essential elements of yesterday’s answer have been four assumptions.
First, that companies exist to earn “profit,” in the form of financial returns, by extracting rent for their owners—shareholders—as codified by the great eighteenth-century economist David Ricardo. Second, that in a hierarchical regime of militaristic control, managers are a company’s exclusive decision makers, and that their primary responsibility is crafting strategies that let a company “win” vis-à-vis adversaries, as put into practice by the legendary Alfred P. Sloan. Third, that employees “work” on parceled-up tasks to mass-make “product” à la Henry Ford. And, finally, that at the end of the globe’s great chains of production sit the people known as “consumers” whose immediate needs companies exist to “satisfy”—an idea best codified by the great economist Alfred Marshall, the father of the now-familiar supply-demand chart.
Touch it up with a filigree here and there if you like, shade it in with color if you want, but I’d argue that this Ricardian, Sloanite, Fordist, and Marshallian mind-set, this set of industrial-age assumptions and beliefs, is a rough but complete approximation of business not just as we know it, but also as we see it, do it, live it, practice it, and think it.
And as we have known, thought, and lived it. So little have the components of this paradigm changed over the decades, that most of us see them not just as eternal fixtures of the landscape, but as the landscape.
Think it can’t be changed? We’ve done it before. Remember, human exchange wasn’t always synonymous with what we think of today as “business.” Historian Peter Watson has traced commerce back not just for hundreds of years, but for more than 100,000 years. Three millennia ago, the Mediterranean and Aegean seas were hotbeds of commerce, yet trade was done by negotiatores, combination bankers-cum-wholesalers, and mercatores, or local merchants, who traded often naturally harvested commodities through networks and coalitions on a small, sole-proprietor scale, pursuing the bottom line of cash flow. Though individuals, families, and partnerships certainly made fortunes then as now, from shrewd negotiation and risky enterprise, it wasn’t through Ricardian, Sloanite, Fordist, Marshallian “business” as you and I know it.
So picture, if you will, the broader outlines of the world of commerce before business. As brought vividly to life by the works of the great sociologist Karl Polanyi and eminent historian Fernand Braudel, it was a world where households were the economy’s main productive unit; guilds