The visions are focused on how an organization will earn financial returns for shareholders—invariably, by being the “best” at producing, marketing, or distributing a given set of products and services. Fundamentally egocentric, they are about what an organization will do, and they leave entirely open the question of what kind of wealth, if any,

Once upon a time, it took a royal charter to incorporate; today, it takes a mouse click and a credit card. Yesterday’s pathologies are today, if not totally conquered, then at least mostly vanquished, and the recipe for sending them packing now formulated, packaged, and dispensed by the dozen under the label “liberalize, privatize, and stabilize.”

But eudaimonia wasn’t an easy, comfortable, materially rich life, but one that was authentically, meaningfully rich: rich with relationships, ideas, emotion, health and vigor, recognition and contribution, passion and fulfillment, and great accomplishment and enduring achievement, exactly what “business,” “output,” and “product” seem so achingly

One where commerce, companies, and trade do more than just create shareholder value by earning profits or by selling product to “consumers”—where they seed and nurture a good life.

Your biggest threat today isn’t external; it’s internal. If you want to go into betterness, if you want to compete in twenty-first-century terms, if you want to take a quantum leap into the future of commerce, well, then it’s not rivals that must be bettered. You yourself must be bettered.

That lives lived meaningfully well place real wealth above shareholder value, people above product, outcomes above income, and are a consequence of striving for better—instead of just “busier.”

I’d suggest that today we stand on the vertiginous cusp of an equally dizzying transformation in our understanding of prosperity’s place in the human universe: that an economy isn’t an end in itself, but that it’s a means to the end of a good life. That life isn’t a means to the end of wealth, but that wealth is a means to the end of a good

What happens when a nation willfully ignores perhaps the most fundamental lesson of economics and hopes that rent seeking will equal real prosperity? This does. What happens when a nation either loses, or prevents, a stabilizing middle class? This does. What happens when a government—any government—gets so out of touch with the governed? This does.

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.