Betterness: Economics for Humans (Kindle Single)

Ask yourself: What kind of products won’t we offer? What products and services will we discourage people from consuming?

at its best, an economy is one that’s not visibly, wheezingly unhealthy.

When a person is wealthy relationally in social capital, environmentally in natural capital, managerially in organizational capital, personally in human capital, emotionally in emotional capital, and intellectually in intellectual capital, he or she might be said to be authentically, broadly, and deeply rich.

That a good life is composed more of what you can’t buy than what you can.

Creating wealth means igniting it in your constituencies, bringing forth their potential to live meaningfully better.

It’s time to get ambitious, not just “visionary.” From an organizational perspective, an ambition specifies a superordinate goal: one not subordinate to the organization (like a vision is), but larger than it. It’s a superordinate goal that transcends the organization itself in three ways.

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.

Today, an organization’s greatest adversary is itself. The terms of yesterday’s bone-crushing battles have been turned upside down. 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, th

When an organization can say, “We exist to create this specific kind of marginal wealth because it has these consequences for people, communities, society, the natural world, or future generations,” it has crafted an ambition.