Betterness: Economics for Humans (Kindle Single)

profit itself is an industrial-era conception of performance,

Business, today, is fighting back hard against the inexorable rise of constraints—demanded by constituents across the globe—largely by expending hard-earned cash on influencing the political process.

But perhaps, given the parlous state of global prosperity, merely ridding the economy of dysfunction might not be enough to power another century or more of wealth creation. Maybe merely erasing industrial-age dysfunction yields not a “healthy” economy, just a stagnant one.

What kinds of higher-order returns do you want the world to have tomorrow that it doesn’t have today? Which kinds of precise benefits do you want to return? The first step in going out of business and into betterness is making that choice. Second, after answering which kind of wealth you should create, the next step is to understand impact: whose w

Adversarial, arrogant, and alienating, competitive advantage is often extractive.

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.

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.

They are markets, networks, and communities composed of a huge variety of actors: NGOs, peer and trade groups, customer and supplier communities, activist investors, and labor organizations, to name just a few.

The terra incognita we’ve never explored is whether it’s possible for prosperity and human exchange not merely to go less wrong, but more right.