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.

Companies in business often can’t ignite a generative advantage, because they have chosen instead to gain competitive advantage.

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

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

This crisis of real wealth may well be not merely situational, but structural, no evanescent crash, but what economists call a bad equilibrium—a toxic convergence decades in the making. The different forms of bucket emptying—wealth destruction—are long-run trends, not transient phenomena. All have been under way for at least a decade, and most as l

Going from business to betterness means going from vision, mission, strategy, and objectives to ambition, intention, constraints, and imperatives.

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 contra

But an ambition answers the elemental question, “why are we here?” by painting a detailed picture of the specific kinds of wealth an organization wants to add to the Common Wealth, to ignite a modern conception of eudaimonia: it’s a precise, concise statement that expresses how an organization will blow past “profit” and redefine the very concept o

If you want to enjoy a generative advantage and master the art of poeisis—bringing forth human potential—then I’d like to humbly suggest that your challenge isn’t antagonistic, but protagonistic.