profit itself is an industrial-era conception of performance,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I’d wager the farm, the house, the 401(k), and the tasseled loafers on the following proposition: that the sum total of human effort can add up to not merely more, but to better. What if commerce, companies, and trade can make us better off in bigger, more enduring, more human ways than simply having? What if the great challenge for enterprise in t

From an economic perspective, generative advantage is about creating a surplus in authentic wealth, not just a skyrocketing share price.