Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us

What is also needed is the next step: to open that purpose up for employees and shareholders and customers to participate in, in meaningful, creative, joyful ways. Only

After all, it has been the dominant story for only 80 years or so; its very dominance is evidence that stories can and do change.

The Consumer Story goes like this: each of us is out for ourselves, and that is the way it should be. We are individuals, narrowly defined and independent of one another; the ‘self’ might extend as far as our immediate family, but no further.

We are made to feel naive, looked upon as idealists and pointless dreamers. We are stopped in our tracks.

We are made to feel naive, looked upon as idealists and pointless dreamers. We are stopped in our tracks.

when staff interact only professionally, the normative frame is cold, rational, transactional; when the targets are all about quantity, the culture is all about immediate return on investment. The dominant story is ritualised into the context of everything we do; and unless we consciously act to break it, it drags us back in.

when staff interact only professionally, the normative frame is cold, rational, transactional; when the targets are all about quantity, the culture is all about immediate return on investment. The dominant story is ritualised into the context of everything we do; and unless we consciously act to break it, it drags us back in.

In its chaotic, open, and intensely creative origins, the internet offered individual empowerment and access, cross-pollination, almost limitless connection among and between Citizens everywhere. As a many-to-many medium, it asks more of us than television or radio or the printing press, equipping us to be active in the world, capable of representi

Stories function like the streetlight in a moral as well as a practical sense. The light illuminates those who are good, who count, who should be thought of as ‘us’; it leaves in the darkness those who are bad, who don’t matter, who can be dismissed as ‘them.’ American linguist and political scientist George Lakoff calls this effect ‘framing,’ and