It’s a pivotal instrument to confront the multitude of challenges, tiny and towering, urgent and slow-burning, local and global, facing people, communities, society, and future generations in the twilight of industrial era capitalism.

Disruption happens when construction erases maximum destruction: when new cornerstones are brought to places and spaces where borrowing benefits from or shifting costs to people, communities, and society is—yawn—just business as usual. Constructive strategy is most disruptive where there is a growing surplus of destruction, because that is where

It is to profit more from less economic harm, instead of being trapped to profit only through more harm.

Allow me to put that in context. In the twentieth century, worse was often better. What was better for the bottom line was—perhaps not immediately, absolutely, or deliberately, but often, ultimately, and sometimes unwittingly—worse for people, communities, and society. Twentieth-century capitalists tended to build worse-is-better businesses,

What’s better for people, communities, and society is already, and will continue to be, better for the bottom line.

For constructive capitalists, business isn’t merely a zero-sum game to be won. Rather, it is, as Twitter CEO Evan Williams remarked to me when revealing Twitter’s nascent philosophy, “a force for good in the world.”2

Thick value is value that is more sustainable, meaningful, and authentic than that of rivals.

Say it fast ten times: first principles force failure. They are what make a company experiment—always, consistently, frequently. Only when a company articulates how it won’t merely block others from creating thick value does the impetus to fail emerge, and the company feels the pressure to evolve products, services, and business that do create

They are fundamental laws that explain how we won’t merely prevent others from creating thick value, but instead how we will create, refine, and hone thick value.