After a lifetime working at mattering, I realized I had under-invested in what really mattered: Relationships.

Social capital, as he presents it, is a form of wealth that can compound and throw off real dividends when it’s cultivated, or wither and die when it’s drawn down or neglected. Having access to social capital is a privilege. In the business world, social capital is earned over decades, and doled out carefully by those who have it: you can’t just... See more

If you look at the the work of anthropologists like Marcel Mauss [Ed: who wrote ‘The Gift’ on gift cultures]or, Pierre Bourdieu, [Ed: who coined the idea of cultural capital] they emphasise the importance of non-monetary capital, the way in which, what we call social capital only functions if it didn’t feel transactional, if it didn’t feel like... See more

Those relationships can have intrinsic value for the individual members, creating a sense of belonging or being connected to others. But it can also have value fo r the larger society for three reasons: first, because one can draw on it as a resource for accomplishing some objective , such as partnering with other parents to improve the local... See more