Sublime

begin with minimizing economic harm and end with maximizing the creation of authentic economic value.

industrial era capitalism’s cornerstones undercount costs (ignoring many flavors of loss and damage) and overcount benefits (overstating how much products and services make people durably, tangibly, and meaningfully better off).

The five cornerstones we ultimately distilled are so familiar to CEOs and clerks alike that they are invisible fixtures of everyday economic life: value chains as the means of production, value propositions as the means of positioning, strategy as the means of competition, protecting marketplaces as the means of advantage, and inert, fixed goods as

The fundamental challenge twentieth-century organizations face in the twenty-first is uselessness: an inability to add to the Common Wealth.

Here then is my modern twist on eudaimonia, how I might put paid to the idea of “faring well.” A good life is about more than quantity of gross product, denominated in nominal income. It’s about net real wealth. And real wealth, in turn, consists of much more than mere money.

But every so often glimmering instants of kairos or “supreme moments” emerged—turning points, critical junctures, dependent on contingency and chance, when opportunities emerged and unexpected, unimagined, transformative new paths could be chosen.

Twentieth-century capitalism’s cornerstones shift costs to and borrow benefits from people, communities, society, the natural world, or future generations.