Film on New Economic Models - "Fixing The Future"

In our political debates, races, etc. there is always room for more conversation about the sustainable, thriving economies we can create in our own home towns. Here's a very inspiring film which I encourage you to watch if you are wondering what can be done to fix our economy, and our future!

Watch Fixing the Future on PBS. See more from NOW on PBS.

I was on the radio show "Business Rockstars" with Ken Rutkowski

Today I had the pleasure of being on Ken Rutkowski's amazing radio show "Business Rockstars" on KFWB News 980 in Los Angeles with over 800,000 listeners.

We had a wonderful conversation about sustainable business, ethics in business, our flawed economic paradigm based on the illusion separate from society and nature, B-Corporations, organic food labeling, sustainable investing, maximizing the quality of relationships in business for success, community relationships to business, corporate social responsibility and sustainable and responsible investing.

Hear the interview here, my brief interview starts at minute 55.

I helped create the Access to Capital Guidebook as a member of California Financial Opportunities Roundtable

A key issue to grow our sustainable economy is moving capital to the businesses who need it most and businesses who are going to create jobs, wealth, and improvements to the quality of life for communities around the world. 

Entrepreneurship and local businesses are some of the key drivers to keeping our communities thriving, and the institutions which are meant to finance such businesses have lost human scale in the last 40-50 years. Big banks getting bigger, Wall Street dealmakers only doing bigger and bigger deals - leave much of the small to medium sized businesses without easy access to much needed capital.

Furthermore - small businesses which are privately owned are more likely to be in tune with the needs of society, the environment and the community of stakeholders around them. Thus the more ways we can support locally owned, small and medium sized enterprises, the better.

To that end, I have been very involved with the local investing movement for the last 7 years.

Most recently since mid 2011 I have been a member of the California Financial Opportunities Roundtable - a group of experts convened by the USDA Rural Economic Development and Federal Reserve Bank to identify pathways for moving money into the businesses and communities which need it most, and who will drive the most positive change for their communities. We represented finance, impact investing, philanthropy, business, economic development, government and more

The California Financial Opportunities Roundtable (CalFOR) is part of a statewide initiative supporting development of regional industry clusters to provide jobs, entrepreneurial opportunities, business growth, public and private sector investment in value-chain infrastructure and sustainable communities throughout California. Working with a wide array of partners, the goals of that project include:

• Innovation in Capital Markets and new sources of investment for projects and business growth.

• Expansion of regional food systems and associated value chain opportunities.

• Growth of biomass utilization, biofuels and renewable energy production.

• Development of region-specific industry clusters and related business networks.

• Improved Rural-Urban collaboration and related infrastructure deployment

Our ACCESS TO CAPITAL GUIDEBOOK is available for viewing and download here.

Evolving our businesses to become Common Good Corporations

There are many stories over the last 20 years of examples of ethically motivated businesses who grew to such a large scale which left the founders with choices either merge, sell out or cooperate with major corporations. The challenge has often been that the values and priorities which originally inspired the entrepreneurs from the beginning were very difficult to maintain when the business or brand is continued in the larger context, or the company is owned by a larger entity who does not share the priorities for the common good of the original entrepreneur.

One solution has been to adopt the B-Corp model, by baking the values into the DNA of the company.

My colleague and close friend Terry Mollner is an expert on such issues, and has played a meaningful role in this context for some time.

Here's a video of Terry discussing the heart of these issues, where he clarifies his vision that all companies have the opportunity to make their highest priority the COMMON GOOD, invites us to all discover the role we can play in bringing about this new way of doing business.

Common Market - What a Food Hub can do for the food economy!

We can create jobs, and healthier community by simply shifting the way that food is created and sold in our cities. It's that simple.

Building an economy based on reality.

It's time that we completely wake up as a civilization to reality as it is: EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED.

Carl Sagan said it decades ago, "the new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism, and recognizes an organism at war with itself is doomed."

We must evolve from using war to get our needs met. This means every one of us. Starting with the language you use. Become aware of all of the ways that you use military and warfare lexicon in your daily life - do you really want to war if you are here to create peace?

From this recognition we must build an economy of connection, of relationships. An economy of peace, rather than one of war. Simply that.

Enjoy the video.

"The Possibility for Profound Change in America"

We're in the driver's seat for "The Possibility for Profound Change in America" an amazing lecture which recognizes each of us are responsible for systemic change for our civilization. I met Gar a while back and he's extraordinarily thought provoking. Inspiring, and worth the investment of time. Enjoy!


Gar Alperovitz E. F. Schumacher Lecture from New Economics Institute on Vimeo.

Book: "Economyths Ten Ways Economics Gets It Wrong"

The challenge of our time is that our myth is that we have no myths.


Irony is, that we are still a deeply mythological culture and it is high time that our culture recognize the false premises and untenable myths that define our economic paradigm.

This is most recently highlighted by a blog from The Capital Institute which mentions a book on the myths of our economic viewpoint. Here's the blog entry:


"A Capital Institute shout out to Leland Lehrman for sharing with us David Orrell's eloquent cri du coeur found at the conclusion of Economyths, 10 Ways Economics Gets It Wrong. Leland calls the book "a brilliant reconstruction of economics that covers gender, happiness, fairness and other perspectives on economics in intellectually and mathematically rigorous ways without becoming unreadable." "


From the book:

"So, students. Decision time. You live at what many believe is a bifurcation point in human history. You've seen all the graphs with lines curving up like a ski jump. Human population. Gross domestic product. Species extinction. Carbon emissions. Inequality. Resource shortages. You know that something has to give. You've got an idea that the price isn't right. Maybe you're even suspicious that if the world economy does turn out to be a Ponzi scheme, you or your children are a little bit late to the game."

"You therefore stand at a fork in the road. You can take the orthodox route -- and risk ending up with a qualification as impressive as a degree in Marxist ideology right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Or you can take a chance on regime shift by speaking up, questioning your teachers, being open to disruptive ideas, and generally acting as an agent of change. You can insist that the economy is a complex, dynamic, networked system -- and demand the tools to understand it. You can point out that the economy is unfair, unstable, and unsustainable -- and demand the skills to heal it. You can tell the oracles that they have failed. You can go in and break the machine. And then you can do something new."

I'm heartened by the fact that so many people have economics on the mind, and are independently coming to similar conclusions.

I trust that in coming years our economy will look much different, and work much better for the well being of humanity and all living beings on the planet. 

We are the 100%

An important ethos expressed in this film, words of my friend Charles Eisenstein, author of the recent book "Sacred Economics"

Social Complexity Theory as a framework for new economic models

I have just learned from my brilliant friend Ron Schultz that he's the co-author of another book on complexity in the context of business. It is called "Coherence in the Midst of Complexity"

In my conversation with him, I learned that the ideas outlined in his book would most definitely apply in my field. I gathered that anyone who shares my passion for advancing the new frameworks in the fields of Sustainable and Responsible Investing would benefit from seeing the world through the lens of "coherence in the midst of complexity."

Here's an overview of Social Complexity Theory from the book's website.

"Complexity and emergence (the appearance and impact of the new) can be the bane of managers and their organizations. Both complexity and emergence threaten to upset adherence to predefined categories, which supposedly allows for efficiency. Indeed, traditional management thinking focuses on a retrospective coherence where ideas and events are assigned to categories, the categories are labeled, and outliers are treated as statistical deviants.  

"The study of how such attributed (retrospective) sense-making breaks down in and around organizations is the focus of social complexity theory. Coherence in the Midst of Complexity discusses the social complexity approach, where dialogue and stories allow for the degrees of freedom needed for the opportunities of emergence to take root. The book focuses on the experience of coherence and how such experiential lessons differ from the establishment and maintenance of categories and labels."

"Social Complexity Theory examines the role of coherence and emergence in organizations. Coherence is regarded by many psychologists as critical to day to the day productivity and effectiveness of individuals. Both scholars and managers have adapted this belief to the world of management and organizations. Coherence is regarded as a sign of a well-run organization. But, the concept of a coherent thought defined as how well an idea holds together as a single entity gradually breaks down as the scale shifts to individuals, groups, and ultimately larger organizations. 

"Adapting to and dealing with emergence is perhaps the most important task facing managers and organizations. Coherence as traditionally defined interferes with that task. By restricting the concept of coherence to measurement against definition (what we call ascribed coherence) managers and organizations implicitly are restricting their ability to deal with the unknown, the uncertain and the emergent." 

"Social Complexity Theory provides another perspective on coherence -- rooted in the felt experience of coherence and in the importance of emergence. Richard Rorty tells us: Knowledge is not a matter of getting reality right, but rather a matter of acquiring habits of action for coping with reality. In common parlance such coping mechanisms are called models. The aim of Social Complexity Theory is to teach managers and members of organizations to make use of some very different models as part of their coping mechanisms."

Upcoming Movie - "Thrive"

Thrive, a very important upcoming film with some friends in it. Here's a link to the trailer.

Greg Wendt Interviewed on "The Dr. Pat Show - Talk Radio to Thrive By"

Click here to hear the show.

Contentment.

From a Taoist Scripture - via a friend's text message:
"Don't chase after people's approval.
Don't depend on your plans.
Don't make decisions;
let decisions make themselves.
Free yourself of concepts;
don't believe what you think.
Embody the inexhaustible.
Wander beyond all paths.
Receive what you have been given
and know that it is always enough.
The Master's mind is like a mirror:
It responds but does not store, contains nothing,
excludes nothing, and reflects things exactly as they are.
Thus she has what she wants and wants only what she has."

Economics based on Beauty and Community: Putting Aesthetics back into the Economy

Here's an article I posted on Ethical Markets Blog a while back - enjoy:

Right before I boarded a plane after a green business conference last year, I noticed a Body Shop store in the terminal next to the gate. The Body Shop was founded by the late Anita Roddick who was a very influential and inspiring thought leader who was one of the pioneering business people who incorporated social and environmental values into her operations. 

As I thumbed through my reading materials I found an article in Resurgence Magazine by Roddick entitled “The Currency of Imagination.” This eloquent article laid out some of her guiding principles and reflections on being one of the only CEOs in the crowd of human beings who raised their voices against the globalization paradigm represented by the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle.

In the article she laid out a new vision for society, a vision which I share, where we establish community and beauty as driving values for our individual and institutional decision making. I have learned that for any successful endeavor in new economic thinking to work, it must be built on a culture of trust and collaboration amongst the participants. Such ideas have inspired me in the efforts I have made in my region. I am the co-founder of Green Business Networking in Los Angeles, a monthly networking event which brings together entrepreneurs and professionals committed to greening our economy through their businesses and the Green Economy Think Tank which convenes sustainability leaders to evolve solutions for a green economy.

Somewhere along the line we picked up a virus in our culture’s source code. This virus misguided us by placing money and power as the central measuring sticks for success, all fed by a rapacious economic operating system driven by the gospel of consumerism. The ethos of our economy has become largely devoid of beauty and community, transactions have become ”complex, opaque, [and] anonymous based on short term outcomes” according to Don Shaffer, President of RSF Social Finance. Instead, he states our transactions need to become “direct, transparent and personal, based on long term relationships.” On a similar theme, Judy Wicks, founder of the White Dog Café, who is also a co-founder of the very successful movement “Business Alliance For Local Living Economies” lives these principles. She says that her business was built on the principle of “maximizing relationships” rather than “maximizing profits.” As a result of her focus, her business thrived with the satisfaction of higher sales, and happier people.

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, and the significant ills facing our world, it has become clear to many people that the prevailing economic paradigm is no longer working to improve the wellbeing of all of humanity. With climate crisis, declining ecosystems, billions in wretched poverty, food riots, childhood diabetes, etc. individuals and institutions are experiencing the severe ramifications of an avaricious and predatory economic model. However, there is another way.

Let's take a moment to inquire into the nature of the latent economic opportunity of which Roddick spoke -- that which incorporates improvement of the quality of relationships founded on beauty and community into the economic equation. I am keen to discern the most effective and coherent actions necessary to transmute our current economy of waste into an economy of thriving abundance, conservation and renewal for 100 percent of humanity. Our economic paradigm utilizes debt manipulation and consumerism as a short-sighted means to an unforeseen dead end and endless gluttony for a few at the top of the heap.

Here's what Roddick said:

“Consumerism doesn’t care if we buy in beautiful or ugly surroundings. Few aspects of the global economy provide beauty or community and, worse, in many ways it drives them out by deliberate manipulation of debt, which is as powerful a motivator as has been invented in human history. Providing for vital needs like beauty, creativity and community requires another kind of economy altogether.”

Sadly, and with far reaching consequences, our current economy has failed to value these essential components of quality of life.  Roddick pointed out that the economist John Maynard Keynes “talked about the hideous waste of an economic system that could not recognize art or beauty…. In a speech to the Irish government in 1933, he urged politicians and economists to raise their ambition, and spend the money on beauty.”

The economy of beauty that we need transcends and includes the artful beauty of which he speaks. It is a culture of thriving community and high strong relationships built on trust: people inspired by, evolving and learning from others and from the beauty that surrounds them.

How do we recognize and create such a vibrant community as the foundation of a successful economic paradigm?

Such a community has “deep connectivity” between participants. An economic system that encourages such “deep connectivity” would have to be based on the currency of relationships. An interesting example is the deeply successful Mondragon Cooperative movement, a community-based economic system successfully operating in the Basque region of Spain. It started during the Great Depression in the 1930s and thrived amid the oppressive Franco dictatorship. Mondragon succeeded in such a fascist context “by avoiding confrontation, not by being passively servile but by doing what was for the good of all.”

In his book “The End of Money and the Future of Civilization,” author Thomas Greco made an important point that the success of the Mondragon experience is replicable, but only in conjunction with the simultaneous weaving of a strong social fabric. That effort need not necessarily be centered around ethnic identity and culture, but could be based on other common factors between the participants such as religious affiliation, geographical proximity, shared values, or other factors that create common interests (but with concern for the greater common good always foremost.)

It is precisely this inherent characteristic of wishing to be part of something greater than ourselves that has given humans a sense of meaning since time immemorial. This heroic sense of contribution and sharing for the common good is a key principle of true success.

Consider: has there ever been a time in history when this kind of collective heroism is more important than now, when the stakes are as high as they can get?

Mondragon scholar Terry Mollner makes a distinction between the declining ‘Material Age’ and the emerging ‘Relationship Age,’ and concludes that the [Mondragon founders] ‘set about building a Relationship Age society by extending into more sophisticated realms the Relationship Age values which were already present in Basque society.’

Along the same lines, Roddick concludes “We will succeed to the extent to which we encourage human connection and conversation. We will succeed also to the extent to which we spend the small change of imagination – the human stories about people and places and what they aspire to do.”

Although it has been said before – we are at a critical juncture where our global circumstances require each of us to embrace a kind of global responsibility in every relationship we have. We share the responsibility to manifest the “Relationship Age” right where we are. A Relationship Age of artful living in deep connectivity is the evolutionary catalyst to shift our current economic operating system towards the creation of shared well-being for all of us on spaceship Earth.

"Money and Life - A Story about Money That Will Change Your Life"

Just befriended Katie Teague who is making this amazing film "Money and Life"  with interviews with my heroes and friends such as Orland Bishop, David Korten, Lynne Twist, Hazel Henderson, Ellen Brown, Stuart Valentine, Bernard Litaer, Charles Eisenstein who are some of the most inspiring people in this field I have met. 


The movie articulates many ideas which are unexamined issues in our global culture which has by and large placed the money at the center of the altar. 

So, since our global civilization worships the God of Money, or the accumulation of it, we are all well served to inquire into the nature of Money, and Life. And explore how we can work with money to heal, serve and increase life and well being for all residents of our world.


Lynne Twist states - "It's as if we, as a species, have realized we have a terminal disease and we need to come together in community and get ourselves through the crisis, and it will change the very fabric, the very nature, of our relationship with life itself."



Money & Life trailer from StormCloud Media on Vimeo.

The Empathic Civilisation Emerging For The Community of Our Planet

Simply - as all disciplines of knowledge such as anthropology, biology, physics, psychology, economics, neuropsychology, etc. become more sophisticated and evolve, every discipline must also evolve in response to incorporate new world views. Further all the institutions of our culture - education, governance, religion, commerce, etc. are currently based on outdated world views.  As the world views evolve, so must the institutions.

This video is one of the most succinct articulations of a vision of an empathic civilization based on solidarity with all life on the planet.

Public Banking - "Banking in the Public Interest"

Excellent article was just written called "Reviving Main Street - A Call for Public Banks" highlighting the opportunity states across America have to restore a healthy economy - simply by creating a state bank.

Surprisingly, North Dakota is the only state in the union which has created its own bank.

The article highlights work of thought leader Ellen Brown , and the Public Banking Institute which educates policymakers about the opportunities from the straightforward process of forming a state owned bank.

Her site shares that:

"Public Banks are...
• Viable solutions to the present economic crises in US states.

• Potentially available to any-sized government or community able to meet the requirements for setting up a bank.

• Owned by the people of a state or community.

• Economically sustainable, because they operate transparently according to applicable banking regulations

• Able to offset pressures for tax increases with returned credit income to the community.

• Ready sources of affordable credit for local governments, eliminating the need for large “rainy day” funds. 

• Required to promote the public interest, as defined in their charters.

• Constitutional, as ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court

...and are not

• Operated by politicians; rather, they are run by professional bankers.

• Boondoggles for bank executives; rather, their employees are salaried public servants (paid by the state, with a transparent pay structure) who would likely not earn bonuses, commissions or fees for generating loans.

• Speculative ventures that maximize profits in the short term,  without regard to the long-term interests of the public."

The Fastest Growing Socially Responsible Business Movement in the Country....

BALLE, The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies is a national effort of independent business networks in over 80 cities.

Green Business Networking, the non-profit business community I started in 2006, is the LA County BALLE network dedicated to serving LA Region's business professionals and owners building our green economy!

Here's an inspiring video about the BALLE effort, and conference - and look for my brief comment at 3:21 into the video:


Place Matters: Living Economies 2011 from BALLE on Vimeo.

Measuring our success and standard of living - it's not only about the money we make!

There was a sign in Albert Einstein's office at Princeton which said: "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

With our singular focus on money in our global culture, many carry the belief that simply "more money" equals "more happy".  At a very basic level of subsistence more material goods and services in our lives are necessary for a degree of happiness, but beyond the fundamental level, there are diminishing happiness returns on every extra dollar of income or accumulation.  All of us know in our heart of hearts that at for anyone who has their basic needs met, the "more money equals more happy" is not really true.

Then, how do we measure the standard of living or true well being happiness in a community or a region?  Challenge is that our much of lives and well being do not all fall into the category of "economic activity."  Yet the issue remains -- how do you MEASURE the level of progress and standard of living in all of the non-financial dimensions?

In his book "Prosperity without Growth - Economics for a Finite Planet" Tim Jackson states:

"There is an interesting overlap between components of prosperity and the factors that are known to influence subjective well being or 'happiness'. Indeed to the extent that we are happy when things go well, and unhappy when they don't, there is an obvious connection between prosperity and happiness. This doesn't necessarily meant that prosperity is the same thing as happiness. But the connection between the two provides a useful link into recent policy debates about happiness and subjective well being."

Some of the components of "quality of life" - real wealth - are loving relationships, supportive and vibrant community, good health, cultural and creative stimulation, healthy and vibrant natural environment, contributing to society in a meaningful way and spiritual fulfillment. 

Yet, ironically, one of the key methods that most countries define standard of living is the measure of "Gross National Product" or GDP, which is simply a financial measure of economic activity.  But to meet the Earth’s challenges, these outmoded ways of measuring the “product” of our economy have to be reexamined. They are out of touch with our finite supply of natural resources (or natural capital) upon which our economic growth depends and they are similarly out of touch with the non-financial dimensions of the well being of participants in a society.

Article - "What’s blocking sustainability? Human nature, cognition, and denial"

We are in the midst of a paradigm shift from the old ways of understanding reality to a more sustainable civilization. William Rees wrote an article that articulates key concepts.

In summary he writes: 

"In 1992, 1,700 of the world’s top scientists issued a public statement titled The World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity. They reported that “a great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.” More than a decade later, the authors of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment were moved to echo the scientists’ warning asserting that “[h]uman activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of the Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.” Ours is allegedly a science-based culture. For decades, our best science has suggested that staying on our present growth-based path to global development implies catastrophe for billions of people and undermines the possibility of maintaining a complex global civilization. Yet there is scant evidence that national governments, the United Nations, or other official international organizations have begun seriously to contemplate the implications for humanity of the scientists’ warnings, let alone articulate the kind of policy responses the science evokes. The modern world remains mired in a swamp of cognitive dissonance and collective denial seemingly dedicated to maintaining the status quo. We appear, in philosopher Martin Heidegger’s words, to be “in flight from thinking.” Just what is going on here? I attempt to answer this question by exploring the distal, biosocial causes of human economic behavior. My working hypothesis is that modern H. sapiens is unsustainable by nature—unsustainability is an inevitable emergent property of the systemic interaction between contemporary technoindustrial society and the ecosphere. I trace this conundrum to humanity’s once-adaptive, subconscious, genetic predisposition to expand (shared with all other species), a tendency reinforced by the socially constructed economic narrative of continuous material growth. Unfortunately, these qualities have become maladaptive. The current coevolutionary pathway of the human enterprise and the ecosphere therefore puts civilization at risk—both defective genes and malicious “memes” can be “selected out” by a changing physical environment. To achieve sustainability, the world community must write a new cultural narrative that is explicitly designed for living on a finite planet, a narrative that overrides humanity’s outdated innate expansionist tendencies. "