Betterness: Economics for Humans (Kindle Single)

Today, an organization’s greatest adversary is itself. The terms of yesterday’s bone-crushing battles have been turned upside down. Your biggest threat today isn’t external; it’s internal. If you want to go into betterness, if you want to compete in twenty-first-century terms, if you want to take a quantum leap into the future of commerce, well, th

the goal of competitive constraints is to support and protect a generative advantage, a surplus in real marginal wealth.

Once upon a time, it took a royal charter to incorporate; today, it takes a mouse click and a credit card. Yesterday’s pathologies are today, if not totally conquered, then at least mostly vanquished, and the recipe for sending them packing now formulated, packaged, and dispensed by the dozen under the label “liberalize, privatize, and stabilize.”

Your biggest threat today isn’t external; it’s internal. If you want to go into betterness, if you want to compete in twenty-first-century terms, if you want to take a quantum leap into the future of commerce, well, then it’s not rivals that must be bettered. You yourself must be bettered.

Companies in business often can’t ignite a generative advantage, because they have chosen instead to gain competitive advantage.

What kinds of higher-order returns do you want the world to have tomorrow that it doesn’t have today? Which kinds of precise benefits do you want to return? The first step in going out of business and into betterness is making that choice. Second, after answering which kind of wealth you should create, the next step is to understand impact: whose w

So what went wrong with this gleaming, streamlined machine? As the old axiom goes, what gets measured gets managed. And as it turns out, we’ve been measuring the wrong things.

But an ambition answers the elemental question, “why are we here?” by painting a detailed picture of the specific kinds of wealth an organization wants to add to the Common Wealth, to ignite a modern conception of eudaimonia: it’s a precise, concise statement that expresses how an organization will blow past “profit” and redefine the very concept o

See the difference? “What are we here to do, on a daily basis, and what is our day-to-day raison d’être?” That is the second fundamental question every organization must ask. Mission and intention both answer it, but in very different ways. A mission specifies, daily, how an organization will do business with its customers. But an intention specifi