Business, today, is fighting back hard against the inexorable rise of constraints—demanded by constituents across the globe—largely by expending hard-earned cash on influencing the political process.

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.”

Going from business to betterness means going from vision, mission, strategy, and objectives to ambition, intention, constraints, and imperatives.

Just as the crowning achievement of twentieth-century economics was constructing a national income statement, so the crowning achievement of twenty-first-century economics is likely to be conceptualizing and constructing a national balance sheet.

One where commerce, companies, and trade do more than just create shareholder value by earning profits or by selling product to “consumers”—where they seed and nurture a good life.

A positive economic paradigm doesn’t merely conceive of “health” as maximizing profit by minimizing waste but as redefining the outer limits of human achievement.

They are markets, networks, and communities composed of a huge variety of actors: NGOs, peer and trade groups, customer and supplier communities, activist investors, and labor organizations, to name just a few.

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.

Hence, modern theories of management also rest on this negative paradigm, and the modern manager exists largely to prevent dysfunction, limit deviance, and correct error, just as classical psychologists focused on ridding the conscious and unconscious mind of neuroses and phobias.