ARE YOU IN THE BUSINESS OF CREATING A BETTER WORLD?
The Commercial World in the New Paradigm
The pursuit of profit is an old story but there was a time when many things were regarded as too sacred or too essential for the public good to be considered a business opportunity. These services to humanity were then protected by tradition and public regulation
The Corporation documentary, 2004
In the new paradigm, human and ecological health would be paramount and industrial activity that undermines these goals will be progressively phased out, or at least made expensive, and more healthful approaches incentivised.
Our first step will be to begin to reduce the corporation’s power.
In The Story of Stuff Annie Leonard posed the question “What needs to change about corporations’ powers?” She went on to advocate the following:
Do away with limited liability and corporate ‘personhood’ under the constitution
Demand an increase in corporate accountability
Stronger antitrust laws and international liability
The extraction of corporations out of the political process and the removal of corporate money from political campaigns
Extended producer responsibility and;
Internalising costs in business and total stakeholder responsibility
Later on, the author suggests that the core steps towards new paradigm living might be to:
Redefine what progress is.
Do away with war.
Internalise externalities.
Value time rather than stuff.
Annie Leonard also recommends that we each earmark a few hours of our newly ‘time rich’ lifestyles to join the collective struggle to transform the institutions of power that drive our consumer world.
The provision of jobs alone can never be claimed to be a valid reason for a harmful business activity. There are after all plenty of valuable life-giving jobs that need to be, done and not enough people doing them
Need Greed or Freedom, John Whitmore
A GIFT FROM THE PEOPLE
160 years ago, in both law and the culture, the corporation was considered a subordinate entity that was a gift from the people, in order to serve the public good. There were very few corporations then and the ones that existed had clear stipulations in their state issued charters. Guidelines about how long they could operate, the amount of capitalisation they could accrue, and what they made, did or maintained were explicit. All this was recorded in the corporation’s charter and they stayed within those rules. A corporation could not own another corporation and their shareholders were personally liable for the debts that the entity accrued should the business go belly up.
When a series of legal decisions gave corporations the rights of a person and these business structures became transnational in size and kind – governments no longer had the power or leverage to regulate them. In fact, corporate interests have colluded with government officials to steer policy towards the needs of the corporate business entity before the needs of either the general public or the environment, (and this has moved into hyper-drive over the past four decades).
Source: The Corporation documentary 2004
Perhaps as we begin formulating the steps towards dismantling the power of corporations, and re-establishing them as a people’s tool using feminine values to structure and facilitate this, we might pivot towards a profit-for-purpose commercial world, in which we move to align the values and methods of our commercial undertakings in harmonious accord with the natural world.
Social business frameworks embody these characteristics …
The bottom line is that unending GDP growth threatens the very planetary life-support systems on which we depend, and if we are to have a future it is vital that we redesign our growth-addicted institutions to support ecological health. Economist, author John Perkins describes this as the movement from a death economy to a living economy, author David Korten explains in his book Change the Story Change the Future, that it is the shift from the Sacred Money and Markets Narrative, to a Sacred Life and Living Earth Economics. It is the shift from an economics derived around the corporation to an economics derived around the household. The death economy, Perkins writes, is based on the assumption that success is defined by the maximization of short-term profits for corporations and the short-term accumulation of material things for the individual, regardless of the social and environmental costs.
An addiction to control and the need for power over others is given full expression in the pathological nature of the modern day corporation and it is the essence of ‘empire’ building.
Power has become an artificial substitute for pleasure. In the business environment and the corporate sector it materializes as an addiction
Circle of Simplicity, Cecille Andrews
SOLUTION: From Global to Local Economies …
“Millions of local and regional enterprises are already demonstrating that they can do a better job providing for basic needs” Norberg Hodge states “including the fundamental need for community – than the handful of giant corporations that currently dominate the world’s economy.” Whilst “community based projects will reweave the social and economic fabric of society in ways that meet the needs of nature, both wild and human.” Hodge elaborates, “We need to pressure our governments to shift taxes and subsidies, and to modify food, health, and land-use policies so that they support local enterprise”.
“Localization is a process of economic decentralization that enables communities, regions, and nations to take more control over their own affairs. As we have seen, global banks and corporations actively shape our societies and our political institutions (to meet their own needs). Localization is a way of reversing this trend. Instead of business determining the rules for society, citizens – through the (participatory) democratic process – ought determine the rules for business”
Local is Our Future: Steps to an Economics of Happiness, Helena Norberg Hodge
As Stephen Green explains in his book Good Value: Reflections on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World, those with a polarise masculine mindset tend to focus and then compartmentalise their work life away from family life and the greater world. This enables them to view their ‘work life’ as somehow separate from questions of value or even questions of right and wrong. Winning and the bottom line are then pursued without recourse to moral concerns, or the wisdom of the day.
A RUNAWAY TRAIN OF AMBITION
From a cultural perspective, Newton’s cosmology of a mechanical universe has furthered the separation of head (reason and intellect) from heart (intuition and empathy).This fact, coupled with the relatively recent enactment of laws that gave our corporations the rights of the individual without the same responsibilities, has resulted in a runaway train of ambition. Globalisation has further facilitated the tyrannical nature of the out-of-sight, out-of-mind financial transactions that dominate our business world today… and we are at the mercy of this powerful combination.
But we don’t have to be …
Economic Hit Men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. The funnel money from the World Bank and the US Agency for international development (USAID) and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations, and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's resources.
Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex and murder. They play a game as old as empire: but one that has taken on a new and terrifying dimension during this time of globalization. I should know. I was an EHM Economic Hit Man
The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins
EMBRACING FEMININE VALUES WILL BRING PROFOUND CHANGE
Embracing feminine values will change the world profoundly at every level of society. In the new paradigm business world, leaders will relish the opportunity to draw out the best in each of us and to do so in the service of the greater good of the group.
In essence, the feminine infused business leader and politician will view themselves primarily as servants to the people and to the group’s aims, with an emphasis on what they are able to contribute rather than jostling for power for its own sake, or for the higher pay packet or status alone. It would be a workplace in which individuals collaborate and share power, with a shift from the paradigm concept of top down power to working from within the centre of an egalitarian web. It would be a nurturing and inclusive workplace that values the ‘we’ concept of shared prosperity. Winning will become a plural affair, a group construct in which the business leader will seek to cultivate the progress of all stakeholders in their quest to meet the business entity’s aims.
