Actions for Progressive Business
We believe that progressive and responsible companies will need to develop new built-to-last values, purposes and business models fit for the new Wellbeing Economy and “Capitalism 3.0″. The companies which do this will last, the ones which do not will eventually die by the wayside.
New business models will need to focus upon new forms of products and services to reflect these societal changes:
- Shift from current industrial and commercial practice to an ecological and bio-inspired one in tune with the principles such as the “land ethic” of Aldo Leopold: “A thing is right to do when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of a biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
- Shift to operate in line with Herman Daly’s three principles on which to base limits on the throughput of an economy so that it does not become too large in relation to the environment:
- renewable resources should be harvested at rates that do not exceed regeneration rates;
- the rate of depletion of non-renewable resources should not exceed the rate of creation of renewable substitutes; and
- waste emissions rates should not exceed the natural assimilative capacities of ecosystems into which they are emitted
- Shift to what Daly also recommends in that “manmade” capital should be kept intact and that we should emphasize technologies that increase resource productivity, measured as the amount of value extracted per unit of resource, rather than technologies for increasing the resource throughput itself
- Shift towards examining and delivering to psycho-spiritual Wellbeing needs
- Shift of focus from selling products to delivering services
- Shift to longer lasting, durable products which are far more efficient in use of resources in their life and which can be replaced more slowly, thus requiring lower rates of resource use. One adaptation in this direction is the service contract for leased commodities
- Shift towards an end to some materials – such as products which break easily, are impossible to repair and decompose very slowly. Organic inputs will be the norm
- Shift from seeing products as benefits to seeing production as a cost of maintenance of delivery to societal needs. This shift to production being a cost not a profit making enterprise is fairly fundamental
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