Category: Communities of Commerce
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Defining Your Business’s Success Using Net Positive Value
Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to Generosity At Work that defines a concept that’s critical for assessing the impact of your business. Let me know what you think! Defining Net Positive Value Self-centered business care whether their own bottom line is growing. Generous businesses care about their own growth at the same time as…
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What Makes Digital Tech Companies Models of Generativity?
Buffer, WordPress, AirBnB, Waze, LoveWithFood, ModCloth, Etsy— so many of the organizations I’m using as examples of generative businesses share a similar profile: They are relatively small, young, organized around a core software process or product, filled with coders and developers, and part of a specific tech community. Why is generativity such a defining part…
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My TEDxHoboken Talk: The Boost Revolution
It is a truth universally acknowledged: … that watching yourself on a grainy video talking about the ideas closest to your heart is rather mortifying. So, with a little cringing, I’m excited to be able to share the video of my TEDxHoboken talk, The Boost Revolution: Expanding Possibilities for Business. It took some time to…
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Why Zipcar Is Not the “Sharing Economy”
Zipcar isn’t a sharing business, so it can’t create the sharing economy. Who can? Businesses that support customer-to-customer relationships and reciprocal caring.
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Defining Thick Value in a Boost Economy
Thick value has many simultaneous kinds of positive meaning, that are stacked, nested, embedded, and fused with each other into layers that are weighty with significance. Thick value has more meaning and conveys more about why it’s valuable. When we pay attention to thick value, we make choices that help us maximize more than financial…
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5 Ways to Expand How We Think About Value in a Boost Economy
It can be hard to convince certain “business” people that it actually makes sense to conduct their business in a generous, boosty way that creates opportunity for others. The mainstream business conversation has remained so wedded to the notion that ‘price’ accurately captures ‘value’, and to the belief that financial goals trump other kinds of…
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Self-Reliance Versus Interdependence in The Boost Economy
Being independent and “going it alone” can feel very satisfying. Our culture prizes independent initiative, so much so that we often overlook the importance of working with each other to help each other. I see this bias towards independence when gurus talk about leaders as though followers don’t exist. And, I see this bias in…