Ricardo Semler, author of the book Maverick said:
Only two things grow for the sake of growth: Businesses and Tumors.
But if everyone knows that, why the heck most businesses are continuing to grow for the sake of growth?
Wouldn't be great to figure out a new way to count and to imagine what really counts in our life? What if modern companies instead of being driven by more massive manufacturing, would be driven by cultivating a more authentic plenitude of values such as authenticity, empathy, compassion, that really matter in human terms? It's time to make a paradigm shift and only with a renewed mindset political leaders and business leaders will be able to learn that what really counts is to truly take into account the people. And that people everywhere on Earth ask for Better, no longer for more.
The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income. The volume of output an economy can produce, import, export, or finance sketches only the crudest outlines of literally how well human exchange causes people, communities, society, and future generations to fare.
Simon Kuznets, 1971 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Umair Haque (among the Top 50 Thinkers) the author of Betterness* is making a great analogy between the first car was ever build and our economic system. The first car didn’t have the speedometer, but the rev counter to check whether the engine was working. In fact there was no interest to measure speed limits in a time when reaching the destination at all was the main priority. Something similar happens to our economic rev counter which is measuring "how furiously” the engine of global commerce and business is pumping, but without the speedometer we have no indicator that tells us whether all this movement that sucks both human and planet resources is generating “the motive force that lifts people from penury to prosperity”. * you can find this quote about S. Kuznets on page 12 of Betterness.
Umair Haque interviewed by Thinkers50 from HavasMediaLabs on Vimeo.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
Remarks of Robert F. Kennedy at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968 More than forty years ago during the famous speech at the University of Kansas at Lawrence on Gross National Product, Bob Kennedy pointed out the limits and the dangers of an economic vision which does not consider what really matters and what really counts in terms of human prosperity.
My heartily wishes to see the end in 2012 of this kind of fake prosperity sustained by the “business as usual” paradigm. This year I wish a new awareness will spread and grow in every country: the mere pursuit of profits has created only devastating effects for individuals, societies, businesses, global and local environments. In 2012 I wish more and more businesses around the world will embrace this secular cultural change, this phenomenal paradigm shift and will start to build a complete different kind of prosperity. I mean a prosperity where individual fulfillment, trust, empathy, human relations are the priorities over economic returns, incomes, shareholders value, stock exchange rules. In 2012 I wish more and more people around the world will be starting to ask the question: if this model of prosperity as we know it can’t provide food to 20% of the world's population (1.5 billion), if 5 million children are dying each year from malnutrition, if 11 million of children are dying every year from preventable diseases, if over a billion people have no safe water to drink, what kind of good can we possibly expect for the future? How to change and how to start writing a new page in our history? My humble suggestion is that our heart is the perfect starting place. We have to help each other to become more aware of the immense power each one of us has in rethinking the world starting from the smallest things and decisions in our daily life. When this will begin to happen, it will really be a good year to remember. This is my best wish in 2012.
Meaningful Brands For A Truly Compelling Consumer Experience
The industrial definition of prosperity is optimizing the production for “more, bigger, faster, cheaper” consumption of goods and stuff. But today people’s values are shifting towards a more human definition of prosperity in which what it truly matters is to live a meaningful life, with true ...