Time for a corporate spring

A common complaint in today’s world is one of disconnection. Our industrialized world has resulted in less contact with community — we don’t know our neighbors or who grows our food. In the same way that we’ve lost touch with a deeper sense of belonging and place, many of us have become disconnected from the soul of our work. The corporation-worker structure today is a master-servant relationship. We’re slaves to the company, working longer hours for less wages.

“Now mass layoffs to boost profits are the norm, while the expectation of a career with one company is long gone,” William Lazonick wrote. “This transformation happened because the U.S. business corporation has become in a (rather ugly) word ‘financialized.’ It means that executives began to base all their decisions on increasing corporate earnings for the sake of jacking up corporate stock prices. Other concerns — economic, social and political — took a backseat. From the 1980s, the talk in boardrooms and business schools changed. Instead of running corporations to create wealth for all, leaders [are told they] should think only of ‘maximizing shareholder value.’”

Our economy is dominated by a monoculture business model, Kelly says, driven largely by publicly traded corporations that have built in pressure from Wall Street for maximum short-term earnings. But a healthy, living economy needs biodiversity. We can find this if we begin to look around — across the U.S. and the world — where there are businesses designed not for maximum profit but with a mission-driven social and economic architecture. One of these models is the “social enterprise.”

The Social Enterprise Alliance defines these organizations as “businesses whose primary purpose is the common good. They use the methods and disciplines of business and the power of the marketplace to advance their social, environmental and human justice agendas.” And one of the defining characteristics is that “The common good is its primary purpose, literally ‘baked into’ the organization’s DNA and trumping all others.”.......