Help John Grant Edit His New Book “Co-Opportunity” [Part 4]

This is an extract from the draft John Grant’s new book Co-opportunity, contracted for publication with John Wiley & Sons Limited, January 2010. This extract is section 4 of the book – Economic Resilience.

How can an economy keep growing in a finite world? Most fans of the ‘green growth’ approach argue for green jobs, a dematerialised economy, service, software and so on. But the historical evidence isn’t kind to this view – as the economy grows there is very little relative decoupling and zero absolute decoupling. The gearing of the economy also impacts on events such as the food crisis. And in economic terms we have a system that has to go faster every year or it crashes, destroying businesses and communities in the process. That’s why economics is a hot topic in sustainability circles and proposals like the Happy Planet Index and Valuing Biodiversity are gaining serious political support.

Economics is presented as the ultimate ‘technology’ – a mechanism that shouldn’t be tampered with, and in which co-operation and choices play little role. It’s been seen this way since Adam Smith – laissez faire ie ‘let it be’. Yet it is ultimately grounded in social contracts and expectations. One suggestion that became very popular in the 1930s was that of a leisure society with maximum 3-day working weeks. Through examples like this you can start to glimpse how economics would be transformed if quality of life (the common well being) were truly its goal. This would mean supplanting GDP which critics including Robert F Kennedy have pointed out is a very narrow measure of value. And instead valuing assets, including social capital and environmental reserves.

We have a way to go before economics becomes remotely co-operative for the common good on these macro- scales. But in micro-economics we are already witnessing revolutions; like microcredit and other social ventures being ‘not just for profit’. This style of thinking has started to influence the business mainstream – for instance in the B-corporation movement and the new found interest of management gurus and business schools in all things sustainability. We are also seeing hybrid co-operative/capital structures emerging such as Community Choice Aggregation schemes bypassing the utilities and buying greener, cheaper energy wholesale for a whole city. This brings us back to the notion of co-operative capitalism and the structures that thrived in the 19th century by serving communities rather than shareholders. For instance ‘building societies’ were originally collectives of workers who built housing in their spare time then drew lots to see which would get housed next. The shape of things to come?

All of this thinking comes into practice when you are starting a business and deciding how to structure and finance it. New developments such as patient capital and crowd funding are increasingly providing attractive co-operative alternatives. There is also a lot of interest in resilient business models; ways of hedging your business against uncertain times ahead. One of these models I find particularly interesting in marketing terms is the move from thinking about customer acquisition to lifetime loyalty. In this section we’ll also be exploring lots of the sorts of businesses who have rejected ‘either/or’ (either cause/or business) and gone for ‘both/and’. Like Method, Etsy, Howies and others. We’ll also take in some of the developments in alternative currencies and social economics – ideas from the 1930s finding a fresh relevance in the web 2.0 world of co-innovation.

How This Works

My publisher, Wiley, has been quite broad-minded in allowing me to share the near completed draft in this public way, for free. I’d ask you to please be respectful of that and for instance don’t circulate all or part of the manuscript. Also by Wiley’s request only one section of the book with be available for download at any one time. If you or a colleague has missed an earlier section, you can always email me at thejohngrant@btinternet.com.

Please do post thoughts, ideas, comments and insights in the comments sections of each part of the book. John will be checking into these, and using them to help me complete the manuscript. I’ll also be giving free signed books to the most helpful commenters and acknowledging all those that are helpful in the acknowledgements section of the final book.

Posts in this series:

John Grant’s Blog: Greenormal