Scanning transcripts of speeches for value-laden words leads to interesting insights.

In this article, Jay Bragdon, author of Profit for Life (SoL 2006), explains why companies that mimic living systems consistently outperform those that exist as mechanical entities. The term he uses to describe this emerging living systems model is relational equity. Over the past ten calendar years he tracked equity returns on the sixty companies in his learning lab against widely used benchmark indices – ones that broadly represent traditional bottom-line-first management methods. His data revealed that companies driven by a traditional bottom-line approach, on average, either lost value or barely broke even. However, those that followed a relational equity model were able to catalyze a powerful reinforcing cycle of profit. In reading this article, we learn that a business managed as if it were a living organism creates a radically different and more beneficial set of relationships than one managed as a static entity. Firms that operate as living systems inherently place a significantly higher value on people and Nature (living assets) than they do on non-living capital assets. They understand, as we as practitioners need to understand that, at a fundamental level, living assets are a prolific source of capital assets. [Source: http://www.solonline.org/ ]

Many people today are focused on the global economic crisis, but Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter sees also a global crisis of business.

The model of American capitalism that worked so well to raise the fortunes of millions of people last century appears to have hit a wall. What's good for General Motors may no longer be good for the country. In its place must arise a new model of the company, one that serves society as well as rewarding shareholders and employees, Kanter argues in her new book, SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good.

She tells the stories of "vanguard companies" such as IBM, Proctor & Gamble, Cemex, Banco Real, and Omron that are rewriting what it means to be successful in the 21st century.

In this excerpt, Kanter explores how vanguard companies use values to guide business strategy.

If you were asked to fall backward into the arms of a stranger, would you trust the other person to catch you? Such a situation, a common exercise in group therapy, is a bit extreme. But every day most people place some degree of trust in individuals they do not know. Unlike other mammals, we humans tend to spend a great deal of time around others who are unfamiliar. Those who live in cities, for instance, regularly navigate through a sea of strangers, deciding to avoid certain individuals but feeling secure that others will, say, give accurate directions to some destination or will, at the very least, refrain from attacking them. In the past several years, researchers have begun to uncover how the human brain determines when to trust someone. And my colleagues and I have demonstrated that an ancient and simple molecule made in the brain—oxytocin (ox-ee-TOE-sin)—plays a major role in that process. The findings are suggesting new avenues for discovering the causes and treatments of disorders marked by dysfunctions in social interactions.

The Neurobiology of Trust By Paul J. Zak, Scientific American, June 2008

Just as nature is "red in tooth and claw," so is market exchange. All market participants--from business owners and managers to their employees to the grandmother shopping at her local grocery store--must eke out every possible efficiency or be crushed by the capitalist machine . . . or perhaps not. This book hopes to convince readers that both Alfred Tennyson's characterization of competition in nature, quoted above, and an uncritical reading about selfish competition in markets in Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations are not so much wrong as incomplete and, in the view of the contributors to this volume, woefully so.

Available at Amazon: Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy  By Paul J. Zak