3DN Financial or Living Resources
Financial or Living Resources
From Korten 'The Post Corporate World`:
Korten asserts that Corporations are growing out of control like cancer cells in the body. When I do the analysis, I use an ecosystem metaphor instead of an organism metaphor. I see the corporation as a recently evolved species. Its metabolic process (as described by Korten) is to turn living resources into money (financial resources). Korten suggests that we need to take steps to kill the cancer. It occurred to me that Mother Nature would not handle it that way.
There was a time when a new species began filling the atmosphere with a gas poisonous to life. That gas was oxygen. Rather than seeking to destroy the species creating the poison, nature designed new species to utilize the oxygen and thereby increase the abundance and diversity of life.
What would an organization converting financial resources to living resources look like?
- It would take in money and use it to create new living systems.
- It would be a structure that supported the production of an abundance of basic goods and services. See: Restructuring for Abundance
- It would take in money in exchange for an internal currency backed by the assets of the organization.
- It would "sell" its internal currency into existence. See Sample Transactions
How could such an organization attract (capture) financial resources?
- Provide services that are expensive in the money economy and use the money to produce an abundance of basic goods and services in the internal economy.
- Provide goods and services that make the community in which it operates more livable.
I had not thought of it that way but, the Self-help Corporation, using Korten's construction, is designed to create living resources. I had designed it to grow based on the value created by its members in a bootstrap manner. One of the reasons that I did not consider other sources of financing was the problem of aligning the interests of the parties (See Trust). However, if we look at such an organization as providing those benefits that Adam Smith saw in the Free Market, it is in the interest of the "community" that the organization succeed.
What if we looked at it as an investment in the community. The community would convert the dollars earned in the money economy into assets that produced ongoing goods and services for the community.
Back to good and evil
Back to Introduction
Back to Table of Contents
