Do you want to deliver even more effective results against the climate emergency? Or any of the 17 sustainable development goals? Are you working towards a circular, regenerative or blue economy? Are you about to found, or are you already in a startup? Are you in an existing business, whether small, medium or multinational? Make this one change to unlock high impact results otherwise inaccessible to you.
“We the Peoples” begins the UN Charter. It recognises that only through the power of all of the peoples, and hence all of the people of the world, can we be protected. Protected from the planetary-scale threats that led to the UN being formed.
Today the biggest threat we all face is the climate emergency, along with the other related aspects in the 17 SDG.
We the people are, always have been, and always will be, the primary hope for the future.
To turn that hope into aligned actions that can deliver the planet-scale positive results as big as the negative threat of the global climate emergency, we need to work together to regenerate the multiple capitals we have over used. All the natural capitals, social capitals, and your own individual human capitals.
We need to bring together our individual hope, capacities and capitals to deliver outcomes bigger than any of us ever could understand alone.
How we incorporate business today is a barrier to doing that; and yet the tools of business bring most of what we need, in order to multiply natural, social, and individual human capitals (not just multiply financial capital). We just need to change one element of incorporating business, an element we can change today within existing company law in almost every country in the world.
The most significant leaps in our capacity to turn individual hope and capacity into beneficial outcomes for all have come with leaps in freedom; the rights to engage in governance, the equitable share of benefits generated, and accountability for outcomes that are embedded in that freedom.
Every company wanting to maximise its impact tackling the climate crisis, or wanting to be part of a circular economy or regenerative economy, needs to incorporate giving all the peoples a share in governance and wealth generated (all capitals, not just financial).
“We the Peoples” points very clearly at the next evolution needed in business: that only by including all of the people involved in, or affected by, a business’s activities, in the governance of the business; and giving them an equitable share of the wealth generated by that business; does a business have the potential to truly address the climate crisis and 17 SDG.
This also means making each business free, not the property of an owner. Only then can a business be truly held accountable for the outcomes of its actions. Today it’s really the investors, as owners of the company, that are accountable. (Much as the owner of a slave was accountable for a crime committed by the slave because of direction from the owner.)
Read my earlier blogs, or read the draft of my forthcoming book, to know more about how to create today such a company, a FairShares Commons.
Do it now, if you are about to incorporate your startup.
If you are already incorporated, even if you are a 150 year old multinational, create your next spin-off as a FairShares Commons.
Anything less is fragile, and ineffective against climate change or any of the 17 SDG.