I'm a research director at Institute for the Future, and I interviewed author Douglas Rushkoff about his latest book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. It's a terrific look at the way the current system of wealth creation is rigged against everyone but the financial gatekeepers at the top of the food chain. More importantly, he offers some great suggestions for ways to make the system more fair for everybody.
As you approach whatever it is you’re doing, you have to think “do I want to be like a traditional corporation, a shareholder owned corporation, where the object of the game is to earn and extract enough money from this business, so my grandchildren can inherit enough cash to live their lives? Or do I want to create a business that’s healthy and sustainable enough that it can generate revenue and opportunities for my grandchildren who hopefully will want to join that business?” The latter is the sort of approach that creates a business that wants to befriend communities. It’s your name on the thing. You don’t want people to hate you the way they hate Uber because that’s you, that’s your kids, that’s your family name, that’s your legacy. You have such a different relationship to it that you start to think of your neighborhood as a legacy and the planet as a legacy and your grandchildren as a legacy and your workers as a legacy. That is who you are. It’s so much more integral than this fractious and abstracted business landscape that we’re seeing die today.
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