Info and tickets: https://grayarea.org/event/team-human-douglas-rushkoff-guests/

3 - That’s another great reason to subscribe to Team Human via our Patreon page: http://patreon.com/teamhuman 

Patreon subscribers get to go to the shows for free on the guest list, instead of paying $20. (all proceeds go to Gray Area Organization, so it’s still a great thing to do. 

4 - I’ve been writing less for magazines and websites. Somehow, those things seem to disappear before they’ve been read. The news cycles are just too fast. I’m liking expressing my ideas through the TeamHuman monologues. I’m even liking not transcribing those monologues, so they can’t be spread around piecemeal, out of context. That said, I did post a little last summary of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - maybe it was a way of really moving on to the next book. 

It’s a cheat sheet, if anything - the sort of list of actionable ‘takeaways’ one never prints because then no one has to buy their book! But you all deserve it, so i’s below. 

I’m embarking on the Team Human project full-time, now, while teaching and touring. The book itself won’t be out until January 2019, but I’m sneaking out bits and pieces through the monologues on the podcast. I hope to be announcing a major radio partner for the show as well, in the coming months. 

5 - What you can do: Help me spread Team Human to more people. We are creating really great shows, but we haven’t been actively publicizing. I’m loathe to employ social media, and I’ve always had faith in the organic spread of good things. But I’d love for the show to reach more than the 10,000-20,000 who currently listen, as this will make all the work we’re putting in all the more worth it. So share the link to http://teamhuman.fm or to your favorite show.

This week’s guest, Danielle Butin, runs an organization - http://afyafoundation.org - that brings surplus medical supplies to places that don’t have any, and shares the way that *listening* to people before trying to help them, is really the only way to know what’s needed. (Sounds obvious, but look at the way most philanthropies work these days…) 

I will be back soon. Feel free to share the existence of this list, as well. Subscribe link at the bottom. 

With love and in solidarity,

Douglas 

—

Nobody cares about how we got here. They just want solutions for how to get out of the trap. CEOs are struggling to create value for corporations programmed only to accumulate more capital, drain local economies, and externalize the costs. 

So I've been ending my talks with specific, actionable suggestions for how companies of all sizes and stages can become more sustainably profitable in the current environment. It amounts to a 12-step program for getting off the addiction to growth. If you need to grow in order to survive, then you're not a real business - you're just a brand name on debt. 

Here's the quintessence of the recommendations to be gleaned from hearing my talks, reading my book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, or listening to my TeamHumanpodcast. Of course, if you read the book you'll see the arguments for why these strategies will work, and how they expose the false assumptions we've been working under for a few centuries, now. But here are the basic principles. 

1. In all decisions, optimize for the velocity of money over the accumulation of capital. How do we keep money moving instead of piling up? If you are sitting on money that can’t be deployed, you are taking too much out of the system. 

2. Make them rich. Make your customers, suppliers, partners, and even your competitors rich. If you drain the value from your marketplace, your customers won’t have money to spend with you. If you squeeze your suppliers on margins, they will be looking to do business with anyone else at the first opportunity. If you make everyone who comes into contact with you wealthy, they will want to keep working with you.

3. Employ bounded investment strategies. Think of the US Steelworkers, who invested their retirement money in construction projects that also put steelworkers to work. Or their subsequent decision to invest in projects that hired them to build nursing homes for their own parents. This triple and quadruple dipping is not a conflict of interests, but the leverage that comes with bounded investing. With boundaries, you can generate the cyclone effect required to enhance the velocity of money. Don’t earn ten dollars once; earn one dollar ten times. 

4. Push for a tax policy that promotes revenues instead capital gains. Shareholders are addicted to growth of share price because dividends are taxed higher. Reverse the tax code to promote flow over growth. Dividends and payroll should be tax incentivized; passive capital gains, discouraged. 

5. Organize as Platform Cooperatives.  Think Uber, where the drivers own the company. Even if they’re getting replaced by autonomous vehicles, they are going to own the company for which their labor served as the R&D and machine learning.  Labor must participate in ownership of the means of production, instead of simply getting a redistribution of spoils after the fact through taxes. Coops like Winco beat shareholder companies like Walmart wherever they compete. 

6. Local crowdfunding. If you run a bank or credit union, instead of giving 100k loan to a small business, give 50k contingent on their ability to raise the other 50k from the community, through advance-sale discount coupons. Customers pay $100 for $120 of pizza at the restaurant when it finishes expansion. Locals invest in their community and Main St, instead of outsourcing investment to the S&P, and draining local coffers. 

7. Develop favor banks and local currencies. An economy is people with needs and people with skills. They shouldn’t be hampered for lack of a means of exchange. Local currencies and favor banks allow for the exchange of value without borrowing at interest from a central treasury. This also means local businesses in the chain can transcend the artificial growth requirement. 

8. Cooperative businesses cooperate. Do everything open source, open API, and without “trade secrets.” Maintaining secrets shows you believe your company’s best innovations are in the past. Sharing secrets means you know your best innovations lie ahead, and that you benefit from everyone being smarter. It positions you as the center of competence in your field, dedicated to promoting a culture of learning and innovation.

9. Larger companies can enact economic experiments as local, limited trials. No need to turn the whole ship. Sell the ideas to the CEO or Board  as public relations stunts, then use their success to promote them throughout company. Walmart can introduce an aisle of locally produced goods; supermarkets can open parking lot to farmers market on Sundays; banks can offer local crowdfunding apps. Promote disruptive ideas as if they are just one-offs, not the radical game-changing innovations they really are. 

10. Run your company like a family business. Family businesses do better in every metric than shareholder owned businesses. They make more money in the long run, have better-paid employees, more stability, less damage externalized to the community or environment, and so on. They are concerned with legacy, the family name, the relationship of their own families to communities in which they live, and the company itself as the inheritance they are bequeathing subsequent generations. 

11. Develop new metrics for success other than growth. Put them down on paper. How prosperous is the community in which we are operating? How many unsolicited resumes from qualified candidates are coming in? How well are our suppliers doing? Do our frontline employees feel they are being supported by the company? 

12. Your goods and services are your product - not your stock. Don’t build a company to sell it to someone else; build it to run it, yourself. Companies are not disposable. An “exit strategy” is for Ponzi schemes. The world is connected. The environment is limited. The economy is circular. There is nowhere to run.