Owning Our Future

All of the current attempts to address the economic collapse are overlooking an essential factor: ownership. So long as businesses are set up to focus exclusively on maximizing monetary returns per quarter for a narrow group of individuals the economy will be subject to crippling boom-and-bust cycles. But now people are experimenting with new forms of enterprise ownership--we are in the midst of the most creative period of economic innovation since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Marjorie Kelly calls these new forms generative: life-serving, aimed at creating the conditions for life for many generations to come. They are in contrast to the dominant ownership designs of today, which can be called extractive: aimed at extracting maximum short-term financial wealth. To understand these emerging ownership alternatives, Kelly reports from all over the world, visiting a community-owned wind facility in Massachusetts, a lobster cooperative in Maine, a multi-billion-dollar employee-owned firm in London, a foundation-owned pharmaceutical in Denmark, a farmer-owned dairy in Wisconsin, and other places where an economy that works for all is being built. This is not a moment for old solutions and tired approaches. As we enter a new era of limits, alternative ownership designs can help it become a new era of fairness, sustainability, and community.

Marjorie Kelly is a fellow at Tellus Institute, a Boston think tank, and director of ownership strategy with Cutting Edge Capital. She is the author of The Divine Right of Capital and was cofounder and president of Business Ethics magazine.

Foreword – by David Korten
Prologue – The Journey Ahead

Part I – The Overbuilt House of Claims: Extractive ownership as the cause of financial collapse
1. Debt, Inc.: Extractive design
2. The Community Bank: Generative design
3. Wall Street: Capital markets on autopilot
4. Overload: The expanding house of claims
5. Collapse: The eroding middle class base

Part II – Returning to Earth: Ecological values as the seedbed of a generative economy
6. Waking Up: From maximizing profits to sustaining life
7. The Island: From growth to sufficiency
8. Bringing Forth a World: From individualism to community

Part III – Designing Living Companies: Five patterns of generative ownership design
9. Living Purpose: Creating the conditions for life
10. Rooted Membership: Ownership in living hands
11. Mission-Controlled Governance: Humans at the helm
12. Stakeholder Finance: Capital as friend
13. Ethical Networks: Reinforcing shared values
Epilogue: Next
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author