Common Good Capitalism: It's Next! (Paperback)
You should buy this book. It's not perfect by any means, but it's a fun and insightful romp through what Terry Mollner sees as the inevitable future of capitalism -- an economy where the biggest firms have basically given up competing for market share and profits and instead vie against each other for the good of society. Full disclosure -- I have met Terry and might be working with him in the future on one of the projects in the book, Trusts for All Children.
The whole idea, honestly, sounds crazy and Terry is clearly a child of the sixties and seventies -- there is a lot of enlightenment language that hearkens back to the mystical thinking of the Age of Aquarius, and paeans to stages of being that lead to wise elders running the world. If you can slog through all of that, though, there are broad rays of genius shining through the book and many delightful stories of Terry's work with Ben and Jerry's ice cream, meetings with masters of the universe at Davos, and travels in India. What he proposes may not become so easily universal as he proclaims in the book, but the tools and examples are in place to shift capitalism in the direction of nurturing the common good -- if not as a top priority, then simply because consumers demand it.
Terry is one of the grandparents of socially-responsible investing and social business; he is a keen observer of trends and brings things together in ways that never occurred to me. He has a front-row seat for many of the narratives he describes. There is clearly a large and growing movement afoot to shift the dialogue on social change to include the private sector -- impact investing, social responsible mutual funds, Benefit Corporations and L3C legislation, the B-Lab Impact Rating System that engages both tiny social enterprises and a few billion-dollar-valuation companies, and so on. Combined with corporate social responsibility, the examples of Gates, Buffet and now Zuckerberg to give away most of their wealth, and other trends, the rise of duopoly monopolies might indeed offer a lever to push some of the world's biggest actors to directly engage in socially-responsible activities.
The book does not appear to be available in electronic format, however, and I've mostly given up reading books made from dead trees, but with any luck that will be fixed soon.