This week’s episode of the MBA Series is focused on the next steps we should all be looking at. The idea of the next economy has an obvious connection to the future, but we also like to bring things into sight in the present and ground what we are doing with what is happening right now, all around us.

Here, Erin and Kevin cover some of the most fundamental bases, unpacking the subjects of healthcare, housing, and education, as well as looking at how you can find a good container for your energy and abilities. One of the pillars of this discussion, as always, is the concept of systems change, and how this can be accomplished.

Due to the breadth and depth of the necessary steps, we will most likely be dropping into a ‘part two’ of this conversation, so make sure to check back for that. But for now, join us to hear all about the areas and initiatives we are most inspired by and some fresh ideas that might just help you rethink how we can build a brighter world, together.

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As an economic system, capitalism has been the driving force behind tremendous global prosperity and innovation. However, it has also faced criticism for its negative impacts on social inequality, environmental degradation, and the concentration of wealth and power. Recognizing the need for change, many individuals and organizations are advocating for the transformation of capitalism.

In this thought-provoking episode, we delve deep into the topic of transforming capitalism to create a more sustainable and equitable future. Join us as we explore the inspiring stories, innovative ideas, and groundbreaking initiatives that are reshaping the capitalist landscape. We cover transforming capitalism into the Next Economy and unpack the complexity of the systems that need to change. We explore the steps required to transform the economy, why government systems need to change, and why the existing education system needs to be altered. We also discuss democratizing media, what Next Economy Living is, how LIFT is helping, and more.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a socially conscious consumer, or simply curious about the potential for capitalism to evolve, this episode offers an enlightening and inspiring exploration of the possibilities that lie ahead. Tune in, and be part of the conversation as we navigate the transformative journey toward a brighter economic future!

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Here is a small sample of some of the answers we have received from folks over the years:

Basic needs: Everyone has their basic needs met, including access to clothing, shelter, food, water, healthcare, and education.

Regenerative transition: The dominant extractive economy is not in existence. It has been replaced by a bio-regional, equitable, inclusive, communitarian, multi-stakeholder, and locally self-reliant economy that works for the benefit of all life. This has led to a return to pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide. The Earth is now growing in biodiversity and abundance.

Equitable leadership, outcomes, and reparation: There is leadership in all sectors of the economy from Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC); women; recent immigrants; people with disabilities; folks who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, asexual, and more (LGBTQIA+); as well as other traditionally marginalized groups. Differences in outcomes of health, wealth, education, housing, and so forth do not correlate with a person belonging to a particular racial or ethnic group. In addition, truth and reconciliation processes have been completed. Full reparations have been given to Black and Indigenous folks.

Indigenous wisdom and sovereignty: Indigenous wisdom and knowledge are deeply respected and informs all types of decisions. Indigenous teachings are now guiding fire management, flood mitigation, and overall efforts to achieve ecological balance. Native American rights and Indigenous rights around the world have been restored.

Abolition: Prisons and police have been abolished. Appropriate, timely, and empathetic care is given to all. Transformative Justice responds to violence and harm beyond restoration and repair by addressing the systems that produce injustice and oppression.

Liberated children: Children are physically, emotionally, mentally, and socially free to be curious and inquisitive. Kids are not tucked away while caregivers work. Childcare no longer functions to support the extractive economy’s schedule.

Disability justice: Access is understood as a collective responsibility. Access is centered as a core part of living in the world together. It is seen as a core part of liberation.

Dismantling white supremacy: All forms of white supremacy have been eradicated. White people are connected to their place-based Indigenous European ancestors, keeping them rooted in culture beyond whiteness.

As you can see, this small list of examples can feel exciting and motivating. Co-creating a more detailed vision of the future will inspire people to move beyond the status quo. This can make it easier to work backwards and identify the steps needed to create a better world.

From The Next Economy MBA: Redesigning Business for the Benefit of All Life, by LIFT Economy in association with Erin Axelrod, Kevin Bayuk, Shawn Berry, and Ryan Honeyman. Learn more at lifteconomy.com/mbabook.

Shareable is partnering with LIFT Economy to share the audio recordings from the Next Economy MBA program. Over the course of a year, we’re publishing all 25 of their trainings for everyone’s benefit. If you’re interested in learning more about their program, please visit: https://go.lifteconomy.com/nextmba

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Act fast to get this limited-quantity item! Your life is not good enough without this product. Sound familiar? Business-as-usual marketing relies on scarcity, but it doesn’t have to be like that. As you’ll learn in today’s episode, changing the way that we look at marketing starts with framing it in a different context. Rather than incentivizing consumers to buy products, Next Economy marketing focuses on relationship-building, a process that is focused on listening, empathy, and truly understanding someone’s needs in order to create opportunities to meet them.

Join Shawn Berry and LIFT Economy Marketing Lead Jeanette Morelan to find out what marketing looks like in the Next Economy, from iterative design grounded in reality to responsive audience research and user testing, factual and emotional messaging, authentic storytelling, and more. Although we use some of the same tools as business-as-usual marketing, Next Economy business principles inform a slower and more intentional approach to commerce.

At the end of the day, we believe that marketers have a moral responsibility to meet people where they’re at and offer solutions to basic needs rather than manipulating people or manufacturing desires. Tune in today to learn more about your role in fulfilling a vision of collective liberation and “speaking the Next Economy into existence.”

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Problem 1: Interest-bearing Debt

An increasing percentage of people use money to meet their basic needs. This is problematic because money is most often generated through interest-bearing debt, meaning it is created through the process of being lent out. For example, if you take out a loan, the bank deposits money—which it created out of thin air—into your account and begins charging you interest. One consequence of this is that it generates an artificial need for growth—often via activities that exploit people and the planet—in order to generate enough money to repay the debt and interest. This burden of continual growth has placed extreme pressure on society and the environment. Many people feel forced to participate in this system because they do not have access to alternative strategies that can meet their needs at a lower cost to their mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health. It is also problematic because it depersonalizes interactions—the opposite of how human needs have historically been met through gifts, bartering, and sharing. You end up with impersonal transactions rather than relationships. You get business instead of community.

Problem 2: A Scarcity Mindset

In Oakland, California, houselessness is a huge challenge (“houseless” and “unhoused” are sometimes used in place of the word “homeless” because many unhoused people feel that they do have homes). Tents and other makeshift structures can be seen under highway overpasses, in industrial areas, and on downtown city streets. In 2022, there were 5,055 houseless people—a 24 percent increase over the previous three years. However, the most recent U.S. census data for the area showed that more than 15,500 housing units remain vacant in Oakland. This shows that there are three times as many vacant houses as houseless people. Similarly, as was mentioned in the Introduction, about 800 million people go hungry or malnourished each day, even though twice the number of calories to feed all of humanity are produced. Scarcity is a fundamental concept of the BAU economy. Often, as in the case of housing and food, resources may be generally plentiful but distributed in a way that generates scarcity among certain population segments. 

Problem 3: The Fallacy of the Meritocratic Society

Meritocracy is a political system in which economic benefits and political power are vested in individual people based on talent, effort, and achievement rather than wealth or social class. We want to call out (in order to hopefully disrupt) that meritocracy is a narrative that has been explicitly championed around the globe to distract from the recognition that colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy are some of the reasons why inequities exist. It is much easier to keep the power structures in play when folks are directing their attention at individual performance instead of changing the oppressive systems that sustain inequality.

Problem 4: The Fallacy of Progress

The fallacy of progress occurs when generalized economic statistics are put forward as proof that humanity is trending toward the growth of well-being and prosperity. Using a single economic measurement like gross domestic product (GDP) to quantify progress for all humanity does not tell the whole story. We do not use GDP to measure progress in this book and our live training. For example, in an oil spill, well-being and environmental health go down (people who fish out of work, ecosystem collapse, etc.) while GDP may actually increase (through the transactions and expense of clean-up efforts, increased extraction elsewhere, even relief spending). This makes GDP a questionable measurement of “progress.” We prefer to reference health and well-being measures, such as the genuine progress indicator (GPI). GPI shows that on a global level, factoring in negative impacts that are not quantified by GDP (including species die-off, overwhelming toxics load, and institutionally enforced incarceration), wellbeing has declined over the past several decades.

Problem 5: …and Beyond

There are so many more problems. Property ownership, intellectual property silos, the pressure to maximize shareholder earnings, extractive investment culture, short-term thinking, structural racism, structural sexism, and externalizing social and environmental harm must be addressed. The challenges society faces expand beyond the boundaries of what is traditionally thought of as economy to include the education system, the media system, how humans collectively make sense of information, how to make decisions together, what is valued, and how people live. 

Getting from Here to There: Transition Frameworks

Now that we have established a shared language, a vision for the Next Economy, and an analysis and critique of the BAU economy, it can be helpful to offer some frameworks to support humanity’s journey from the problems and challenges of the current economy and systems to the Next Economy. The journey can appear long or impossible. It can be difficult to discern what actions to take and which strategies matter. A natural and understandable response to the harms of the BAU economy is to recoil from the pain and grief, to freeze and deny that change is needed, and to filter out information that urgently suggests otherwise. 

We have found the Two Loops model developed by the Berkana Institute very useful for making sense of the variety of approaches and paths on the journey to transforming the economic system (indeed, the image on the cover of this book is inspired by that work). The Two Loops model can also help you better understand what role you might play in supporting the transformation. While we are inspired by the Berkana Institute’s work and want to ensure that all credit for the creation of this model is given to them, for the purposes of our work we emphasize different aspects and interpretations of the Two Loops idea. We encourage you to learn more about how the Berkana Institute uses the model on their website at berkana.org.

The Two Loops model is useful for helping understand the transition from a dominant, old system (BAU economy) to an emergent one (Next Economy) and how to partner with the natural force of evolution to transition to the new and more adaptive system. The model itself is a simple drawing of two curves or loops (Figure 1). The “hospice” curve descends, representing the gradual “death” (or deep transformation or composting) of the existing system (in our case, the BAU economy). The “midwife” curve starts under the hospice curve and moves up, representing the birth or emergence of a new system. Together they represent the journey from now to the full realization of the Next Economy. What does it mean to do hospice and/or midwifery work to transition the economy?

• Hospice: Some people, when they become aware of the harms and injustices of the BAU economy, begin to work within (or adjacent to) the existing system, structures, and norms to reduce the harm of the BAU economy, taking incremental actions. Examples include activists pressuring Walmart to commit to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035, or getting Unilever to agree to reduce the amount of waste from its products that end up in the landfill, or the years-long effort that has gone into getting investment firms like Goldman Sachs to launch environmental, social, and governance (ESG) public equity investment funds, or campaigns to get Adidas to replace virgin polyester with recycled polyester in products. These hospice actions and strategies are necessary—but wholly inadequate—to effectuate the transition to the Next Economy. People involved in hospicing out the BAU economy can sometimes regard midwife efforts with cynicism. They might refer to midwife efforts as “impractical” because they do not immediately address the perceived problems “at scale.” Hospice work is often easier to take on at first because more resources and opportunities for personal security are available. However, hospice efforts can start to generate cognitive dissonance as it becomes clear that hospice is inadequate to effect the full transformation.
• Midwife: Others are not interested in incremental change. They want radical change to the existing systems, structures, and norms. These folks set off to midwife into existence entirely new (or novel, but informed by old-wisdom traditions) forms of organizations, efforts, and lifeways to model what the system might look like after it has already fully transformed. They are inspirational, but midwife strategies come with their own set of challenges. Midwife efforts are often fraught, under-resourced, bereft of personal security, and culturally invisible to society at large. People involved in midwife work often regard hospice work as inadequate and a distraction from the courageous path-finding work needed to truly transform the economy. Midwife workers may have few opportunities for income and feel extreme pressure to stop the harm of the BAU economy, so sometimes folks involved in more radical work feel antipathy toward anyone not fully engaged in dismantling the existing system as quickly as possible. 

It is important to note that this is not a strict binary. Projects can, and often do, have both hospice and midwife elements. In addition, neither hospice work nor midwife work is “better,” “more important,” or “more impactful.” People must push firms like Adidas to reduce their environmental footprint as quickly as possible. Simultaneously, new enterprises like Soul Fire Farm—an Afro-Indigenous-centered community farm committed to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system—need to be created to model what the Next Economy might look like. 

The Two Loops model’s key insight is that hospice and midwife work is needed. We understand and empathize with any resistance you may have to the idea that hospice work and midwife work are equally important. We still grapple with this tension on the LIFT team. Like many of us, you may have developed a strong identity and attachment to the story that there is a clear binary and your type of work is better than the other. It can feel good and can reinforce your sense of self, to believe you are on the correct side of the problem. However, binary “us vs. them” thinking is part of cultural conditioning. Judging and blaming others is easier than expanding the definition of “us.” Creating a larger “us” takes vulnerability, courage, humility, and the willingness to listen.

One important insight to help you on this journey is to see hospice and midwife efforts as complementary rather than separate. For example, hospice efforts can sometimes access funding and resources for midwife efforts. Hospice efforts can bring visibility to emergent Next Economy projects. Midwife efforts can sometimes inspire organizations that are only interested in incremental change to make radical shifts. The Next Economy will be achieved more quickly if you can grow an appreciation for both approaches. Try to identify areas in which hospice and midwife efforts can be mutually supportive and beneficial. 

From The Next Economy MBA: Redesigning Business for the Benefit of All Life, by LIFT Economy in association with Erin Axelrod, Kevin Bayuk, Shawn Berry, and Ryan Honeyman. Learn more at lifteconomy.com/mbabook.

Shareable is partnering with LIFT Economy to share the audio recordings from the Next Economy MBA program. Over the course of a year, we’re publishing all 25 of their trainings for everyone’s benefit. If you’re interested in learning more about their program, please visit: https://go.lifteconomy.com/nextmba

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What comes up for you when you hear the words ‘profit and loss statement’ or ‘balance sheet’? Fear, anxiety, stress, or even anger are common answers to that question. Although there tends to be an aversion to wanting to understand financial systems, there are a number of intuitive financial concepts we use in our daily experience. But the language around them can confuse and intimidate the public, creating barriers leading to problems later on.

This episode imagines what may change if universal financial literacy becomes the norm. It explores what is necessary to develop the necessary expertise to successfully navigate financial systems without dedicating oneself to in-depth study. Next, a distinction is made between compliance and management accounting and their corresponding timelines.
Understanding tracking and reporting is a cornerstone of financial systems theory. Tuning in, you’ll learn the implications of leaving out this important step and what you need to know in order to interpret the numbers. We consider the impact of developing universal literacy across an organization and discuss how operating projection can be a powerful tool. In closing, your hosts discuss what we may learn when we create a more holistic and inclusive dashboard beyond cash value. Listen in to hear more today!

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As we work toward building the Next Economy, organizational structure often comes up. No matter what stage of development an organization is in, it’s likely to run into some challenges that stem from aligning its actions, ethics, and values. Of course, when you have Next Economy ethics and values, you want to deliver needed goods and services to your community in ways that benefit all life. Needless to say, business-as-usual strategies don’t necessarily apply in flat, non-hierarchical, communitarian, cooperative, or familial organizations.

In today’s episode of the Next Economy MBA Series, we take a look at part one of our session on operations, which includes organizational structure, roles, and tasks. Ultimately, what we suggest is taking a both/and approach; in other words, consider both the vision, values, and impact you want to see in the world and find some clarity around organizational structure. Who is doing what? What is your team formation? How can you collaborate and ultimately achieve better outcomes to make the world a better place?

Tuning in, you’ll learn about the side effects of a typical hierarchical “chain of command” structure, the benefits of empowering and engaging the implicit intelligence of your team, how to structure horizontal organizations in a way that maximizes efficiency and functional collaboration, and more.

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Good governance is the cornerstone of any company’s ethical and responsible operations, from shareholders and customers to employees and the wider community. Strong governance not only upholds the company’s reputation but also increases the likelihood of its long-term success, empowering it to make informed decisions and manage risks effectively.

In the competitive world of business, a positive reputation is worth its weight in gold. Good governance plays a vital role in building and maintaining this reputation, not only within the industry but also among the wider public. By establishing a culture of transparency and accountability, companies can attract and retain customers, employees, and other stakeholders, while creating a distinctive brand identity that sets them apart from their rivals. The result? A powerful and competitive advantage, helping drive success and growth over the long term.

In today’s conversation, we unpack the third strategy of our MBA Series and discuss how to leverage the power of governance. We discuss how meetings are a part of the decision-making process, the concept of authority, the different systems of governance, and why engaging more stakeholders is better. Learn about practicing good governance hygiene, tactics for forming strategic partnerships, the various facets of accountability, and more. To hear actionable steps and essential insights to ensure a culture of good governance for your company, tune in now.

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