Business Lives in San Francisco
1. Business should nourish life
Business shouldn’t just mean ‘being busy’. In Scandinavia, the word for business is ‘naeringsliv’, literally “nourishment for life’. Indirectly, everyone expects business to answer their needs - particularly in providing the money to do what you want. But what about the needs of the environment, community, expression, recognition, spirituality, grace, generosity?
2. The industrial model wasn’t built to nourish life
It was based around the logic of machines: to get something out, you have to put something in. Whether it was oil, coal or sheer manpower, the factories had to be fed to keep your business going
3. The village and virtual community model is built to nourish life
Because the more you use them, the stronger they get. Whether it’s paths across a field being worn in the right places by walkers, or searches being made at Google, or the way second-hand books get stacked in interesting piles by absent-minded browsers, this is the new model.
It means you don’t have to build a giant factory to start off with and then try to sustain it. The starting point is finding the right conditions which cultivate life.
4. But how can you make that work for every business?
While it makes sense with search engines, or village halls, what does it mean to how you run your organisation? And your life? What are the design principles you can use to navigate through difficult decisions, in order to ensure you are maximising the possibility for a living, sustaining business?
How can you tell which bit of your business is self-sustaining and living, right now, and which is doomed to fade away if you pull the plug?
5. The Kaospilots want to make sense of it.
The students of the Kaospilot school are trained over three years in project, process and business design. They specialise in rapid prototyping of new businesses, projects and strategies, pulling on knowledge from multiple disciplines.
In spring, 35 students from the Kaospilots are coming to San Francisco to work on projects to build great examples of successful, sustainable businesses that nourish life. They are looking for people to work with.
“We have a dream of what we would like to get out of a ‘business that nourishes life’. We would like to know what you would need out of that kind of business."
“We have a dream of what we think we could contribute to building the ‘living businesses of the future. What could you contribute to developing new, living businesses?"