Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Posting to John Mackey's blog

Previewing your Comment

Hi John,

DISCOVERY CONTEXT
Michael Strong's discovey ( http://flowidealism.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_flowidealism_archive.html ) of my first essay regarding evolving capitalism ( http://www.well.com/~rb ) --

"Reed Burkhart has created a sort of mirror-image of FLOW"

-- accelerated my discovery of you. Thanks to you, Michael and Jeff Klein for encouraging open dialogue on the strategic topic of business evolution, that I consider to be of immeasurable importance for my children's future welfare.

APPLAUDING YOUR INNOVATIVE RECORD AND NEW IDEAS ON EVOLUTIONARY ROLE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Your critique of (adolescent) capitalism's positive and negative traits and practices I consider to be insightful, objective and innovative. You are a well-established innovator in business coming to be an innovator in culture.

Perhaps the greatest innovations (cultural innovations, business innovations, or "Aikido-meme" innovations that coactivate the former two) are those innovations oriented toward keeping wealth and vision together, a state of affairs persistently challenged by rogue capitalists.

Innovation could be considered the key metaphor permitting the differentiation of wholly fruitful business (integral, durable, sustainable, trusteeship-embracing conscious business/capitalism) from merely profitable business (amoral, accretive without particular regard for good corporate citizenship, rogue business/capitalism). Durable life processes always have a regenerative (innovative) component -- so your focus on entrepreneurship and innovation can reference sound correlates from the life sciences (E.O. Wilson, et al.).

Consequently, I applaud your proposition to reward innovation above mere capital management/investment via tiered (inverse to hold time) capital gains tax rates; and hint that among the more integral thinkers in the life sciences, there is substantial opportunity to make an even stronger case for why:

"Corporations must rethink why they exist. If business owners/entrepreneurs begin to view their business as an complex and evolving interdependent system and manage their business more consciously for the well-being of all their major stakeholders while fulfilling their highest business purpose, then I believe that we would begin to see the hostility towards capitalism and business disappear around the world."

The Aikido metaphor that I raise in my essays "Aikido Activism" and "Integrated (Aikido) Entrepreneurship" provide vision out of the paradox of profit, because if in rethinking why corporations exist we proceed to make efforts to mobilize that we must deal with the difficult issues raised regarding the inertia of contemporary capitalist practices, which are not uniform from one industy to another -- with food being far, far more transparent than many other industries that collectively set the tone of capitalist practice and culture with Whole Foods ... and now more and more Chinese, Indian, Russian, Peruvian -- etc etc -- companies and cultures of capitalism (the global war of capitalist memes).

In particular, the Aikido metaphor, combined with the notion of evolutional business -- durability, or natural selection -- answers directly criticisms such as:

"I can't see oilmen, auto manufacturers, bankers, defense industry contractors, senior government officials, media moguls, - i.e. the power mongers and the money grubbers who have always ruled the world (be they American, British, Chinese, Japanese, Saudi, Swiss etc.), adopting these principles any time soon. For them, as myself and several other contributors to this forum have pointed out, the usual Darwinian evolutionary principles apply."

The reason for hope of evolution beyond the more roguish, adolescent practice of capitalism is exactly BECAUSE the inertia posed by the most rogue capitalists is subject to Darwinian/Schumpeterian business evolution including through the evolutionary vehicle of the perception of power, and the coming perception of how Aikido -- when practiced successfully in business entrepreneurship (also remembering that traditional Aikido is practiced through both instruction and application, so business Aikido should have both mobilizational and educational elements) -- transforms current powers or energies, even those energetic components with great inertia in untoward direction, to be in harmony with nature.

By this line of reasoning, the transition of even the most regressive, adolescent capitalist elements actually happens far earlier than otherise might be predicted, because as the power-focused adolescent capitalist mind encounters, experiences and understands the inherent power of innovating/inflecting the power vector of business practice (via Aikido as described in my essays), they naturally evolve their own understandings, objectives and trajectories.

The scale and growth issues are also nicely handled in the same proposed solution context of Aikido-meme based evolution of business by winning the game while truing it.

I have immense appreciation, John, for your leadership in visioning, communicating, and mobilizing what indeed is a need for evolving the practice of capitalism.

Regards,

Reed Burkhart
Walnut Creek, CA
http://www.well.com/~rb

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