Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution

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.

As long as businesses are set up to focus exclusively on maximizing financial income for the few, our economy will be locked into endless growth and widening inequality. But now people are experimenting with new forms of ownership, which Marjorie Kelly calls generative: aimed at creating the conditions for life for many generations to come. These designs may hold the key to the deep transformation our civilization needs.

To understand these emerging alternatives, Kelly reports from all over the world, visiting a community-owned wind facility in Massachusetts, a lobster cooperative in Maine, a multibillion-dollar employee-owned department-store chain in London, a foundation-owned pharmaceutical company in Denmark, a farmer-owned dairy in Wisconsin, and other places where a hopeful new economy is being built. Along the way, she finds the five essential patterns of ownership design that make these models work.

Winner of the 2013 Nautilus Silver Award in the category of Business/Leadership.

Foreword Author David Korten is an author, president and founder of the People-Centered Development Forum, and board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). He is an associate of the International Forum on Globalization and a member of the Club of Rome. Some of his bestselling titles include The Great Turning and When Corporations Rule the World. He is a regular guest on talk radio and television and a popular speaker at conferences around the world.

Foreword – by Jeffrey Hollender

Introduction – The journey ahead

Part I – The Evolution of Ownership: Home

From dwelling on the land to tangled in debt

1. Debt, Inc.: Extractive design

2. The Community Bank: Generative design

3. The Faux Community Bank: Capital formation

4. Wall Street: Financial alchemy

5. Acceleration: Ownership for a nanosecond

6. Overload: Extraction in extreme

7. Derivatives: Losing touch with reality

8. Collapse: Erosion from below

Part II – The Turning Point: The Commons

Beginning the world anew

9. Waking Up: No separate systems

10. The Island: Beyond growth

11. Bringing Forth a World: The ecosystem of generative design

Part III – The Design Challenge Ahead: Enterprise

Living companies for a generative economy

13. The Employee-Owned Store: Social boundaries

14. The Mission-Controlled Corporation: Governance

15. Finance Revisited: Capital

16. The Farmer-Owned Dairy: Networks

17. Coda: Next