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.

Kelly reports on emerging ownership alternatives fro all over the world, visiting a community-owned wind facility in Massachusetts, a lobster cooperative in Maine, the employee-owned John Lewis Partnership in the UK, foundation-owned Novo Nordisk 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.

Marjorie Kelly is a Fellow at Tellus Institute and Director of Ownership Strategy with Cutting Edge Capital. She consults with private companies and leads research projects for the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and others. She co-founded Corporation 20/20, a project to create the vision for the future corporation. Kelly was the co-founder and for 20 years president of Business Ethics magazine. Her writings have appeared in publications such as the Harvard Business Review, Utne Reader, Chief Executive, Tikkun, E Magazine, and Yes Magazine.

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.

"This magnificent book is a kind of recipe for how civilization might cope with its too-big-to-fail problem. It's a hardheaded, clear-eyed, and therefore completely moving account of what a different world might look like-what it already does look like in enough places that you will emerge from its pages inspired to get involved."
-Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy

"This book is not only brilliant but also tremendously important. It's one of those rare books that opens our eyes to the fact that something we've taken for granted is actually intrinsically destructive and can be replaced by alternative, healthier forms of organization. I found it exhilarating."
-Fritjof Capra, physicist and author of The Tao of Physics and The Hidden Connections

"As a serial entrepreneur who's started three traditional shareholder-owned businesses, I know from experience what's wrong with that model. The future belongs to the alternative forms of ownership Kelly writes about. This is a book the world desperately needs."
-Jeffrey Hollender, cofounder and former CEO, Seventh Generation