BEAUTIFUL BUSINESS LETTER #6

Burning Down The House

 

Wait! The House hasn’t even opened, and we want to burn it down? Not so fast.

Yet the theme of this Beautiful Business Letter shall set the tone for one aspect of the House—the daring, bold, and fierce one, the one that defies the status quo and pushes for radical solutions to some of the most urgent issues our planet and species are facing: climate change, growing social disparity, the fatigue of liberalism and Western-style democracy (and the rise of a new AI-powered oligarchy), our concepts of gender and identity, and the list goes on.

At the House—and in this issue—you’ll hear (of course) about fire power, about meat-free burgers, a world without work and parenthood, transhumanism as the most radical vision for the future of man and machine (hint: it’s the same), and Deliberately Developmental Organizations (DDOs). But we also feature heretics such as author Anand Giridharadas who lambasts “fake change” as the product of an elite group of leaders who like to give back but never ever accept to take less, as he puts it, and critical believers such as Charles Eisenstein who examines the grand illusion of bigness in his essay.

Despite all these fervent theories of radical change, in the end, there is doubt: “When people ask me why I don’t build an organization around the work I do, I say, I’m not sure if what the world needs right now is another organization,” Eisenstein writes. He points out that “Organizations as we know them behave in the way organizations behave, for better or for worse. Something else is needed. I’m not sure what, but maybe it will have a chance to emerge if we resist the rote impulse to scale up.”

Burning down the house is a start. 

Your House of Beautiful Business team