E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Sacred Economics in a Gift Economy

In the past, you may well remember how I have been putting together a good number of blog posts on a topic that I have grown to become rather interested in, and very fond of, over the course of time around the Circular Economy. You know, that kind of economic shift towards sustainable growth for everyone, even planet Earth. Well, it looks like there is a new one out there that I got introduced to, just recently, thanks to a Google Plus post by Luis Alberola referencing the excellent work from Charles Eisenstein and his rather intriguing book “Sacred Economics“. Of course, I’m talking about The Gift Economy. 

There is a lot of really good, well written, spoken, and inspiring literature around the topic of the Gift Economy. But perhaps the one that I have found the most transformational one is that one from Charles himself where he keeps talking about it in his new book Sacred Economics. This book, indeed, does look a little bit out of the ordinary, specially, when you go into the Web site and you find this rather uncompromising quote: 

“In keeping with one of the main themes of the book, Charles has made the full text of the book available online as a gift. Click on the links below and enjoy. If you feel moved to send Charles a return gift, you may do so below“

Of course, as intrigued as one can be, I decided to spend about 12 minutes on watching through the promotional video clip that was put together by director Ian MacKenzie and I doubt there would be anything more inspiring that you may have watched this week, perhaps this month, or, maybe, even, this year. What an absolute delight you will be embarking on if you start watching it. As a teaser, it kicks off with this absolutely stunning, and worth while living for, quote: 

“We’ve all been given a gift, the gift of life. What we do with our lives is our gift back” – Edo

Needless to say, that I would strongly encourage you all to watch further along the video, so that you can see what are some of the main key statements that Charles himself postulates not only on the video clip itself, but on the book as well. Topics like ancient gift economies, modern capitalism, the role of money on how it’s contributed, tremendously, towards “alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth“. How money is just an agreement; how it just doesn’t have any value per se; and how scarcity is built into the money system, just as much as our traditional concept of growth.

How our very own separate selfs have contributed into building a hostile environment for us as a species, in constant conflict with nature, with ourselves, with schooling (learning), with life and how we are already embarked on a ruthless self-destructive path difficult to revert back from. And in that context that’s where that gift economy kicks in. “We didn’t earn air, we didn’t earn being born, we didn’t earn our conception, we didn’t earn a planet that could provide food, we didn’t earn the sun” is just another superb quote that finishes with a rather mind-blowing affirmation: Inborn gratitude, where life is a gift and the natural response to giving / receiving a gift is gratitude. Naturally. The one we show every day.

According to Charles, in a gift society, if you have got more than you need, you give it to somebody who needs it. That’s what gives you status, a stronger sense of security. If you build up all of that gratitude people are going to take care of you, too. If there are no gifts there is no community and therefore societies become monetised. Eventually, according to him, we just can’t have community as an add-on to a monetised society. We actually have to have a need for each other, which surely makes perfect sense from the perspective of how we, after all, are social animals, with a strong sense of caring and belonging to the group. Regardless. 

His description on the video about The Shift and what it would entail is just priceless altogether on its own, finishing up with a quote that I thought was worth while mentioning over here as well, since I have mentioned it a couple of times already myself on where we are at the moment: ”It’s going to be up to us, to determine at what point this wake-up plan would happen“. Remember, Awakening 2.0? Just brilliant!

Charles’ closing remarks from the video clip itself though are even much more profound ones on what’s needed to revert the tide, to aim at that significant change of how we do things, who we are as human beings, as community, and what we should be focusing on:

“[…] We have been messing around, playing with our gifts of technology and culture. And developing these gifts. Now we are coming into adulthood. And it’s time to apply them to our true purpose. At the beginning, […] it’ll be about healing the damage that’s has been done. […] We are in the business of creating miracle around Earth. […] It’s necessary. Anything even less than that is not even worth trying”

The interesting thing though is that for all of that to happen, for that shift to take place, and the sooner, most probably, the better, we may well need the current economic system to collapse and fail, big time, as my good friend, Dave Pollard, hinted out on a superb blog post under the title “Moving from Understanding and Protest to Direct Action“, where he reviewed the book  and he concluded:

“If we are hugely fortunate, when the industrial growth system starts to fly apart and collapse through its own unsustainable failings (a process that’s well underway for all the attempts to cover it up), some collective of smart, generous, articulate people might start to put some of Eisenstein’s ideas to a real-life test. But I wouldn’t count on it. When things start to collapse, panic, denial, blame-seeking and reactionary thinking are more likely human responses“

Probably, but, on the other hand, recent signals are starting to come out and tell us otherwise, and with various multiple flavors that are starting to become rather difficult to hide away from the common public, regardless of what mainstream media, governments or whatever other public / privates entities are trying to portrait further. A couple of them have actually become my true favorites, mainly, because they have started to show what that Gift Economy would look like in the real, and, specially, in the context of the current financial econoclypse that we are going through over here in Europe, by demonstrating that, if there is a way, we can make it. It may take some time, it may take plenty of good effort, energy, and passion, but if there is a way that we can show and demonstrate caring and sharing for one another, specially in times of need, and I mean, serious need, we will eventually find it, embrace it, apply it. Live it. 

Yes, indeed! Welcome to the Gift Economy! Where sustainable and profitable growth for everyone, including planet Earth, is now finally becoming a reality. Our communal reality. And where businesses take a new meaning in life by co-sharing that responsibility with the community to do things right and where money may no longer be the only ruling principle in town. Exciting times, my dear friends. Indeed, very exciting times … 

Have a good one everyone!

[Oh, and in case you are wondering, here's how the gift economy would work… Charles' book on Sacred Economics can be read entirely online for free, but I felt so inspired watching through the video, learning tons along the way, getting really excited about it, that I just purchased a copy of the book for my Kindle, as a token of gratitude for the inspiration. It *does* work!]

Think – About Making the World Work Better

It’s that time of the week, almost the weekend!, where we could all do with a bit of an Inspiring Video of the Week, don’t you think? The last series of blog posts that I have put together over here in this blog in the last few days have been on the long side of things and while I do appreciate everyone going ahead, reading through them and leave behind some wonderful comments (Thanks much for that, indeed!), I think most folks would also appreciate a shorter blog entry every now and then with a clearer, sharper, insightful message being shared across, right? So how about this one: THINK, about making the world work better. 

Indeed, that’s the title of a 10 minute long video clip that has been shared, a little while ago, over in YouTube by IBM (So the usual disclaimer would apply in here, before anyone starts wondering, I happen to work for that company for over the last 15 years) and which I think would make for a rather interesting reading, if we would want to venture into figuring out plenty more about that “Circular Economy” that I have covered in the recent past a few times already. IBM itself calls it Smarter Planet, but I think it would be much more suggestive and inspiring altogether going ahead with that mantra of what’s behind the Circular Economy and how it helps us focus on just simply making good, healthy progress.

Either way, I wouldn’t want to extend myself for far too long, other than to mention how the main theme behind this rather inspirational video clip is all about something that seems to be lacking nowadays in the world out there, in general, and that we probably need to bring it back very soon, and pretty badly, if not already!, if we would want to keep progressing nicely as sustainable, profitable businesses, as meaningful cultures and as societies representative of the human nature: sustainable growth through critical thinking, based on these key elements: “seeing, mapping, understanding, believing and acting“. Amongst others …

Not too shabby, don’t you think? I am not sure whether you may have read it or not, but the video clip reminds me of a superb, rather short blog post from my good friend Euan Semple under the heading “What I think” which would nicely summarise what I actually meant above when I said critical thinking and how we seem to be lacking, generally speaking, those key skills, specially, in the world of the Social Web, when you would imagine that it wouldn’t be like that, given the chances and the many opportunities that we nowadays have to connect, collaborate, share our knowledge, converse, learn and innovate together through a good number of those social technologies. But Euan himself describes it much nicer than what I could possibly do myself, and I am going to take the liberty of quoting a couple of sentences and leave the rest out out to you to head over to this blog entry to read the rest … 

“We all have the ability to think seriously. We all have the right to say what we think […] We are on the brink of working out new ways to productively combine what we all think […]“

Perhaps, we should all start doing a bit more of that critical thinking that I have mentioned above, in order to try to solve some of the most urging problems we keep bumping into as a society, instead of figuring out why we cannot longer make sense of the Trending Topics of, say, Twitter or why Twitter closed off the door for things like LinkedIn or Instagram. Seriously? Don’t we have better, more impending issues to work on as a collective through using these social technologies to think AND act? I think so. I know so! Thus we better roll our sleeves and get down to make the world work better… It would be about time, don’t you think?

Have a good one everyone!

The Sharing Economy

In the recent past you may well remember a couple of blog posts that I put together over here around the subject of the Circular Economy, right?, as perhaps one of the most forward thinking initiatives towards sustainable, social, purposeful and meaningful growth, maybe much deeply inspired by the world of Social Business. Well, now, here it comes The Share Economy with a far too similar mantra that most of us, socially networked knowledge workers, have been embracing, and living!, for a good while now: Sharing!

In a world where plenty of our activities, whether personal or work related, are always pretty much individualistic, as we are starting to come around group activities, eventually, with the emergence of social networking tools, even though there is a group of people out there who keep claiming that the (Social) Web has made us all far too isolated from the rest of the world, to the point where people decline any physical contact or fail to grasp social physical cues anymore, it’s rather refreshing to see new and very innovative initiatives like Uniiverse, whose motto is nothing less than a tremendously inspiring “Platform for Collaborative Living“.

In a business world, where 80% of the knowledge workers, so, that is, 8 out of 10!, are not happy with their work anymore, and probably with their lives either, since work / life are now so intermingled with one another that’s becoming quite a challenge to distinguish which is which, here comes Uniiverse, once again, sharing along how there may well be a much better approach out there to continue providing us with an opportunity to have a “happier, more sustainable and a better lifestyle“, which doesn’t seem to be too much of a bad idea, if you consider the current state of things, whether on a personal level or a work related one. And all of that, because of a single magical word: share!

Indeed, the folks behind Uniiverse have put together a rather interesting and thought provoking initiative where they have sparked the idea of sharing and contributing into building what may well be the next wave of social interactions, as Social Business keeps taking by storm the corporate world encouraging, if anything, not just connecting and collaborating amongst knowledge workers, but just something so fundamentally simple and, yet, so incredibly powerful, as sharing. Sharing for the sake of sharing. Like the good old Knowledge Management mantra, sharing your knowledge across for the sake of sharing it and without asking for anything in return (cf. “In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge” by Dave Snowden).

What IF we would then shift focus and instead of hoarding and protecting our knowledge, as we keep thinking that “Knowledge is power“, which, obviously, has not made things much easier for the vast majority of people, if we currently take into count the financial crisis we have been going through over the course of the last few years, we would go ahead and, instead, share it across freely, so that others could learn and become better at what they do, just as much as you would be able to do it yourself from the knowledge that others share with you (“Knowledge shared is power“). Wouldn’t things run much smoother towards that ”happier, more sustainable and a better lifestyle“? If so, what’s stopping us then?

Our ingrained ability to fight against each other to have a position of supremacy and power, over the others, as well as influence, which in most cases would only serve a few and no-one else? Or is it because we are far too scared of the huge potential behind that simple act of sharing? Imagine an example: what do you think would happen if all of a sudden, everyone in the corporate world, going from the bottom line to all the way to the top (i.e. Regular knowledge workers, and top executives alike), would come across in an exercise of radical transparency and share their pay slips, that is, their monthly salaries, like Rachel Happe was mentioning over three years ago in a rather thought provoking blog post under the title “Radical Transparency: Where The Rubber Hits The Road“? Do you think we would benefit from that act of sharing as a result of that transparency exercise? Tough one, eh? I think we would and here is why…

With (knowledge) sharing there comes an opportunity to become much more open, transparent, nimble, trustworthy, agile, engaged, responsible, interconnected, bonded, etc. etc. Essentially, some of the various main key traits behind living and embracing a Social Business, and, in a way, if you look into it much closer, the folks at Uniiverse have actually shown us what it could potentially look like. Take a look into this YouTube video clip that lasts for a little bit over two and a half minutes and which shows the power of sharing and building an entire economy around it. Worth while a look for certain!

Not sure what you would think, but with the emergence of all of these social technologies I sense we are a lot closer than what most people would think from truly realising that Sharing Economy. And somehow, just like the Circular Economy that I have talked about in the past, they both seem pretty good solid options to provide us with that sustainable growth for a better life. Our life.

What do you think? Still consider that sharing doesn’t add any value to you, as an individual, or to a group, a network or a community? Perhaps we need to start re-thinking about our priorities and evaluate, once again, whether protecting our position, power and influence, that is, our knowledge, is worth while after all, instead of putting it to good use and help others become much more effective at what they already do. Somehow, the connection to Servant Leadership is clear, it’s right there!, and so is that connection of Social Business and open (knowledge) sharing. So what do we have to do to make it all work? What would make it click for everyone? It just doesn’t sound too difficult, does it? I hope not. Let’s hope not!

Let’s do it then! Let’s share!